Disclaimer: Yep. Still don't own NCIS. (Though I hear Cote de Pablo wants to learn Chinese—I volunteer?)

Spoilers: 10x22 "Revenge" (yep, it's another tag.)

So ... this one is darker than the other tag, believe it or not. It can work as a companion piece to End, but I decided to put it as a separate one-shot because the style is different from that one. This one has no happy ending either, though :P also, it might sorta sound like a Ziva hate-fic, but I assure you it's not. Ziva's just really mad at herself right now.

-Soph

P.S.

To Ladyaloysius: I'm so sorry; I meant to reply to your reviews two fics ago, but I always seem to forget while I'm writing my A/Ns. I've no idea if you'll see this, as it is, but if you do—I'm dying to know which part of me you feel reflected in you! I do not know the reference of music having a nice beat and one being able to dance to it (oh, sue me, people), but I wouldn't mind finding out :) and thank you so much for your reviews. I really appreciate them.

To others whose reviews I have not replied to (if you are signed in and have PM enabled): I know I take a while getting to reviews sometimes; up until ... well, today, I worked 10 hours a day, five days a week, and wrote fics as well as prepared lesson plans on the weekends, so things were sort of in a rush for me. Rest assured, though, I will get to your reviews because I always do. And I honestly do appreciate them. Thank you so, so much. Much love to you all, and have some virtual chocolate on me!

First-Hand

The bus ride home was quiet, with a mere scattering of passengers here and there at this time of the night.

Ziva had been adamant that she take public transportation home, unwilling to impose on—or be physically anywhere near—Gibbs or McGee, though she hadn't counted on Tony being equally adamant that he accompany her during the journey. He sat beside her now, still and observing her out of the corner of his eye; she sat stiff and wishing there was instead an insurmountable distance in between them. She'd just finished giving her statement of events to Morrow of Homeland Security, and she didn't think Tony would want to be so close by her after hearing about what she'd done.

"You know, I don't know why you wanted to hear those details," she said, surprising herself when she spoke up.

"I wanted to know what happened," he answered before adding pointedly, "y'see, I wasn't there."

She flinched at his words. "I know you weren't." And guilt and shame still coursed through her, despite knowing that her going behind the team's back had been for the best.

He covered her fidgeting fingers with a warm palm. "I don't blame you."

She laughed humourlessly. "I don't think you know quite how far back this part of me exists."

"What part of you?"

"The … bloodthirsty one. The one in need of revenge."

"Oh," was all he said, and she felt her bottom lip press into her upper one against her will.

I will not cry, she told herself. She would not cry, because she was not built to feel sorry for herself.

And then he said, "Tali," and it sounded so much more like a comment than a hazarded guess needing confirmation that she wondered if he was aware of how dirtied her hands were, after all.

"Yes," she affirmed anyway.

"What'd you do?"

She shook her head without looking once at him. "You do not want to know."

They fell into silence once more, and she focused on the rumbling vibrations of the bus seat beneath her to keep her emotions at bay. It almost worked—until, once more, her mouth betrayed her, "What did you think, seeing Bodnar fall?"

"Huh?" he asked stupidly, sounding as taken aback as she felt over the question.

"I have—" she began, and then stopped and amended, "this is the first time you have seen me kill in cold blood."

"Ziva—"

"It is true. I do not think you have ever seen me send a man falling through thin air, have you?"

"Is there a reason you're asking me this?"

"I am just wondering…" What you think of me now.

And it seemed he did understand her, after all, because he addressed the unspoken part of her sentence incredulously, "Ziva, you did it in self-defence."

"So you say."

"So you said, to Tom Morrow. And if you believed it, then why should I have had any reason to doubt you?"

"Because you had just seen me kill a man, Tony!" The involuntary exclamation had her head snapping up, checking to see if anyone else had heard, but it appeared that people paid less attention to their surroundings than they really ought to. She lowered her head again.

"It's not the first time you killed a man."

The callous words made her stomach literally ache. "No, but it is the first time you saw it," she conceded in defeat. "At least, in this context. You have only my word that it is self-defence, and yet you saw a man, just as bloodied as I was, plunge twenty-five feet toward the ground and die from breaking his neck. You wonder, yes? If I was telling the truth?"

"You're worried my opinion of you has changed," he summarized unceremoniously, and her jaw clenched. She blinked back the tears in her eyes.

She would not cry.

"Well, it hasn't," he assured her, and she closed her eyes to stave off the hotness threatening to spill. "I think you're still the same woman as you ever were."

"That much might be true."

"I don't think you quite mean that in the way I mean it."

She took a deep breath. "'Could those two children ever have i-imagined that one would kill her own … brother, and the other, his mentor?'" she recited from haunted memory. Tony remained mute. "You have seen the entirety of the video call Ilan had with me, yes?"

"Ari was killed by you," Tony supplied by way of answer, and she nodded.

"It was necessary."

"Then why lump it into the same category as whatever category you're lumping it into?"

"Because I did not hesitate." She lifted his eyes to somewhere around his collarbone. "And when you do not hesitate, you start to question the purity of your own heart. I don't think I'm the woman you think I am, Tony."

"Hesitation only leads to unjustifiable death in our line of work, Ziva."

"Regardless … there are too many things I have not hesitated about. Killing Bodnar was one of them."

"Was it?" he asked, as if he did not believe her.

And suddenly she was flashing back to the hellhole of a ship, the narrow, metal-wrought corridor inside which Ilan had turned his back on her and taken for granted that she wouldn't shoot him. He had been right.

But did that mean she wasn't right? Had she at all hesitated when she pushed him over the railing to his ungraceful death? What had she been fuelled by—adrenaline, or fear, or anger, or self-protection, or the blinding and overriding need for vengeance? Was it wrong that she had felt so very relieved it was all over, until it had finally sunken in to her that she had terminated the last of her childhood ties? And who did Tony and Gibbs and McGee, the men most important in her life—who did they see when they looked at her now?

Did she even want to know the answers to any of those questions?

And yet, she was certain that no matter which way she looked at it, she had a mind far darker than any of them could ever have thought—and that night, the ones she loved the most had caught a glimpse of the raging monster in her. That night, her teammates had watched her kill a man with her bare hands and live to appreciate it.

"That's my stop," she muttered abruptly, scrambling to collect the scattered pieces of her being.

She didn't really care if it was her stop or not. As the bus drew to a halt, she pushed past Tony and ran down those few steps onto the pavement, ignoring his attempts to call her back.

Those who get too close always end up dead, she remembered once having told Ducky.

She had been right—she had only neglected to mention that she was always the one whose hand brought about that consequence.