Chapter Text
NCIS Director’s Office
“Bad few days,” Leon Vance said, studying each member of the MCRT as they stood in front of him in his new office. The Director's office. His now, because Jenny was gone. He could see the pain and exhaustion in all their faces, but he hardened his heart to it. There was no time, and he was hurting, too. Jenny Sheppard had been his friend, and this whole situation was a mess.
Jenny deciding to go out in a hail of bullets, doing it on the watch of two members of NCIS’s premiere team, Leon thrust unceremoniously into a leadership position he wasn’t yet prepared for, and this mole situation…
Well, the MCRT would just have to suck it up and deal with the fallout.
“Officer David, the liaison position with NCIS is being terminated. You’re going home. McGee, I’m moving you across to the cyber crimes unit. You’ll be working with officer Holdsworth, starting tomorrow. DiNozzo.”
“Sir.”
Leon studied the younger agent’s face. Nothing he had heard about Special Agent Tony DiNozzo endeared the man to him, and fair or not, Leon blamed him more than a little for his friend’s death.
“You’ve been reassigned. Agent Afloat, USS Ronald Reagan. Pack your bags, you fly out tomorrow. Agent Gibbs. Meet your new team.”
He held out the file folders and met Gibbs’ glare head-on. He didn’t back down.
Special Agent Tony Dinozzo was tired. More than tired; he was soul-weary, bone-deep exhausted. In the last six months, his world had been turned upside down.
Gibbs head injury and the subsequent amnesia had been the beginning.
Tony had never wanted to be the boss. He liked being the right-hand man, the witty guy with a badge, the one who’d break tension with a movie quote before diving headfirst into danger. But when Gibbs had left, there hadn’t been a choice. Jenny had looked at him and said, “You’re in charge now.”
And just like that, everything changed.
McGee had looked at him like he was wearing his father’s too-big shoes. Ziva treated him like a placeholder, like she was waiting for someone worthy to step into Gibbs’ shadow. Abby—sweet, quirky Abby—had started making jabs of her own. Relentless reminders that he wasn’t Gibbs. That he would never be Gibbs.
Even Ducky, dear Ducky, hadn’t seemed to notice how Tony was barely keeping his head above water. His anger over Gibbs’ secrets, over being left in the dark, had consumed him.
Tony was on his own, trying to maintain impossible standards with an insubordinate team that seemed to have lost all respect for him.
Then Jenny had handed him the Benoit assignment, sent him undercover with a woman he was supposed to charm. Court her. Manipulate her. Seduce her.
Tony wanted to believe that even if he had stayed on the mission, he would have had enough self-respect left not to have slept with Jeanne. Not because there was anything wrong with her, but because he was gay. Closeted, careful, and tired of hiding—but hiding all the same. It was the only safe choice in law enforcement, and especially so in an agency so tied to the military and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
The mission had drained what little he had left to give. And then the call came.
Lorelai.
His best friend. His anchor. His daughter’s mother.
Gone.
Struck by a drunk driver. Brain-dead on impact. One phone call had made him a single parent to a grieving 12-year-old girl overnight, all while running himself into the ground trying to prove his worth to a team that refused to see it.
Jenny, to her credit, had been the one person who showed him compassion. She’d let him walk away from the Benoit job without fanfare, even arranged to keep Rory’s existence locked behind a secure file, despite Tony’s shift to primary caregiver. But now Jenny was gone too. Suicide by standoff. A choice to go out on her own terms rather than face her own illness, no consideration for the impact on those around her. Another abandonment.
So as Tony stood in Vance’s office, facing down the man who had just casually ordered him to leave his daughter for a shipboard post, something in him snapped.
“I need a word. Alone,” Tony said evenly.
Vance’s brow lifted, just a little. Around them, McGee narrowed his eyes, Ziva folded her arms, and Gibbs—Gibbs looked at him like he was a stranger. A nuisance.
“I don’t think—” Vance began.
Tony didn’t flinch. “Director. Please.”
Vance paused. Then jerked his head toward the door. “The rest of you are dismissed.”
When the door clicked shut, Tony’s composure didn’t falter. “With respect, sir, you’re making a mistake.”
Vance arched a brow. “You’re lucky I’m not firing you. You disobeyed orders, let your Director die—”
“I followed my Director’s orders. Orders she never should’ve been allowed to give,” Tony snapped. “She ordered us to stand down. Protection detail isn’t a job for field agents. Marines or Secret Service, maybe. But not NCIS agents under her chain of command.”
