Chapter Text
**CRACK** The shot rang out and he could feel the blood and gore splattering his face, hear her body hitting the roof top, see her eyes staring up at him sightlessly. Tony moaned in his sleep "Kate" The picture morphs instead of Kate's face he sees Ryan, lying there staring at him, knowing that he couldn't save him. Lying there dead.
"RYAN!" Tony shouted as he woke up from a fitful nap. The dream so real he wiped his face expecting to see blood on his fingertips. Shocked to some degree when it wasn't there.
"GAH!" Tony roughly rubbed both hands over his face and through his hair. It was still disordered from his time in the holding cell.
As soon as he got home after he was released, Mia, his house guest, met him at the door. Abby had kept her updated infrequently the entire time that Tony had been incarcerated she knew he was being held.She knew when he was cleared. Tony had expected her to have a warm hug and possibly a hot meal waiting for him.
Instead, like all things in his life lately, she was meeting him with yet another problem. All she knew was that Ryan had been shot. Ryan's uncle had called and spoken to her. She had no other information. She had arranged with Mary and Moha to have the private plane waiting. Tony grabbed one of the prepacked bags he keeps ready for work and he was off. Thankfully he had been given a few days off from work to rest after nearly spending the rest of his life in jail.
So here he was on the plane to Miami in the middle of the night. Wearing the same clothes for the past 2 - 3 how many days was it...anyway it didn't matter. Having nightmares that mixed Kate and Ryan in his mind. He had found out that Ryan had been shot by a nail gun in his eye. The good news was that he had been released already from the hospital and was presumably home.
The bad news was he was going to have to hurt his cousin. Tony had extensive contacts throughout the country many of them in law enforcement. It made it much easier to try and meet Gibbs sometimes impossible deadlines if you had a source to go to for reliable information. It didn't hurt that Tony genuinely loved people thus making it easy to network.
He had especially cultivated contacts and informants in Miami. Ryan had no friends on the Miami-Dade PD when he joined, so Tony worried about him. When he joined the CSI unit Tony knew Ryan had faced a lot of opposition, he feared that if Ryan was hurt on the job he would never know about it because Ryan had no friends at work to share details of his personal life with. So he made sure that Ryan's uncle knew how to contact him and he made many friends in the local PD, at conferences and during investigative phone calls.
What this meant today is that Tony knew that Ryan went into an unsafe situation with his gun not drawn and with no backup. He called one of his PD contacts and they were more than willing to shoot the breeze , or in other words gossip, about the CSI who had been shot.
Hell Tony even knew why he did it, even if Ryan couldn't admit it to himself. Even after over a year and countless denials, Ryan still feels like he is in Tim's shadow.That he still doesn't measure up, that he has something to prove.
God he was tired. Spending a few days in jail does nothing for a person's sleep patterns. The plane would be landing soon and he would be able to see with his own eyes that Ryan was not badly injured. He was not lying on the pavement staring sightlessly up at him like Kate does seemingly nightly in his dreams. He was still alive, and Tony was gonna kick his ass to make sure he stayed that way.