Part of Tony hated the way Kate, Rebecca, and Mario made sure one of them was always next to him. It seemed so blatantly obvious, though perhaps that was because he was a cop, and was trained to look for such things. They cycled in and out of his company, providing a buffer between him and those who would make him uncomfortable. And there were a lot. He loved his family, but as a whole, the DiNozzos were cursed with cats’ curiousity. He said a lot about Kate, dissembled cleverly about his work, and endured countless sidelong glances and searching looks, which Kate, Mario, or Rebecca would quickly put a stop to by engaging the source of said looks in conversation.

Oh yes, part of him hated it, but it was a very small part. The greater part of him was grateful for they way they kept the pressure low, or as low as he could conceivably expect it to be.

He should have expected Rebecca and Mario to help him. After all, they were the ones who had endured the first month after the final blowout, before he’d learned to bury the anger and hurt behind a facsimile of his regular good mood. He’d spent that month in their spare bedroom; Mario hadn’t taken no for an answer, especially when he found out that Tony had insisted on Annette keeping the apartment. It hadn’t mattered, in the end; Tony had gone to Baltimore when the job had come along. But in that month, he’d grown closer to his brother and sister-in-law than he would have ever expected, given the circumstances.

As for Kate, well, she was looking at this as work, and she was doing a damn fine job, too. Part of him was amazed at the ease with which she inserted herself into his family. She really was good at this sort of thing.

Between the three of them, they had successfully encircled Tony in a wall of caring and goodwill. They were sitting down to dinner now, and he had only been alone with Annette for those five minutes out on the porch, and had yet to exchange more than curt hellos with Julio. And it was okay. Oh, it was hard, no mistake. He couldn’t look at Annette without remembering something, good or bad, but he wasn’t falling to pieces.

And, he had to admit, he took a perverse pleasure in seeing her so off-balance. It was petty, he knew, and completely below him. Well, maybe not completely. But oh, he did so enjoy the way Kate’s presence seemed to annoy her.

He guided Kate to the dining room table with a hand placed gently in the small of her back, and didn’t miss the glare Annette sent their way, though he was careful not to look directly at her. Kate was chatting amiably with Rebecca, and hardly paused when he pulled out her chair for her. She glanced up at him, though, and he smiled at her. There was another part of him that like putting Kate off balance, too.

She sat down, and he sat down next to her. Rebecca and Mario took seats to Kate’s right, and Rafe threw himself into the chair on Tony’s left after handing Lisa into hers. It didn’t really surprise him that Annette and Julio ended up across the table from them. Kate’s leg pressed against his, and he knew she’d noticed the seating arrangement, even though she was still talking with Rebecca. Didn’t miss much, this woman.

Tony’s father cut off Rafe’s tirade about “The State Of The World” by clearing his throat and extending his hands to the people on either side of him at the head of the table. Immediately, talk stopped and they all joined hands. Kate seemed to hesitate briefly, but then her strong fingers wrapped around his, and she too bowed her head slightly for Grace.

“Heavenly Father,” his father intoned, “we’d like to ask Your blessing on our gathering here today. Thank You for seeing to it that so much of our family could be here with us to celebrate our anniversary. Bless and keep each one of us as we give thanks for Your many gifts. Lord, we’d like to thank You for the children who have been added to our family: Mitchell, Rose, and Duncan. We’d also like to thank You for the other additions: Annette, and Kate.” Kate’s hand twitched, and he gripped it tighter. His jaw clenched a little. It wasn’t right, the two of them in the same sentence... “Continue to bless our marriage, and the marriages and relationships of our children and relations. Bless this house, and bless this food to our bodies. For these gifts we give thanks to You, in Jesus’ name.”

“Amen,” Tony murmured, along with all the others at the table. They released hands, and as his mother invited everyone to dig in, he turned to Kate. She was looking at him, and not even her impressive self-control could keep him from reading her discomfort. Underneath the table, he found her hand again. Her fingers laced through his and held on. Something else began to glow in her eyes: worry. No, Kate, he thought. It’s all right. He moistened his lips slightly, and leaned towards her.

