Brunch

It’s late when Tony stirs. He glances at the clock on the nightstand to find that it’s nearly midday. Hardly surprising as they only wrapped up the case at 3 a.m. and crawled into bed sometime around 4. He can smell coffee and hear Gibbs moving around downstairs, so he guesses it’s time to get up.

It’s the middle of summer and the room is baking, the sun streaming in even through the closed drapes. Tony groans and slides out from under the sheet which was all either of them could bear to sleep under in the heat last night. His entire body is aching from the stress of the past few weeks and his muscles protest as he forces them to move. Didn’t he only roll into bed an hour ago? It feels that way.

His head is pounding and everything seems too bright. Tony keeps his eyes half-closed as he makes his way to the bathroom – he could walk there in his sleep in any case.

When he’s done, he wanders naked into the bedroom, still in a haze, opens the closet, and searches around blearily for some clean clothes – only to come up empty. He glances at the overflowing laundry hamper in the corner of the room and sighs. They’ve spent three weeks on this case, running from one dead body to another, culminating in a desperate race against time to stop a bomb taking out half of Quantico. They’ve been coming home late, throwing off their clothes, crawling into bed, and then crawling out again a few hours later. Some nights they didn’t make it home at all. They haven’t had time to do any laundry; they’ve barely had time to eat. He has no clean clothes left.

All he can find is a pair of Gibbs’s old, faded blue jeans. He pulls them on, noticing with satisfaction that he can actually do them up – which is more down to the lack of eating these past three weeks than any conscious attempt to lose weight on his part. Still, it’ll be something to tease Gibbs about later. He fills out the jeans snugly, and he manages a slight grin at the idea that it’ll give Gibbs a good view if nothing else. He has no clean socks, and he can’t be bothered to find his slippers, so he walks down the stairs in his bare feet, still half-asleep. He wonders whether he’ll ever feel human again.

Gibbs is in the kitchen. Tony pauses momentarily in the doorway. Gibbs is dressed exactly the same as him – pair of old jeans, no shirt, barefoot. Tony’s heart skips a beat, the way it always does whenever he sees Gibbs. He wonders if that will ever change but it’s been happening for ten years now, so he suspects not.

Gibbs glances at him and then pours a coffee from the waiting brew and hands it to him without saying a word.

“Laundry,” Tony mutters to Gibbs by way of explanation for their attire, gesturing at his jeans with his hand.

“Uh-huh,” Gibbs replies, seeming to understand.

Tony sips gratefully, needing the caffeine hit. When did he last have a cup of coffee? He can’t even remember. He just remembers running, and driving, and making calls, and fighting, and nothing else for days and days and days.

Tony opens the fridge and pours a glass of orange juice for himself and one for Gibbs. Then he gets the crockery and cutlery out of the cupboard and sets them on the table. This is their Sunday brunch routine whenever they get a chance to have Sunday brunch together. Gibbs cooks the bacon, eggs, sausages, and tomatoes, and Tony pours the orange juice, sets the table, and makes the toast. Their dinner ritual is pretty similar; Gibbs does the steak, and Tony does the beer. Tony has a vague suspicion that Gibbs doesn’t trust him with anything involving naked flame, but he’s never put it to the test.

“Naked,” he murmurs as that thought enters his head.

“Yeah,” Gibbs says, and Tony wonders if he really can read his mind.

Tony gets the bread out and sticks it in the toaster. He reaches over to the iPod, scrolls down, finds what he’s looking for, and clicks ‘play’.