Vance folded his arms. “You saying she was out of line?”
“I’m saying no one should be punished for following their chain of command. Especially when the people above them don’t do their job protecting the team from being misused.”
Vance didn’t interrupt. That surprised Tony. Encouraged him.
“Whether or not we agree on the extent of responsibility I hold in Director Sheppard’s death, you can’t assign me as an Agent Afloat.”
Vance’s eyes narrowed, and he was clearly about to argue, but Tony pushed on.
“I have sole custody of my 12-year-old daughter,” Tony continued. “Her mother died three months ago. I didn’t volunteer for that ship assignment, and NCIS policy prohibits involuntary assignments that conflict with primary parental responsibility.”
Vance’s expression shifted subtly. “Your file doesn’t say anything about a daughter.”
“No. It wouldn’t.” Tony hesitated, then decided he had no choice but to trust the man with this. In a clear voice, he rattled off the file number he had memorized, and which Rory herself had engraved on the inside of a thin, metal anklet she wore at all times. “Higher clearance needed. You’ll find her name is Lorelai Leigh DiNozzo-Gilmore. Rory. She's mine.”
Vance studied his face in silence for a moment. Then he reached for a toothpick, turned to his computer, took a moment to access the file, and started reading. His brow furrowed.
Tony kept going. “Rory’s identity was classified years ago. I went undercover with a mob family while I was a detective. Shut down the whole operation, sent the Don to prison. I needed to keep her out of reach. Even my team don’t know about Rory or her mother. Gibbs did, until he forgot.”
Now Vance looked up sharply. “Forgot?”
“Amnesia.” Tony’s voice softened. “From the explosion. He hasn’t gotten all of his memories back. It’s why I turned down the Team Lead position in Rota—that, and Rory lived with her mother in Connecticut at the time, and I would never have willingly relocated so far away from them. When Gibbs came back from Mexico, it was clear from a few carefully worded comments that he didn’t remember her.” Then, in a voice quiet enough that Tony didn’t realize Vance had heard, he added, “Or the respect he used to have for me, apparently.”
There was silence in the office for a long time. Vance leaned back, studying Tony with fresh eyes.
“You didn’t list your prior commendations,” he said slowly. “Your personnel file… it’s thin. Too thin.”
Tony shrugged. “Most of it ended up in the sealed file with Rory’s identity. Including my commendation from Baltimore PD. My work in narcotics. My undercover hours. My college courses, my certifications. It’s there. Just… behind the curtain.”
Vance exhaled and looked at him for a long moment. “It seems I’ve been operating under faulty intel where you’re concerned.”
Tony smiled faintly. “It would certainly explain why you’ve been looking at me like gum on your shoe since I walked in here.”
Another silence. This time, Vance broke it.
“You’re right. I had the wrong impression of you, Agent DiNozzo. I’ll reassign the Agent Afloat post. Report to my office tomorrow morning. We’ll discuss your options.”
Tony nodded slowly. “Thank you, sir.”
He walked straight through the bullpen without a word to his team. Their gazes burned into his back as he disappeared into the elavator, but he didn’t flinch.
Outside, the air felt heavier. Like everything was shifting. He was so damn tired of change.
He walked to the elevator alone, pressing the button and listening to its hum as it descended.
What were his options now? Could he go back to MCRT? Would Gibbs even want him? Would he have to uproot Rory all over again, when they hadn’t even found their rhythm here in DC?
Tony DiNozzo’s Apartment
The key turned in the lock with a soft click , and Tony stepped inside the apartment, his shoulders sagging the moment the door shut behind him. He’d driven straight from the office with only a brief stop for gas and caffeine. He hadn’t had the chance to come home since he was dragged to California with Ziva and the Director.
The TV cast a dim glow across the living room, illuminating the quiet figure curled on the couch. Sookie sat with her knees hugged to her chest, a blanket draped over her like a cape. Her eyes flickered toward him, red-rimmed and tired, and Tony’s chest ached at the sight of her.
She looked smaller than usual. Fragile. Like the weight of Lorelai’s death had pressed something out of her, and she hadn’t quite gotten it back.
Before he even thought about what he was doing, Tony turned and opened his arms.
Sookie stood and practically launched into him, the blanket slipping to the floor. She wrapped her arms around his waist, clutching his jacket in trembling hands. Tony held her tightly, one hand rubbing circles between her shoulder blades, grounding her. Grounding himself.