She turned her head enough so that he caught her cheek, but that was okay. The kiss hadn’t been meant as a romantic gesture, but one of comfort and affection, to emphasize her belonging here. It was half put-on show for the others at the table, but half just for her. He felt her cheeks heat slightly before he pulled back, and he saw her face was delicately coloured pink. He couldn’t help smiling broadly and leaning in again. “You know,” he whispered in her ear, “you look really sweet when you’re blushing.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Tony,” she hissed, but that didn’t stop her cheeks from turning even pinker, or a smile from appearing on her face. She dropped his hand and reached for the bowl of potatoes in front of her, handing it to him. “Here,” she said. “Do something else with your mouth.”

“You’ve been told,” Rafe chuckled.

“I have,” Tony agreed, putting a couple potatoes on his plate before giving the bowl to his brother.

“Then again, she didn’t specify exactly what you should do with your mouth.”

“Good point.” He turned back to Kate, grinning.

She’d been listening, of course. “Eat,” she ordered. “I’ll let you know if I want you to do anything else.”

“When?”

“Later.”

Oh, there was that tone. He sketched a brief restricted bow and turned back to Rafe. “I just can’t get away with anything around her,” he said piteously.

“I know the feeling, man. Hey!” he said as his wife pinched his arm. He laughed and kissed her cheek in much the same way as Tony had Kate. “You know I love your keeping me in line.”

“Pass the potatoes, Rafe,” she replied. “You’re holding everyone up.”

Eating didn’t interfere with conversation at the DiNozzo table, and there was a pleasant buzz of talk around them as they ate. Tony spoke mostly to Rafe and Lisa. Occasionally, as he looked around the table, he caught Annette or Julio looking at him, but he tried not to think about it. He was just listening when he felt Kate shift beside him, then heard her say, “Julio, could you please pass the bread?”

His cousin picked up the breadbasket in front of him and handed it across the table to her. “Here you are, Kate,” he said. Then he smiled disarmingly. “How are you enjoying the meal?”

“Very much,” Kate said, taking a slice from the basket and handing it back to him.

“Good. Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you–” both Kate and Tony looked up sharply, “–how’d you meet my cousin here?”

Tony stiffened. Julio was sniffing around, looking for something to use. His hands occupied with his knife and fork, he nudged Kate’s foot with his.

“He tried to hijack a plane that I was on,” Kate said, putting her foot on top of his.

Tony laughed. “I’d almost forgotten that,” he said as Julio stared at them.

Kate grinned at him, then turned back to his cousin. “After that, I started working at NCIS. I’ve been there for just over a year.”

“Really,” Julio said, recovering. “Were you a police officer as well?”

“No,” Kate answered. “A little more specialized.”

“Kate got to shoot first and ask questions later,” Tony supplied. “License to kill. Shaken, not stirred.”

“Tony,” Kate admonished, shaking her head at him. He looked at her innocently. “I was in the Secret Service, President’s detail,” she told Julio, and the other people around them who had dropped their own conversations in favour of listening to this one.

“Secret Service! Really?”

No, she just goes around telling people that for fun, Tony thought.

“Isn’t NCIS a step down, then?” Annette asked, her tone too casual to be real.

Tony twitched, ready to snap out an automatic response, but Kate’s foot pressed down harder on his. “Not really,” she said evenly. “The way I look at it, I was protecting the security of one person with the Secret Service, but at NCIS, I’m protecting the entire Armed Forces, and so protecting everyone in the country. Can’t see that as a step down.”

“But still, to go from protecting the President to sniffing out criminals in the military–”

“It was a lot of standing around, and sitting on planes,” Kate interrupted. “Now I actually get out and do something during the day.”

Annette settled back, but Tony saw her mouth twitch upwards. Damn. She thinks she’s scored a hit, he thought. Hell, she probably has, on both of us.

But Kate wasn’t done. “After all,” she said, and Tony recognized a hard note in her voice, “I think it’s a better way to end a year saying, ‘I helped foil three terrorist attacks,’ than ‘I got to ride Air Force One twelve times.’” She turned to Tony. “It was three this year, wasn’t it? I’ve lost count.”

Oh, you’re beautiful, Kate Todd. “Foreign, or domestic?” he asked. “And do we count the weapons busts?”

She waved her hand and smiled at him. Her eyes flashed. “Now you’re just getting complicated, Tony.”

“Sorry, darling,” he said, catching the hand and bringing it quickly to his lips. “You’ll have to set down the rules if we’re going to keep score.”

