Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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I think about you all the time
But I don't need the same
It's lonely where you are
Come back down
And I won't tell 'em your name.
~Name – Goo Goo Dolls~
*~*~*
One very tired Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo sat in the bullpen, ignoring the sounds of useless chatter, machinery, and paper. He focused solely on the fact that his right arm was throbbing with a pain that covered most of his upper arm. The day before, he had the brilliant idea to fill in his angel-wing tattoo, which for the past 4 years had been black and white, with color – blue and gold, to be specific – forgetting how much it hurt when he first got the tattoo, or when he had his other tattoo filled in with color. He didn't remember anything about that, in fact, until at the tattoo parlor. The only compensation that he had was that the angel wings looked more realistic.
He had two tattoos on each arm. On his right arm, he had two angel wings on either side of his deceased fiancée's name, along with the dates of her birth and death.
Ziva David had died 4 years ago, after being shot by the serial killer and psychopath Demokritos Kazan. Agent Elizabeth Michael, also known as "Mini Probie," had been Kazan's target. Along with their deaths, he killed 16 other girls, all whom could not be identified without the help of the FBI and Jeffersonian.
With Ziva's death, she was replaced by one of the FBI agents who worked on the case, Christine "Chris" Kellan, a rather neurotic blue-eyed blonde who had worked the Homicide Division of the FBI before joining NCIS.
On his other arm was a tattoo of the Apatura Iris butterfly, along with his daughter's name in loopy cursive.
Before Ziva was killed, she and Tony had a daughter, who at the time of Ziva's death was 2 years old.
Iris Talia David-DiNozzo had been born in the United States thanks to pure luck. In fact, Iris was alive solely because of luck and Mossad. Ziva had been held captive in Somalia for 7 months before being rescued by Mossad and the NCIS agents in the region. She was flown to a Saudi Arabian hospital and treated for PTSD and numerous other injuries, and was flown back to the U.S. 2 days before her daughter was born.
Tony had not found out about Iris until several months after the girl's birth. Several months after that, he had proposed to Ziva, who accepted. They were set to marry the next year, in December.
Ziva was killed in November of that year.
He sighed, and glanced at the two photos he kept next to his desk. One was a sepia-toned picture of a smiling, laughing Ziva, her eyes almost closed with laughter and her skin lit by sunset light.
The other was of the three of them, taken by a lady at the park. Iris was 18 months old in the picture, sitting on the grass, laughing as her namesake butterfly flew past her hands. Ziva was leaning over next to her, her hands on her knees, laughing at Iris's reaction to the butterfly, looking at the camera with brilliant brown eyes. Tony was sitting down on the other side of his daughter, paying more attention to her than the camera, smiling.
Tony smiled, remembering how happy they had been that day.
"Daddy!"
His train of thought was interrupted as his 6-year-old daughter ran up to his desk, the visitor's badge hanging around her neck. He spun around in his chair and the little girl ran up to him, and then jumped up, throwing her arms around him.
"Hey, baby girl! Why are you here?" He asked her as she jumped onto his lap, smiling.
"Well, Señora Maria said that since I was already halfway through the book that I didn't really need to do any more work today, and then she drove me here and that one security guard gave me my visitor's badge and I didn't even have to go through the metal detector this time! And they didn't take away my pocketknife this time."
Tony just smiled.
Iris was, for all intents and purposes, a supergenius. The numerous specialists and psychologists they had seen all called her an "Indigo Child". With an IQ that rivaled Peter Bishop's and a fluency in a dozen languages, it was no surprise that numerous scientists wanted to perform further tests on the child to see just how high her IQ was – "because it's off the charts", McGee had explained when Tony asked why – and whether it made sense for the 6-year-old girl to continue taking AP High school level-courses. In fact, the child was already close to possessing her GED. Due to her intelligence, she could not attend a normal school, and instead was tutored by college grads looking for extra money in subjects such as Calculus, Psychology, Physics, World History, and several other subjects, and in languages by their neighbor, Señora Maria Fernandez, a Colombian-born linguist, who was fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, German, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and several dialects of each language, among others. Naturally, she was a fantastic teacher.
Iris was everything Ziva could have been, had her father not trained her since her birth to be in Mossad.
Physically, she was almost exactly like Ziva. She was small-framed, in the lower growth percentile for her age. Her skin was light, but there was still an olive tone. Her hair was brilliant dark brown; several shades darker than Tony's, and it fell to her shoulders in a mess of curls. Aside from her eyes, she looked exactly like her mother. But her eyes looked nothing like her parents. They were, at most times, a clear, dark turquoise, bordering between cyan blue and mossy green. When there was a change in the light or her mood, they would range to a burning violet, a blue so dark that it was nearly black, a sky blue that was nearly white, an emerald green that captured all the shadows, a slate gray that showed no light, but mostly the brilliant turquoise.
She had also inherited both her parents' athleticism. She was taking ballet, jujitsu, wrestling, swimming, and soccer, and excelling at everything. MVP, and only 3 years after joining jujitsu, was already a red belt.
And yet she was as immature as anybody her age could be at times, laughing at everything and getting distracted by staplers and paperclips – Tony really hoped that she never learned how to kill people using office supplies - obsessed with Spongebob and Winnie The Pooh, and a mild obsession with a copy of Sims 3 that she had been given for her 5th birthday.
He watched his little girl as she ran off, intent on saying hello to everyone else in her extended, unbiological family. He smiled, then looked once more at the picture of Ziva on his desk, wondering what had been going through her mind at the time of the picture that made her laugh so much.
He thought about her all the time. And he wanted her back so much, but he knew he couldn't have her back.
Tony looked towards Iris, smiling.
His angel.
*~*~*
A/N: And so starts the sequel to both Dark Blue and Iris, which you should probably read before this or else it makes no sense. Anyway, I have another story to tell you.
Last Tuesday a pipe burst in my kitchen wall and flooded my dining I had no running water for 3 days, but I finally got it back on Thursday my laminated fake hardwood floor was irreparably damaged, so there is no floor in my dining room, only concrete. So I came home yesterday and the lower half of the drywall in my kitchen and dining room was gone, along with the cabinets, counter, and sink.
Just imagine coming home from school to find that your wall was gone. But at least it's better than coming home to gigantic red industrial sized fans, like what happened on Wednesday. But they were gone yesterday.
Not to mention I'm not going to have a floor soon in half of my house, because we have to replace all the hardwood. But I get a kitchen remodel and tile floor. Thank God for insurance and parents who are paying for everything else.
So if my story updates are a bit erratic, it's because of that.