Yield (NCIS)
Gibbs lets himself go to the club once a month — just once a month.
He has drinks, smokes a cigarette, long, lingering, until the orange burn fringes the filter, and watches the room.
There's always somebody who wanders over, interested, and pleading, drops to their knees in front of him, head lowered in request. That's good enough just to fill up whatever holes that month's punched into him, but sometimes he wishes there was more, somebody he'd take home instead of into one of the back rooms.
He's classic, very old school. His interest in leather is more or less limited to his belt, folded over, and he doesn't need fancy fucking harnesses or metal rings — he wants somebody that bends for him, he wants somebody who lights up at his touch, and who's not going to be afraid when both of them start burning too hot.
"You look bored," someone whispers, close to his ear.
Gibbs glances, still save for his eyes, slanting. He sees a flash of hazel eyes, gleaming in the low light, a crooked smile. He stays quiet.
"It just seems like a waste," the man goes on, and Gibbs shifts his weight enough to see the rest of him — slate-colored shirt, black pants, expensive shoes. He's handsome, with fine features, long fingers around the base of a highball. "This place is too expensive to sit around alone."
Gibbs lets himself smile. "What about you?" he asks. "You too expensive?"
The man laughs. "Can't buy my love, mister," he says.
Gibbs pushes to his feet, his fingertips drawing across the man's wrist, where the bones are stark and close to his skin — just a taste, an invitation. "I'm a high roller," Gibbs lies.
"That so?" the man asks, smiling. "What kind of car do you drive?"
Gibbs says, "Ford. Gray pleather interior. Nothing but the best."
The man ducks his head, sweet, and Gibbs feels a pang at that. He changes his plan now, suddenly. He doesn't want this man in a back room, someone else might see the way the orange lamplight frosts the brown tips of his hair, limns his long, long eyelashes when he dips his neck, accepting.
"You're coming home with me," Gibbs tells him, lifts a hand to close it over the back of the man's neck, runs his thumb along the tendon along the side. "What's your name?"
The man looks up at him, hazel eyes dazzling, and Gibbs hears something shift — click — in his chest. "Tony," the man murmurs, secret, and turning his cheek to kiss the inside of Gibbs' wrist, he says, "You can call me Tony."
**
Tony is sweet — sweet, uncertain.
It takes him a while, longer than usual, to let Gibbs take over, and Gibbs can't decide why he likes that, why Tony makes him want to laugh into his mouth when he pins the man to his front door, shoving his wrists up and holding them to the wood surface.
Maybe it's Tony's first time doing this; maybe someone floated the idea — a lover? Gibbs wonders, although it'll be an ex-lover, now — and Tony couldn't get it out of his head, asked a friend who asked another friend and found out about the club. It doesn't really matter, all Gibbs knows is he's glad he's here, holding Tony against a wall and kissing him, slow and consuming, biting at his mouth until Tony is one long, lean length of heat against him, melting.
By the time they make it to the bed, Gibbs feels like they're moving in molasses, too-sweet, now, but he can't get his hands off of Tony, take his mouth off of him — this isn't his usually modus operandi. He doesn't bother with his belt or to tie anybody to the bed, he just holds Tony down with a glance and his thighs, Tony flat and submitting splayed across the mattress. Gibbs takes anything he wants, takes everything he wants, and Tony just moans and gasps and says, "Yes, yes — anything."
***
Tony's downstairs investigating Gibbs' coffee maker when he wakes up at half past six the next morning, standing barefoot on the tile floor of the kitchen in his slacks and button down, the shadow of a bruise on his collarbone.
Gibbs looks until he gets his fill, hanging in the doorway, at the broadness of Tony's back, the lines of his legs, before he pads over, closes his hand over Tony's where's he's reaching for the coffee, murmurs, "Early riser?" in his ear.
"Not by nature," Tony says, grinning back, leaning into the half-moon of Gibbs' body. "But some of us work in Baltimore — got an hour's drive back."
Gibbs raises an eyebrow, studies the bruised red of Tony's mouth. "Not an hour's drive."
"Is if you don't drive like a maniac," Tony quips, and pulls away, sliding his hand out from underneath Gibbs' fingers and flicking the switch to brew. "What about you? You're up, too."
Tony's mouth's too much of a distraction for Gibbs to resist, so he leans in, kisses him wet and slow and lazy, first, before he mutters, "Once a marine, always a marine, Tony."
"Oh, illicit," Tony laughs, his voice a huff against Gibbs's chin. "I like."
"Is this a military kink I ought to know about, Tony?" Gibbs asks, but he's grinning into Tony's mouth. It's 6:40 in the morning on a Thursday, and Tony smells good, feels good in Gibbs's arms, in the gray light of Gibbs's kitchen.
"Depends on if you still have the dress uniform," Tony answers, deadpan. "Otherwise, don't tease me, Gibbs."
Gibbs thinks that between them, it's pretty obvious who's the tease, but he backburners the thought when Tony darts in again, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, sucks a kiss into his bottom lip, when Tony sweeps his hand up the length of Gibbs's back and knots in the worn fabric of his t-shirt. Gibbs can't remember the last time he stood in his kitchen and necked like a teenager, and he can't remember why he hasn't, because he can hear the coffee maker babbling in the background, and taste the mint burn of toothpaste on Tony's tongue, and palm the angles of Tony's hips, and all in all, it's a fucking excellent way to start a Thursday.
Tony doesn't leave a number, just a sharp kiss — a scrape of teeth — before he climbs into his car and vanishes, and Gibbs, when he gets to work, mulls Tony's Maryland plates, debates checking the DMV records. His fingers itch.