“I knew you were lying!” Rafe crowed. “Come on, Tony, spill. Tell us something exciting.”

“Sorry, Rafe,” Tony said, “national security. Can’t say anything unless you’ve got a C-level clearance.” He was making it up, but no one at the table would know that but Kate.

“You’re no fun at all. Well, I for one sleep better knowing there’s a DiNozzo working to keep us all safe.” Rafe raised his glass and inclined his head towards Tony, who raised his own glass. “Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night–”

“That’s the Postal Service, Rafe,” Tony said.

“Is it? Oh. Well, never mind, then. I’m sure NCIS has an equally catchy slogan.”

Used to his brother’s teasing, Tony simply accepted the toast with a grin and took a sip of wine. “Oh yeah,” he said. “‘What Gibbs says, goes.’” Kate gave him a slight push as she set her glass back on the table, and he laughed as she quickly swallowed.

“Who’s Gibbs?” Annette asked.

“Our boss,” Kate said, glaring with little heat in Tony’s direction. He gave her another innocent look.

“Ah. And what does he say about the two of you?”

“He says that we’re good agents,” Kate said. Tony felt her defenses go up again. He put his hand on the back of her chair.

“No, I mean, about your relationship.”

Luckily, this was one point that they’d worked out in the car. “We keep details on a need-to-know basis,” he answered, moving his hand from the chair to rub her back. “It’s nobody’s business but ours, is it, Kate?”

She nodded, and added, “And we have a deal. If it goes down, the job comes first, not the other person.”

“Hasn’t come to that,” Tony said, not having to feign all the seriousness in his tone.

“Not yet,” Kate said softly.

Boom. Nuclear powered conversation killer. And it worked too. No one seemed to want to follow that topic any further. After a moment of discomfort, Rafe asked them if they thought Britney Spears was a threat to national security, and then launched into a tirade on the state of pop music, which of course was a topic near and dear to his heart as a nightclub owner. Tony relaxed back in his chair with his wine glass, having finished eating. Surreptitiously, he examined his adversaries across the table. He was... confused. He’d known that Julio would look for ways to belittle him. He and his cousin had a history stemming back to when they were eight, when they’d fought over the last Creamsicle at the corner store and Tony had won. But it was weirdly juvenile of Annette to try and find chinks in his armour. She knew how to make him mad, and he knew she was trying, but not even at their worst had she tried to take him down like she’d tried to take Kate down. What had happened to her? She used to be so… positive. She’d married Julio, he supposed, started dating him less than a year after the breakup. Could such a change happen in only five years?

She wasn’t the same woman, he realized. She was quite different, in fact almost fundamentally opposite, from the woman he’d loved. Some of the ache in his heart shifted tenor. It still hurt, but not as much. He shouldn’t have avoided this meeting for as long as he had. He had been clinging to a memory, allowing a person who no longer existed to hold sway over him and colour his life.

And she didn’t exist. He watched her, using all the tricks he’d learned in law enforcement to keep her from noticing. She spoke to her husband and those around her, but mostly she ate delicately and watched him. No, not him. She was watching Kate.

You can’t be happy for me, Tony thought incredulously. You went and got married, and have had this hold on me for years, and you can’t bear the thought of me being happy. I still have to be yours, even after everything that was said between us. And Kate’s a threat to that.

She wasn’t, really, but only he and Kate knew that. It was so unbelievably illogical, so completely out of character for the woman that he thought he knew, that for a good ten minutes, he watched her even closer, convinced that he had to be mistaken. But every half-suppressed look of dislike, every frown whenever Kate laughed at something someone said, every flash of her eyes when Kate looked at him, was more evidence that Annette had become someone he would have never thought it possible for her to become.

So when Kate got up to help clear away the dishes before dessert, and Annette quickly followed suit, Tony thought, She’s going to do something. I don’t know what, but she is. I need to warn Kate. But Rafe had engaged him once again in conversation, and before he could extract himself from it with an excuse of needing to use the bathroom before dessert, both Kate and Annette had disappeared into the kitchen with his mother and several other ladies. He left the dining room in the opposite direction, to make his story stand up, then stepped quickly down the hallway towards the kitchen, hoping to catch Kate on her way back to the table. He stopped, though, when he heard quiet voices around the corner. Two voices, female. Kate and Annette. He leaned against the wall and whispered a curse under his breath. He was too late.