7Part I: Gibbs
Up until he is eight years old, Tony believes his full name is "Patatino Tony DiNozzo." He knows, but does not quite understand, that only his mother calls him "patatino" and that he should not keep writing it on his homework assignments. His teachers are frustrated. His mother finds it hilarious. She picks him up from school one day, dazzlingly bright with her blonde hair and long, white coat, and exclaims with a laugh, "Patatino, you're already a trouble maker! What will I do with you?"
She ruffles his brown hair and kisses his cheek. A diamond bracelet on her wrist blinds him. He wipes the lipstick off his cheek with a smile.
His father is less amused.
"Bad enough he is what he is. Now he doesn't even know his name?"
Tony hears this later, from the hallway outside his father's study. The beige wall against his shoulder is cold, but not as cold as the apprehension in his gut.
"What he is? He's your son." His mother says. Her tone is so harsh that Tony hardly recognizes it. No motherly trills or airy softness. Just hard, jagged lines like glass. "You should love him, no matter what people say."
"How do you know what they say? You don't talk to anyone these days." There's a pause and a thunk. Tony thinks of his father's scotch glass, amber liquid sloshing inside like a tiny, angry sea. "They say we're cursed Stella. Because of him. Because of what. he. is. And what are they gonna say now, huh? Patatino. You baby him!"
"I don't care." His mother's voice trembled. Glass shivering, about to break. "They can say what they want. You aren't drugging him. He's perfect."
"It's not drugs, Stell. It's suppressants."
"It's pills!"
"It's a way out! For all of us! You think they're gonna stop teasing him at school? It's just gonna get worse. He needs this."
"Stop it." Soft voice. Washed away edges. Beach and sand. "Stop acting like you care." A few clicks of heeled steps. A pause. A whisper. "Next time you want to complain, tell it to your girl of the week."
Tony barely has time to scramble out of the way before his mother rounds the doorframe. Her black heels stop just short of his red plaid slippers. She isn't crying, just tired-looking with wrinkles and shadows under her eyes. She sighs in a hopeless way when she sees Tony on the floor, and Tony-desperate to cheer her up—stands, takes her hand, and leads her to the movie room. They watch her favorite comedies until they fall asleep.
When she dies, he forgets things. His name-Patatino-goes first. And then the memory of her voice. The feel of her lipstick on his cheek. Her laugh. And slowly, his life before the endless days of little prescription pills fades into something that might've once been a dream.
What he does remember is: he's cursed.
There were stories, growing up. Stories that every sappy, impossibly in love couple would tell. When you meet your mate, they said, you just know.
Biologically, that's sort of true. One person scents the pheromones on the other, and then their bodies react in a haze of horomones and thus—bonding happens. But in the modern times, bondmates don't always end up loving each other, and married couples don't always bond.
And then there's Tony, the outlier, the cursed (apparently).
Three weeks before his second anniversary at Baltimore P.D., he remembers these stories while chasing down a perp. He's running down the street, in a black coat and baggy jeans, tube socks and sneakers. It's grey skies. Cold as balls. The man he's chasing is dressed like a hobo—ratty red beanie and rattier grey jacket. Tony expects the guy to smell like trash and drugs, but in the moment after Tony screams,
"You can't out-run me! I'm wearing tube socks!"
-there's a scent in the air. A scent that's warm like wood and bitter like pine. A scent that makes Tony's gut pull sharply in warning, and he knows, just before he dives onto the man's back and pins him down to the cold alley pavement, that he is irrevocably fucked.
The stories were true. He can feel it in the way his body warms and brain goes half dead with something between shock and desire. His limbs tremble to kneel, submit, bare his neck and let the alpha take him any way he wants. Tony shakes visibly with the effort to reign himself in against the impulse, which is why the man gets a punch in before Tony puts a gun in the guy's face. The man, with husky blue eyes and Richard Gere hair, actually smirks a little in amusement.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care because while Tony is getting run over by a semi-truck of pheromones, the man can't scent Tony at all.
Because Tony isn't an omega.
He is, but he isn't. But he is.
It's complicated.
And it stays that way for a long fucking time.
"Well, it's confirmed," he tells his partner, Danny, when they're back at the precinct. Everything is loud and bustling around their two tiny wooden desks, but Tony's focus is entirely on the man reclining in the short chair next to him. "He's a cop. A Navy cop. Special agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs."
The not-dirtbag leans back and grins with so much alpha confidence that his over-sized canines gleam in the dim precinct lights. Alpha fangs, generally, are supposed to retreat when the alpha isn't using them, but some alphas have fangs so large that they can't retract all the way. Tony studiously ignores the jokes running through his head—you know they say if his fangs are big, then so is his—and smiles wide, confident, and demeaning. He mirrors Gibbs' stance, leans back and spreads his knees open in a relaxed gesture. It's a fight. His body doesn't naturally want to do this, especially not with Gibbs' scent still making Tony warm, half-hard, and jittery. But Tony's been fighting his own instincts for so long that he's not actually sure what would happen if he let go.
"So what am I supposed to call you special agent...Leroy? Jethro." he teases, asserting dominance with condescension. "It's a little Beverly Hillbillies. Gibbs it is I guess.""
The alpha's face turns stern, and Tony realizes that he's only barely ruffled the man's feathers. Most people would be punching Tony by now. Especially feds, who think they're better than everybody.
There's a squabble between them after that, a small alpha piss match over who's stepping into whose case, and Tony scrabbles to keep up with Gibbs' confidence until somehow they've agreed to share.
Tony gets the bad guy in the end, but it's not the victory that he wants it to be. There's no victory in realizing that the dirtbag knows his partner, has made deals with his partner. There's no victory in realizing that the people who are supposed to love and confide in him don't actually trust him at all.
And the kicker is: Tony doesn't blame them, anymore.
Since when has he told anyone the truth?
But the point of it all isn't that Tony's been kicked in the nuts (again), nor that he's going to have to transfer precincts (again). The point is that Gibbs is there when Tony's life shatters (again) and instead of patting him on the shoulder, instead of pity, instead of just walking casually out of Tony's life like so many people before—Gibbs looks at him with something like approval and offers him a job.
That's the first time Tony thinks that maybe this isn't just biology after all.