Work and No Play (NCIS/The Shining) PG

[mhalachai]

Work and No Play
an NCIS/The Shining crossover
by mhalachaiswords

Summary: Tony hates the snow.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: King and Kubrick own The Shining. CBS and Bellisario et al. owns all NCIS. I'm only borrowing and will return them at the end of the fic.
Spoilers: Spoilers for the movie. Nothing for NCIS, set early to mid season three.
Characters: Tony DiNozzo, some random team Gibbs.
Word count: 1,275, one-shot
Note: Am going there again. Another strange crossover because it's the long weekend and I'm stuck on an action scene in another story. I'm taking some liberties with Tony's past but whatever. This story presupposes having seen the film and the fate of the smallest character in that movie :) Please let me know what you think of this!

~~~

Tony hates snow.

He hates sitting in the car with Gibbs as the man drives down the freeway in a blizzard, hates listening to McGee whine about the evidence, hates staring at the swirling mass and hates the metallic edge of hysteria hiding in his stomach at the sight of so much frozen white.

Sometimes, he falls asleep at his desk and dreams of being lost in a maze of snow, the cold biting at feet and hands and face, chest burning as the frozen air is sucked into his heaving lungs, always running, running, from a dark force he can never see.

There's a pair of dead Navy lieutenants back in the morgue, both female, both with dark hair and brown eyes, and when Tony looks at their pictures he sees another woman with dark hair and dark eyes and big teeth, with circles under her eyes that never went away no matter how many martinis she had or how many expensive necklaces Giovanni DiNozzo bought her. It's fucking with his concentration and Gibbs is going to see it soon, if he hasn't already. McGee's too green and Ziva's too Ziva for them to notice anything off with Tony.

So he sits in the passenger seat as Gibbs drives them down the snowy street and swallows sweet, scalding coffee in a vain attempt to wash the metal from his tongue.

The second victim's mother is a patient at a long-term care facility in Baltimore, struck with Lou Gehrig’s and unable to care for herself. She knows her daughter was murdered and tries to help, really she does, but Tony's backbone deserted him as soon as the snow hit and he leaves Gibbs and McGee with the woman and bolts. While Ziva argues with the nursing staff to see when the dead Lieutenant last visited her mother, Tony finds a window and stares out at the blowing snow and swallows a cough at the tickle in the back of his throat.

It starts like a whine in the back of his head, a familiar itch in his brain that he's almost forgotten. He looks past the dead eyes in his reflection and focuses on the yellow room behind him and the woman sitting there. She's impossibly small, shrunken and bent with age in her wheelchair, but her long white hair is carefully braided and her red bathrobe is new and warm. She stares at Tony with milky eyes as if she sees him.

He dreams of riding over saturated carpets in his Big Wheel, feet moving in endless circles as he zips past empty rooms and silent kitchens and feeling dead eyes on the back of his neck.

Tony pushes away from the window and goes over to the small woman. On closer examination, he can see that she's not old; she's ancient, and he'll never live to be that old and he can't say he's sorry. There's a chair close by and Tony pulls it beside her wheelchair and, because he knows she won't mind, gently picks up a hand more fragile than glass.

"Jessica was a nice girl," the woman says as if continuing an interrupted conversation. Her voice is like a breeze through pine branches. "She brought her mother cookies. Read her the newspaper."

"Did you ever see Jessica?" Tony asks, and then because the name slips into his mind like a memory, "Mrs. Gilroy?"

"Call me Cora," she says, her smile showing toothless gums, and Tony smiles along with her because they are inside, out of the snow, and some days that's enough. "Jessica worked hard to support her mother. She was a good girl."

Involuntarily, Tony thinks of Jessica's autopsy photos, her face bruised and broken and nothing left of the good girl who brought her mother cookies and lived in spartan poverty on post to pay for her mother's medical bills.

"It's that boy," Cora says suddenly, her blind eyes wide and far-seeing. "That boy in the mailroom with the eagle on his arm. Always was a bad one, that one. It's a pity what he used to do to those poor cats."

Tony runs his tongue over dry lips and stares at Cora as she shines under the yellow lights in the lounge. "Why did he kill Jessica?"

Cora shakes her head, shoulders slumping in exhaustion. "She would never look at a boy like that, not a girl like her." Cora's hand trembles as she tries to hold Tony's wrist. "He sees all kinds of girls who don't see him."

He dreams of the day his mother went crazy and attacked all the mirrors in the house. Stepfather Giovanni takes Tony into the ornate library and they talk about mother's situation and how the doctors do not hold out hope for recovery, and how it's just Giovanni and Tony now. Tony knows the man will divorce Wendy but he'll still pay for her expensive treatments with the best doctors, because that's what a man does when his wife goes crazy.

Tony asks if he legally change his name to Anthony DiNozzo and Giovanni ruffles his hair and sends him out for the paper and it's snowing outside and the dark is behind him, chasing, and there's no escape.

"Thank you, Cora," Tony says. "We'll catch him."

"Of course you will." Cora leans back in her wheelchair, eyes closing. "And never you mind about your young woman. She can swim just fine."

Tony files that into his memory for later. He raises his hand to beckon over a nurse but before the man can wheel Cora away, she opens her eyes again and looks directly at Tony.

"Where did Danny go?"

Tony's heart skips a beat, his insides squirming like dead things in the mud.

When he dreams of room 237, he wakes with scratches on his neck and blood under his fingernails.

When he finds his voice, he lays out the familiar lie he's been echoing to his mother for almost thirty years. "Danny went away."

The nurse takes Cora down the hall and Tony stands. His legs are weak and his scarred lungs hurt from what might have been the cold. Down the corridor, he can hear Ziva's strident words. He should go to her or to Gibbs to assist in the investigation, even though he knows they will find the mailroom clerk guilty of multiple murders, just as sometimes flashes of insight come to him in investigations in the nick of time. It's not a lot, and it's never enough, and it hadn't been since that long snowy winter.

His feet move him to the guest bathroom by the nurses' station. He washes his hands three times and slicks back his hair, anything to avoid stepping back into that long hallway.

In his dreams, the growl of the SnowCat can't drown out the whine in the back of his head, the itch in his throat. His mother drives looking straight ahead, her eyes too wide and panicked and broken and for her, Tony answers to Danny, because she will never understand that Danny isn't coming back, that dad isn't coming back, that it's just her and Tony now.

When he looks in the mirror, he sees the shining face of a boy left behind in room 237. Danny's flat eyes stare back at Tony as Tony takes one last breath over the metal on his tongue.

When he dreams, he's with Danny, and they are together and they are happy.

And

then.

Tony opens his eyes and has to live in a world without Danny. Every single day.

Tony steps away from the mirror and goes back to work.

end