It's pointless, Gibbs lectures himself, and mostly, he's managed to flush the memory of Tony out of his mind by the time McGee and Ziva stagger in, each looking so individually shitty he almost feels bad when they get the call about a dead petty officer.
***
Gibbs beats Ducky to Calvert Cliffs state park by almost twenty minutes, and by the time the coroner's van pulls up, McGee is almost a normal color again, photographing the cyanotic-blue fingers of PO1 Harold Garver.
"Talk to me, Ziva," he says, because Garver's face-up, cloudy eyes staring up at the blue sky, sprawled out across a beach, littered with driftwood, grainy sand smoothed out from the tide.
"It's a couple miles hike here from the gate," Ziva reports, tiptoeing around the body and pulling on gloves, her NCIS windbreaker whipping around her thin arms in the gust and her hat turned backward. "Most of these trails are for hikers only, no four-by-fours, but this is a hunting area — although it's off season. It's tough to see how someone would get a body down here at the bottom of the cliff."
Gibbs glances at the broken neck. "Probably threw him."
"Maybe better to say, how did they get the body into the park?" Ziva corrects.
"Could be a park ranger," McGee says, muffled by the camera, taking pictures of the petty officer's shoes now: untied. "Laces undone, Boss!"
"I see that," Gibbs says, mostly to himself, and anything else he wants to say gets cut off by Ducky and Jimmy's voices overlapping each other, the metal creak and protest of the gurney they're carrying in between each other. "You guys are late."
Palmer looks despairing. Ducky says, "Incorrect, Jethro: we merely adhered to the legal limits on vehicular speed."
"Honestly, everybody is so upclenched about that here," Ziva sighs, and McGee says, "Ziva, it's uptight," and Gibbs walks away, along the place where the Chesapeake Bay is licking at the shore. No footprints, although those could have been washed away by the tide, Gibbs thinks, and looks up the beach, to the distant smokestacks over a treeline.
"Time of death?" Gibbs calls, over his shoulder.
Ducky's got his meat thermometer out, frowning at it and doing math in his head. "I would estimate anywhere from 12 to 14 hours," he reports, nodding at Palmer. "I'll have more details once I get him home."
"Oh, also," Palmer says, helping Ducky with the body, "look for a bracelet."
"Bracelet?" McGee asks, peering out from behind the camera for a minute.
"What kind?" Ziva asks, already scanning the beach, the gray-blue pebbles, slick.
Palmer shrugs. "About half an inch wide? Something close to the skin. He's got a pale patch of skin," he says, huffs under the dead weight of the petty officer.
They look for hours, until the sun goes down, without any success, and the 10 o'clock news is wrapping up by the time Gibbs gets back to his boat. The basement smells like hot air from the steamer and clean, sweet wood from the lumber yard and the sour burn of bourbon. Gibbs wonders what Tony's doing tonight, or who, and he scrapes away at the spine of the boat until his fingers go numb and his eyes go blurry, and he lies underneath the wooden bones of the thing and falls asleep in the sawdust.
***
"Petty Officer First Class Harold Garver," McGee says, an unflattering headshot of Garver on the flat screen when Gibbs strides in the next morning double-fisting coffees and feeling ornery as hell. Friday hadn't started with lazy necking in the kitchen. "By all accounts a good but unremarkable marine, based with the Marine Corps Detachment at Aberdeen, where he had some friends but not a lot, and his CO remembers him as being a good kid but not much more than that."
"Overall," Ziva swoops in, taking up her spot shoulder-to-shoulder with McGee and blocking the screen as Gibbs takes to his creaking office chair, "nothing particularly special in his financials or his personal history. No criminal record, debt tied to a new car he bought, lots of online purchases."
She closes her folder and slants McGee a look.
"And?" Gibbs asks, because of course there's an and.
McGee swallows. "And then there's the matter of the bracelet."
Gibbs cocks a brow, takes a long drag off the coffee. "The one we didn't find."
"Right," McGee says delicately, and Gibbs starts counting backward from ten — his people have until about eight before he throws something. "Combined with some of his online shopping habits, we might have a theory."
"Meaning?" he prompts, when he gets to seven-and-a-half and all McGee does is look paler instead of spitting it out.
"To get that kind of tan line," Ziva interrupts, rolling her eyes at McGee, "the bracelet needed to be close to the skin and worn consistently, and the placement — "
" — on the left wrist," McGee cuts in, giving her a dirty look and handing Gibbs a printout of credit card charges, "may indicate his. Um."
Gibbs glances over the statement. "Right," he says.
"Right," McGee agrees.
"The last charge was at a club, Indigo, fourteen hours ago," Ziva continues. "Google tells me it caters to very specific tastes."
Now it's Gibbs' turn to do some math in his head.
Fourteen hours before Garver, Gibbs was at the doorway of that club in Maryland, twenty minutes before he meets Tony, thirty before he's sliding his thumb along Tony's wrist. Somewhere in the two hours after that, Petty Officer Garver had been there, too, made it all the way out to the parking lot, probably, before he ended up at the bottom of a cliff.
Gibbs is too well-trained to think about all the different ways it could have gone down, how easily he could have gone home alone and gone to Calvert Cliffs the next morning and met Tony for the first time, dead and face-up on the beach, neck and body broken in five places. But still, he can't help but to console himself. Tony's young, and strong, had good muscle definition and calluses on his hands and would have fought if anything had happened, and anyway, it didn't.
Eleven hours ago, Gibbs was pressing Tony down in his bed, hungry, sliding his hands down his flank, gathering Tony up in his arms, safe and sound.