Title: Eira
Summary: Tony and Ziva have a daughter and nothing terrifies Tony more.
Pairings: Tony/Ziva
Rating: K
Wordcount: 828
Author's Note: This is just a quick drabble I wrote today. My take on what Tony's feelings toward his child would be. The name Eira means "the healing" and I think it's only fitting since both Ziva and Tony are broken people. I own nothing.
Eira
Tony never thought that this -of all things that has happen throughout his life- this is what would terrify him to no end. That pure fear can come in the shape of soft, damp flesh the colour and texture of peaches. Her breath is baby-sweet against his chest where she sleeps, oblivious to his aching worries.
This is what she is:
Her name is Eira. She has large eyes the colour of wet sand and two and a half teeth in her lower jaw that are short and crooked and white like pebbles. When they grew she cried a little and every time it cut a string somewhere inside him.
She likes music and grass and lemons. She doesn't like canned plumbs and being strapped down and having her favourite stuffed porcupine taken away to be washed.
She likes to run fast on her chunky toddler legs -sometimes buying forehead bumps the size and colour of swollen grapes- and frankly, it is what terrifies him more than anything else.
A day in mid-September she came along; when leaves withered on branches and new life took their place. She was bloody and wrinkly and screamed in shivers and hiccups and he almost did, too.
She's got desert skin like her mother -a strip of land- covering the baby flesh he doesn't want to ever go away. He likes to put his nose in the crook of her right knee and breathe in at the softness there. He doubts there is a better scent in the world.
He doesn't know anyone she likes more than Gibbs. And he his fairly sure Gibbs likes her more than he likes Tony and Ziva put together. Throw in McGee, too. Gibbs scratches her cheeks with his grey beard but Eira only screams with laughter because she's ticklish there. Every time this happens Tony has to fight the urge to pluck her from Gibbs and protect her all on his own, even though Gibbs would probably do a ten times better job.
Who knew being a father would make him feel incompetent to no end.
She is stubborn and her first word was N O and that is all from her mother. He never tells Ziva that, though, because he knows very well what happens when you annoy her. When Eira cries, her eyes become almost twice their size. When she sleeps on the side her cheek turns into a fat crimson crease. The day she starts kindergarten he will follow her every step of the way and Ziva will roll her eyes.
Before, he never knew how fragile a human being can be; how terrifyingly easy it is to break a bone in an arm that's no thicker than his right thumb. How flesh and blood is something temporary and easily taken away.
At times, he wants to tuck her back into Ziva's belly, where she can always be protected and safe and doesn't have to worry him sick.
She is captured in a leather frame on his desk. A little blurred. He remembers that day. She hadn't wanted to sit still and had drooled all over her dress dotted with yellow plastic flowers. Ziva, always impatient, had screamed at the photographer. She'd said the photos were all ruined and a waste of money but a month ago Tony caught her putting one in her wallet. He likes the blur. It terrifies him. It's Eira. Always moving.
When she smiles it feels like someone laces his ribs with a million lanterns and lights them on fire.
This is Eira. She is asleep on his chest and she is his and Ziva's and he thinks that this is probably what a heart attack feels like. Loving someone so much it feels like your heart is a swollen, aching root that snaps your ribcage in two.
He weaves one hand into Ziva's hair and places the other on his baby's head, feeling the slow pulse in the soft scull with fragile skin stretched over. It's two AM and this is the most content he has felt in a while, with both of his fire women asleep, not running around causing him to have a hernia. He will probably wake up to both of them snoring in chorus; Eira clutching his key-bone with her tiny fists with a strength that keeps on surprising him.
He closes his eyes and allows himself to get swallowed in the sea of sheets; sinking deeper and deeper with his tiny family.
And he can't think of a single movie quote to describe the feeling.