A/N So I started this fic ages ago and sort of got tied up and lost in it. With everything that's been going on in the world, I've been going back to the chapters and editing / rewriting parts of it just as something relaxing to do, so I figured I'd reload it. Sorry for anyone who read it ages ago and are getting the rehash, but there's new stuff sketched out / written in the pretty near future. There's going to be a lot more flashbacks to developing their relationship, and I think that part will be less clumsy than it was before. Well, hopefully. Took out the name swap as well. Some of the characters' backgrounds will be fudged to make the timeline work better, so slightly AU. Holler if you have any questions or concerns.
The rain was pounding rhythmically against the shingles on the sloping roof of Ziva David's top-floor apartment. On a dark night like this in D.C., sirens shrieked through the rain in fits and bursts, traveling from the nearby hospital to whatever roadside skid or crackup had just occurred. But, after years of living in the city, these disturbances were white noise to the NCIS agent. She wouldn't have even realized there had been a torrential downpour until the next morning if her girlfriend hadn't just kicked her in the shin.
Kelly Morris often had nightmares; she never remembered them and did not know why they occurred. Ziva suspected they had something to do with her patchwork childhood. Most times when they occurred they manifested as a small whimper, often between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Those nights were the easiest; it barely interrupted the agent's sleep to shift over and pull the younger woman into a protective embrace. Kelly would sigh, roll against her into a comfortable spooning position and settle once more. Other nights, no more than two or three times a month, she would start talking in her sleep; "No," "Stop," "Don't." Ziva always had to wake her in these instances before she gave in to full blown hysterics. Kelly would look up, her blue eyes bleary and confused, hair mussed, with no recollection of what happened.
"You were having a nightmare," Ziva would always explain, and then open her arms up to the other women. Kelly would push herself against her grumpily, mutter incomprehensibly against the crook of her lover's neck and shift sleeplessly for a few moments. Sometimes the sound of the Ziva's heartbeat was enough to sooth her back to sleep; other-times she'd start to nip playfully at her girlfriend's collarbone, letting her know she wanted some help. An orgasm always relaxed the younger woman, and Ziva was always more than willing to oblige.
This night, however, Kelly was experiencing the least common and least pleasant symptom of a bad nightmare. She was shifting dramatically; the movements had already twisted her in the sheets and pulled the blankets away from her companion before depositing them on the floor. Her face was wet with tears, her mouth was open, wordlessly, and her breathing was erratic and shallow. Ziva could not wake her up with a simple touch; she had to pull the younger woman into her while fighting her unconscious resistance and flailing limbs. Then Kelly would cry, deep, wracking sobs and Ziva would press her face into her hair and kiss the top of her head tenderly until her movements calmed.
"What happened, do you remember?" Ziva asked, as she always did.
"There was a man," her voice was hoarse, "He wasn't very nice."
"What did he look like?"
There was no answer, there never was.
"Did he have a name?"
Her partner sighed.
"Kel?"
Again, her question was met with little more than silence. She hugged the smaller woman once more and slipped a hand up her shirt to stroke her back, up and down. Kelly's hair was soft against her face and smelled like lavender. Ziva would recite the Jewish prayers she had memorized in her childhood. The language didn't matter, nor did the content, just the rhythmic sound of her voice hitting the highs and lows of the verse. Eventually, her partner's breathing evened out in the safety of her arms.
Long after Kelly had returned to sleep, Ziva lay awake. Her mind was spinning, trying to figure out a way to hunt down and capture the ghosts that haunted Kelly. They were real, somewhere, made of flesh and bone with histories and families that she could track. If only there was more information to go on.
When the alarm went off in the morning Ziva was tucked into the bed by herself. The pillow next to her still smelled like her girlfriend, but the apartment was filling with a wholly different scent. I am getting soft, she thought to herself, a year ago she never would have slept through a lover moving from her bed. Two years ago, and the quiet padding and humming of her girlfriend in the other room would have had her spinning from bed, with a gun pulled and the safety clicked off. Briefly, Ziva wondered if this change was good or bad.
Their apartment had an open floor plans, so the spaces bled into one another as a long linear room. Ziva had agreed to it against her better judgment. In her previous apartment, where she had lived by herself, the design had been an efficient, utilitarian fortress. There had been a single, barred, rectangular window in each the bedroom, living room, and kitchen, higher up than was comfortable for looking in or out, and a small slot of an opening in the upper reaches of the shower. But Kelly had inserted her influence.
