This is a short little story. Completely unbetaed so all the issues are mine. Hope you like it!
Disclaimer; I don't own any of the characters :(
Ziva David had always been an observant person. Years growing up under the tutelage of the Mossad director followed by her own stint as an agent there and then finally at NCIS guaranteed that if she hadn't been observant she wouldn't have survived this long. It was something she quietly prided herself on. It was one of the things that made her a good agent. So she was surprised it had taken her this long to see.
It was easy to determine that there was something wrong with Gibbs' hands but it took hours of observation for her to figure out what.
It was the little things. The way he carefully tented his hands when he laid them on a table, never straightening them out to lie flat. The way he sent them off after their firearms re-certification so they wouldn't see the way the soft lines around his eyes deepened every time he pulled the trigger and the recoil shot up his arms. The way she noted his latest project in his basement's progress had slowed to a crawl, the number of hours he put in each night diminishing. Or the way he winced when he forgot himself with a suspect and slammed his hands down on the table in anger.
It took months to get confirmation.
The case had been a bad one involving a child. Always a sore spot for Gibbs, but this one had been particularly bad. The wife of a Petty Officer had been found dead in their small home on base, the child and father missing. They'd found Petty Officer Sims but too late for his son. Apparently the wife, Maggie, had come home to find her husband hitting her son. She had tried to stop him but had been beaten herself. In fact, she had been beaten so badly that her appendix ruptured and she had rapidly died of the ensuing toxins released into her blood stream. Angry, PO Marshall Sims had fled with his son and taken out his anger on the boy.
They found Sims in a motel room crying over the body of his son, whom he'd also killed, though he swore it was inadvertent. As McGee was cuffing the distraught father the man seemed to rouse himself. He'd turned on McGee one cuff still attached to his left wrist and come around with a huge roundhouse punch. Gibbs and DiNozzo wrestled the man to the ground, Gibbs getting in a few quick punches to subdue the man.
Once cuffed he had wailed over the loss of his wife and son. Gibbs just ground his teeth.
She found Gibbs in the gym later that day, hands taped hitting a bag drenched in sweat. He'd clearly been there for some time. She watched as he took out his own anger on the bag.
Later that night she stopped by to find him sitting on his sofa staring out into space. A large bowl sat on the coffee table in front of him filled two thirds of the way with ice and water. His hands were submerged in the freezing liquid. He looked up when she walked in.
"It was not your fault."
"We should have gotten there sooner," he argued back.
"We did what we could." Gibbs just scoffed at her response and silence reigned.
She thought Gibbs would leave it at that but his voice echoed softly around the room, "he had everything and he destroyed it."
Ziva could see that old hurt resurfacing. Could see the thoughts of Kelly and Shannon dancing across his face. "Some people do not appreciate what they have. Some people are too angry to see what is good." Ziva thought back to her troubles with her own father and mused that it was all to common a situation.
She sat next to him on the sofa and gently pulled one of his hands from the water. The tips of his fingers were shaded with blue. She softly held the swollen knuckles noting how each joint bulged. "Arthritis?"
He shut his eyes and nodded and carefully pulled his hand out of hers and put it back in the bowl. He'd tried not to let the team see how his hands refused to function sometimes and how they ached every morning and at the end of every day. Somehow he wasn't surprised that it was Ziva who had seen through his screen.
"But this is something old people get."
"I am old Ziva." She had never seen him as old he always seemed so vigorous, so alive to her. Tonight he looked worn though. But she felt the need to reassure him somehow.
"You are not old Gibbs, merely," she searched for the word, "experienced."
He snorted in response to her delicate phrasing. Sighing he removed both hands from the ice and slowly picked up a dish towel from the coffee table to dry them off. He fumbled with the towel keenly aware of his frozen knuckles refusing to bend and his officer's sharp eyes on him. He could feel her gaze and allowing her to see this caused his ears to burn.
Ziva noticed all of this but said nothing. She longed to take the towel from his clumsy hands but she knew he wouldn't react well to that. So she sat and watched. She slowly realized that he had the towel sitting there within easy reach. That he had done this before. That this was a weakness.
Ziva sat back and contemplated that. Many little things had led to this moment of clarity. She watched Gibbs all the time but she never really saw until today that her superhero may not belong on the pedestal she put him on that his body was starting to fail him.
Gibbs was human and for her, that was hard to accept. But he dealt with this pain, and the pain of working cases like the one they had just closed. He quietly carried on despite that. He just kept doing the job, bringing in suspects, finding justice for families when justice would have otherwise escaped them. And she thought maybe his hands were faulty but his character was not. That maybe he belonged on the pedestal she had him on not because he had no weakness but because he would never let those chinks in his armor prevent him from doing what needed to be done.