Tony’s eyes closing for a second as he buried his face in her hair. “Thank you. For being here. For Rory.”
Sookie pulled back after a moment, swiping at her cheeks with her sleeve. “Of course. Of course I came. She needed someone. I needed—” Her voice caught. “I needed to see her.”
Tony nodded, moving to the couch and sitting down heavily. “How’s she been?”
Sookie sat beside him, fidgeting with the edge of the blanket. “Quiet. Polite. Too polite, you know?” She glanced at him, eyes worried. “She hasn’t really made friends. There’s this girl in homeroom who talks to her sometimes, but… Rory doesn’t talk back much. And when you were gone—”
Tony turned sharply to look at her.
“She had nightmares,” Sookie said softly. “About you. Losing you, too. She didn’t want me to know, but I heard her. She’d cry into her pillow, thinking I couldn’t hear her.”
Tony closed his eyes, guilt stabbing through him like a blade. He had tried to be everything for Rory since Lorelai's accident—father, mother, safe harbor. But this job, this life… it always took him away. And each time he left for work, a little part of her seemed to brace for it to be the last. It was too soon for this trip, but he hadn’t been able to get out of it. A compromise, for bailing on the Benoit Op. In hindsight, he wondered if “payback” would be a more apt descriptor.
“She won’t say it,” Sookie added gently, “but she’s scared. Not of you. Of losing you.”
Tony stood without a word, nodding once. “I’ll check on her.”
He walked through the kitchen where Sookie had filled the air with warmth and spices over the past few days, past the single bathroom in the apartment, to where the door of what had once been his bedroom was cracked open.
He pushed it gently with one hand.
Inside, the room was dark but for the faint shimmer of a nightlight—a constellation of soft stars on the ceiling. Rory’s idea. Said it reminded her of Stars Hollow on clear nights.
She was curled on her side in the bed, one arm tucked under her pillow, the other wrapped around a stuffed rooster—Colonel Clucker, Lorelai had given him to Rory when she was four. She seemed to be sleeping deeply, but even in the stillness, Tony could see the way her brow tensed every so often. Like even her dreams weren’t safe.
He knelt by the bed and reached out, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. His touch was light, reverent. The kind of gesture that belonged to parents so in love with their kids it overwhelmed them.
Tony felt that love like a wave crashing over him.
Twelve years ago, he’d been a cocky college kid with a thousand bad decisions ahead of him and no roadmap for the future. And then there was The Fire, and later… he met Lorelai. Sixteen, scared, stubborn as hell, holding a baby and asking to put his name on a birth certificate with a look and a dare.
Tony had said yes.
God, how stupid and reckless and brilliant that yes had turned out to be.
He never could have imagined this life. Never could have known how his heart would expand to make room for this girl, how his whole world would start and end with the rise and fall of her breath.
He leaned down and kissed her temple.
“I’m home, kiddo,” he whispered.
Rory stirred but didn’t wake. Tony stayed a moment longer, letting the silence wrap around him.
And then, like a tide pulling him backward, memory began to creep in.
That night. The night it all began.
-Flashback-
The sky glowed orange, smoke curling into the night like a warning flare as Tony stumbled back, coughing hard, his arms wrapped around a sobbing little boy. Fire engine lights strobed across his face, and soot clung to his sweat-slicked skin like guilt.
"Is there anyone else inside?" a firefighter barked, grabbing the boy from his arms.
Tony, breathing hard, managed to gasp, “His sister. I—I tried, I couldn’t—” He choked again, lungs burning, but not as much as his heart.
They didn’t need to confirm it. The way the firemen moved changed. Slower. Heavy. No more urgency. Just grim reality.
He stood, dazed, while a paramedic tried to press him into an ambulance. He waved her off. He couldn’t sit there. Couldn’t breathe in that space. Not after—
He walked. Then jogged. Then ran.
Somehow he ended up at his car, hands trembling as he shoved the key into the ignition.
He didn’t think. Just drove.
It was two hours later, passing a road sign for the city, that Tony realized he was heading for home. For New York. For the place that always felt like a different kind of fire.
He kept driving.
He didn’t know why Hartford. Didn’t know why that particular off-ramp at that particular time. But eventually, with his chest aching and his fingers blistered from heat, he pulled into the ER parking lot of Hartford General Hospital.
He didn’t go in right away.
He sat in the car until he couldn’t anymore, and then dragged himself inside, where a nurse took one look at his condition and shoved a clipboard at him.
He collapsed into a plastic chair in the waiting room, and that’s when he saw her.
