“They'd called me a monster,” Tony whispered suddenly, when he and Ducky were sitting on the porch at Ducky's house and were watching Ducky's mum and her dogs in the garden.

“Who called you that, my boy?” Ducky sat his cup down and turned his attention fully to the young man who sat in a rocking chair and was slowly swinging back and forth.

“My parents,” Tony replied and his face became distant with the remembered pain. “My father couldn't stand to be around me and my mother killed herself because she couldn't get get rid of me otherwise.”

“Anthony,” Ducky's loud gasp of surprise let Tony stop for a moment. “Who ever told you this-”

“Well,” Tony interrupted. “nobody told me that, Ducky, but it's not hard to think of that as an explanation, when you know that your parents couldn't stand the sight of you.”

“Tell me about it,” Ducky demanded and saw how Tony shook his head.”My dear Anthony, I don't think to bottle it all up inside you is the right way to handle all of this.”

“I...I...I never told anyone about it, Ducky. I'm not sure I can.”

”Well, you have all the time you need, my boy,” Ducky answered back and waved to his mother, who waved happily back.

“Mainly my mother would call me all kind of names like freak and monster, sometimes she would call me Evil and Satan and scream at me that I would only exist to torture her, that I was the reason that she couldn't get pregnant again...usually after she called me all Evil she would disappear for a few weeks and when she came back she acted all spaced out for a while, before everything started again.”

“I guess she'd been mentally ill,” Ducky said, when Tony did a break to drink a little of his tea and the older man had to chuckle a little when he saw Tony's surprised face when he tasted sweet herbal tea, instead of the strong black tea Ducky and his mother preferred.
Tony nodded and went on.

“A few days before my mother had killed herself, my father called me into his study. He let me stand in front of his desk for almost an hour, before he laid his pen aside and glared at me for a moment,” Tony wrapped his arms around himself and his eyes became distant with the memories. “Suddenly he jumped up from his chair and walked over to one of his file cabinets and came back with a thick looking folder. He sat down again behind his desk and glared a little longer at me...

Flashback:

“You know? When your mother gave birth to you it had been a wonder for me,” the older DiNozzo opened one of his drawers and pulled a bottle and a glass out. “You've been everything I ever wanted from your mother.”

DiNozzo poured himself a drink.

“But then they'd discovered a few more organs in your body then it would have been normal for a boy and who would have thought that something like this could be possible anyway? A boy who could get pregnant? Who had a an uterus and everything else only women should own?”

Little Anthony flinched when his father slammed his glass on the desktop.

“I'd asked them to remove it...all of it...what ever the price for it would be, but they declined. You would be too young and too small, that you wouldn't survive such a big operation, but hell, I was ready to take the chance with it, when it would mean that I wouldn't end up as one big joke for my partners and friends,” the man gulped his drink down. “No one wanted to operate on you, whatever price I'd offered to pay.”

Young Anthony watched how his father filled his glass again.

“I had a talk with an doctor this morning. You'll be operated on at the end of the week, someone will come and take you to the hospital on Thursday morning, so that the doctor can have all the tests necessary done with you.”

His father dismissed him with a wave of his glass and Anthony could leave fast enough, before everything his father had told him sunk in.

Thursday morning had come all too fast for the seven year old and he awoke from a sleep filled with nightmares to a strange face looking down on him and he started to scream in surprise and fear, before something sharp pricked his arm and Tony fell into nothingness.

He awoke in a strange room on a bed and tried to roll out of it only to find himself tied down.
He shouted for help, screamed as loud as he could until his throat started to burn and he couldn't get any tone out of it anymore, only then gave he up his fighting and fell against his pillows and cried helplessly.

Doctors and nurses came into his room talking to each other, poking and prodding him, turning him this way and that way and examining his body inside and outside, until the boy felt sore and violated.

But suddenly everything stopped and the operation his father had talked about never came, instead he saw how the doctor discussed hotly with Anthony DiNozzo Senior before he turned on his heals and disappeared.
Tony's father had glared at him, before he too had turned away and left.

Anthony was driven home and was told not to leave his room, until someone came and called him and....

End of Flashback.

“...I've never been so happy in my life, that I could hide under my bed again,” Tony said and sat silent for a moment, before he added, ”In the following night I sneaked into my father's office and pulled the file my father had on his desk the other day out of his cabinet. I'd always been curious about everything and even then my curiosity became the better of me and so I sat on the floor of my father's office and read the file my father had made about me... Okay, I didn't understood half of what was written in it, but there stood that it was suspected that my mother's psychosis and the medicaments she took for it were to make responsible for what happened to my twin and me. There were even a few pictures of other children in it, with legs sticking from their bellies or another head, or...or...” Tony cleared his throat. “I became panicked and thought pregnant would mean that I would get a leg or another head, too.”

*Dear Lord,* Ducky thought and had to fight to hold his emotions under control.

“I can be thankful that my first menstruation hit when I lived with Salvatore. I totally freaked when I started to bled out of my ...” Tony stopped and blushed furiously and Ducky realized for the first time that all female organs for reproduction included the typical time of the month- phase, too.