**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 isn'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.

Ryan sat in the car with his eyes closed dozing, he was exhausted after being called in on his day off, investigating a crime and then ending the day in the ER after having a nail shot through his head. Today was supposed to be his day off, the first one in nearly 2 weeks and he got called in because his coworker didn't respond to his page. If this had been the first time, hell if it had been the tenth time he wouldn't have cared but it wasn't. He had been called in to cover for Eric so many times that he had lost count.

He didn't blame Eric for his injury no that was his own damn fault for not following protocol. He's mad at Eric because Eric won't tell him what's wrong. Initially when Eric showed up at the lab Ryan was upset that Eric had messed up his plans for some rest and a quiet day off. Once Eric started saying how Ryan wouldn't understand so he wouldn't explain it, then Ryan had a whole other reason to be upset with Eric, and hurt that he wouldn't tell Ryan what was wrong.

Ryan thought that the relationship that he share with Eric was growing. He knew that their professional relationship had gotten much better than it was a year ago. They didn't argue as much and Ryan thought that Eric had gotten over his resentment that Ryan had replaced Eric's best friend after he was killed line of duty.

Personally they had started a relationship too. Initially just hanging out, sometimes going for a drink after work. About 4 months ago that changed and they became lovers.

Oh how they mighty have fallen Ryan thought to himself. He had cautioned Tony when the older man had started sleeping with his boss to be careful, that being in a one sided relationship he was only letting himself in for pain. Too bad Ryan couldn't follow his own advice. Here he was a year after tell Tony to be careful that maybe a fuck buddy relationship would only lead to heartbreak and now Ryan finds himself in the same situation.

He isn't surprised; not really, Eric is a well known ladies man not like he was going to abandon that for a gay lifestyle. They rarely spend the whole night together, Eric leaving long before Ryan arises in the morning. The older man not wanting their colleagues to become aware of their relationship, not wanting their families to know. Ryan went along with it for the most part. He did tell Tony, but his cousin wouldn't tell anyone else.

Eric's statement in the hallway of the lab just cemented in Ryan's mind what he already knew. Eric really didn't place any value on whatever relationship they had. Now the young CSI needed to decide what he was going to do. Did he have the inner strength to hang on and try to see if Eric could come to love him as he loved Eric. Or should he cut his losses and try to salvage the friendship they had built in the lab. He feared that if he did the former and it didn't work out he would lose the later.

When Ryan exited the ER after his discharge the last person he expected to see was Eric. He was planning on taking a cab back to his place. Instead he found himself in Eric's car and after a stop to get his prescriptions filled on his way home. Maybe he should go with the first option after all.

The cab drove silently through the night, traffic was light at this hour even in a city like Miami which never really sleeps. Tony sat in the back of the cab making its way to his cousin's home; he could barely keep still, which was unusual for the NCIS agent. Normally he could be almost meditative in his stillness able to recharge his energy during a long investigation with a few minutes of almost meditative type stillness in his chair at his desk on in any seated position for that matter.

Tonight he was running on pure adrenaline and anger and it was making him antsy. Anger at the man who almost had him convicted of murder anger at that same man for daring to try and hurt Abby, anger at his cousin for nearly getting himself killed. He could not sit still in the cab. He had a stray thought that it was too bad he had given that damn harmonica to Fornell when he was sprung from prison; it would give him something to do. His thoughts running around and around in his head. Every so often having to remind himself that Ryan was alive, that this wasn't like Kate and he would be seeing his cousin soon.

He wished that Ryan had never become a cop. That he had never gone on that tour that Siobhan set up for all of them at One Police Plaza all those years ago. He knew that this was one of the factors that led Mel, Ezra, Ryan and himself into careers in law enforcement. He wished that he had convinced his cousin to come work for the NYPD or at NCIS or the ATF, where someone he trusts would keep an eye on him. He knew however, that Ryan is very stubborn and he would never leave Miami. His uncle Ron was here and he was very close to the older man. He wouldn't leave; especially not now that he had started a relationship with someone here.

A relationship that Tony didn't much approve of. It's irony at its very finest and he knew the gods somewhere must be laughing at him. He wonders idly if he could run this Delko guy off the way he nearly ran Vin off a couple of years ago. Although in that instance it was purely a case of misunderstanding. If he acted the part of a really outraged homophobic relative would Delko leave Ryan alone? Tony wasn't sure this Delko guy was that noble. He didn't have many pleasant thoughts for the man his cousin had taken up with. It really didn't matter to him that his cousin was with a man. That would be hypocritical. In fact he got some perverse joy from it because he was sure their mutual family up north would be horrified at the notion. He didn't like Delko because of all of the times Ryan would call him in the months after taking the position with CSI, pouring his heart out and at times crying his eyes out over the treatment he had received from his new coworkers. It was part of the reason that although he wasn't the closest with Ziva he didn't make her life a living hell when she took Kate's position at NCIS. He didn't like her for lots of other reasons, the fact that she was Mossad and that she was Ari's sister ( Not that this was common knowledge but Tony had GREAT contacts) being the main ones. He wasn't as close to her as he was to Kate but he didn't treat her any differently than he did McGee, in the beginning at least. To him she was a probie no matter the time she spent at Mossad. The type of work was different and she really didn't have a lot of the training needed to make a good investigator. So he had to train her. She was decent at undercover work but that was something he expected her to excel at since Mossad utilized quite a bit of undercover work in their operations.

Tony couldn't forgive and forget what Eric had done as easily as Ryan had. Then there was the fact that from what he was reading between the lines, it seemed like the relationship they had was similar to the one he and Gibbs had been sharing until recently. While Tony had enjoyed it while it lasted he wouldn't wish that type of relationship on anyone. Especially not the one member of his birth family that he could actually stand and really loved.

The cab rolled to a stop outside of Ryan's home with Tony not really resolving anything. He paid the fare got out of the cab grimacing as the heat and humidity rolled over him. It felt worse than usual, after not showering or changing clothes in the last few days. He grabbed his bag and walked through the complex to Ryan's unit. Once he got to the door he realized this was one place he didn't have a key to, having keys to most all of the homes that his closest friends and family lived in. He started banging on the door.