A girl.
No—a teenager. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, clinging to the edge of the seat like it was a lifeboat and she’d been tossed overboard.
She was breathing too fast.
Her face was pale.
And oh— oh —she was very pregnant.
Tony blinked.
She glanced at him and tried for a smile, which immediately crumpled under the weight of a contraction.
“You okay?” he asked hoarsely, voice scraped raw from smoke.
She gave a dry laugh that turned into a groan. “Oh, just peachy. You?”
“Just stopped by for the spa package,” he said, coughing again. “You know, steam room, light charbroiling. Might leave a Yelp review.”
That got a snort from her, despite the pain.
“Smoke inhalation?” she asked.
“Fire rescue,” he answered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Didn’t go great.”
She squinted at him. “You ran into a fire?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Stupid, I know.”
“No,” she said quietly. “Brave. Okay yeah, dumb, but definitely brave.”
There was silence for a moment before Tony spoke again. “You doing this alone?”
“I guess.” She winced. “My parents... they’re not here. And the baby’s father... I don’t know. I think he’s still trying to figure out if this means he’s grounded forever.”
Tony blinked, then huffed a laugh. “Wow. That’s—”
“Yeah,” she said, breathless. “That’s pretty much the vibe.”
Another contraction hit, and she grabbed his hand without asking. Tony squeezed back instinctively.
“You want me to get a nurse?”
“No,” she gritted out. “Just—talk to me. Say something distracting.”
He panicked.
“Uh, okay, um—Did you know in Casablanca, they were writing the ending while filming it?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “What?”
“Yeah! The cast didn’t even know who she’d end up with until they shot it. Total chaos. Like this hospital, but with fedoras.”
She started laughing and crying at the same time, and that’s when a nurse came to wheel her away.
She grabbed his arm again, eyes wide with sudden, primal fear.
“Wait—can you—can you come with me? Please?”
Tony looked at the nurse, who shrugged as if to say, ‘not my call,’ and then back at the girl with the movie laugh and the too-old eyes.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I got you.”
And Tony had stayed through it all.
He held her hand while she screamed. Brushed hair from her forehead. Quoted The Godfather and Gone with the Wind until she told him to shut up and then begged him to keep talking.
He was there when the baby girl was placed on her chest, and Lorelai looked at her like the world had just changed. Because it had.
Then the shouting started in the hallway.
Voices yelling about shame and embarrassment and mistakes.
Tony looked through the glass to see an older couple being held back by a nurse. The man looked deeply uncomfortable, like he’d rather be anywhere else. The woman wore pearls and disdain like armor.
“I take it those are the Gilmores?” he asked.
Lorelai didn't answer. Just stared at her baby.
And then the boy came.
Chris.
Just a teenager, barely more than a kid himself. Terrified. Helpless in the face of it all. He touched the baby’s hand awkwardly, chickened out of holding her at all, flinched when Richard Gilmore barked at him, and offered no defense when Emily hissed that the child had ruined Lorelai’s life.
Tony stood in the corner, unseen, watching it all. Still feeling that ache from after the fire—not anything physical, but that helplessness. That need to fix what he couldn’t.
Hours later, after the noise died down and the room quieted, Lorelai cried.
Hormones. Exhaustion. Fear.
She stared at the little girl in her arms and whispered, “I wish she could just be mine. Mine and... no one else’s. No Haydens. No Gilmores. Just—someone who’d protect her. Even if I screw up. I wish I could just write down some other name. Take Chris off the hook. Keep them all away.”
She laughed through tears. “Maybe I’ll just put your name down. You were here. You didn’t run.”
Tony’s heart clenched.
She was joking. He knew she was joking.
But the weight of a girl he hadn’t saved pressed on his soul, and the warmth of the girl in this room—this girl, with her bright baby and movie quotes—settled like a balm.
“Okay,” he said.
Lorelai blinked. “What?”
“Put me down,” he said, voice quiet but steady. “Anthony DiNozzo. Father.”
She stared at him, stunned.
He half-smiled. “She deserves someone. You both do.”
They sat in silence as the baby stirred in her arms.
And when the nurse returned with the form, Lorelai picked up the pen.
-End Flashback-
And now Lorelai was gone, and it was just Tony left to protect Rory from the rest of the world. He finally thought he understood just how scared and alone that sixteen-year-old must have felt, sitting by herself in the hospital waiting room.
And watching Rory sleep, more than a decade later, Tony still felt that burning ache to fix it .