Kelly was warm and sociable, and insisted on an apartment that felt the same. Through a friend, she found a loft apartment at the top level of a middling building, with warm old wood and large warehouse windows that spread the full expanse of the outer wall. Ziva had, successfully, insisted on heavy, protective shutters, but Kelly liked to wake up with the sun, so they often kept the shutters open and introduced layers of shear and patterned curtains. They combined their furniture, and Ziva let Kelly curate the best pieces. Now, a bookcase filled with legal texts, histories, biographies, and romances, of all things, created a low railing at the edge of the sleeping loft looking over the main areas. The couches were set for the comfort of conversation rather than the creation of defensible positions. And she hadn't so much as insisted on defining the kitchen with a breakfast-bar island set under a rack for pots and as she had introduced it one day when Ziva was running a case through the weekend. Her excitement at the surprise of it had overrun any of her partner's instinctual reservation. Besides, Kelly whispered promises of sinful things that they could do upon its surfaces.
The agent slipped from the covers and padded silently down the stairs and into the main space. Kelly was humming along with music playing softly from the speakers while attending to a batch of pancakes browning on the range. She had an affinity for breakfast foods, probably because it was often acceptable to put syrup on the lot of it, and it was just about the only meal of the day she knew how to cook properly. She jumped slightly, when her girlfriend quietly filled the space behind her, one hand slipping around her torso and the other sliding down bare legs.
"God Ziva. Do you have to do that? You scared the living daylights outta me," Kelly took a playfully deep breath, one hand going to her chest in a fit of dramatics. Then, she turned her head to give the woman a chaste kiss before pushing her gently, "Go brush your teeth so I can kiss you proper."
Instead, Ziva wrapped herself further around the other woman, undeterred by the orders. She could hardly resist. Kelly was classically beautiful, with light hair and a wicked sense of humor. Barefoot, she stood just a couple notches shy of Ziva's 5' 7." This early in the morning she was only wearing one of the agent's shirts, which ended dangerously, teasingly, maddeningly short of mid-thigh. "Hm, I am good here."
"Oh no you're not," She said, stopping the other woman's hands before they could begin to travel down her body, and swatting them playfully away. "You know Nathan's on vacation, I don't have as much help at the office. I can't be late into work."
"You were late yesterday, they did not seem to mind," Ziva stated, one hand trailing up to settle on her ribs, one thumb brushing against the soft edge of her breast.
Kelly pushed her hands away and brandished the spatula with a laugh, "Fine. I can't be late again, well, certainly not for a third time this week. It's only Wednesday."
"But I was thinking that we could –"
"Don't finish that sentence, Zi."
"You sure?"
"No, but humor me."
"Tease," Ziva called, pulling away.
"I love you too, babe."
When Ziva returned from washing up, Kelly had just clicked off the stove and was transferring the pancakes to a pair of plates.
"Coffee, Zi?"
"Yes, thank god. I could use some."
"You do seem a little groggy this morning. I didn't wake you up again last night did I?" Ziva nodded in confirmation. There was rarely any use lying to the other woman; she had an uncanny way of feeling the truth out. "Oh Zi, I'm sorry. I hate how I do that to you all the time. I'm worried about you being alert enough on assignment, you scare me enough as it is."
"Do not worry, I love you in spite of this," Ziva replied with a smirk while biting into breakfast, "The pancakes help."
"And here I thought I'd finally had you trained," Kelly replied laughing, "You're supposed to say that you love everything about me."
"Every little thing," Ziva agreed.
Kelly laughed again, but it faded out awkwardly. She was watching Ziva now, and reached across the counter to catch the other woman's chin in the cup of her hand, angling her face so that they were looking at each other. There were deep bags under the Israeli's eyes. "Kel-"
"Oh, so it was a bad one then?" Ziva sighed and nodded, "I thought that type had stopped. It had been so long." Kelly let go and crossed her arms across her chest, hugging herself gently.
"Are you sure we shouldn't reconsider a specialist." The words came out unbidden. The conversation was usually a non-starter; Kelly's parents had already tried this route to exhaustion.
"'We' aren't doing that again. It doesn't help."
"You were a lot younger then."
"No, Ziva. I hate it. It makes me feel crazy. It makes it worse. Maybe there's a good reason I don't remember."
"Then maybe I could just ask my team, and I could-"
"Ziva, please. Let the past stay where it is. I don't want anything to do with it."
"I could-"
"Please," her tone broke and shifted to something more distressed and desperate.
"Okay. Okay. It does not matter now," Ziva backtracked, trying to smooth over the discussion, "Let us eat breakfast together, hmm? We will forget about this whole mess."
"I have to get to work. I'll just grab something on the way." The younger woman headed into the bedroom and began to get dressed. She put on an attractive pencil skirt and blouse. A wide belt looped across her middle in a way that drove Ziva mad, while still being clearly professional. She was still struggling to put the backs on her earrings to hold them in place when she came back for a quick peck. Ziva pulled her towards her, coaxing her gently into her lap, both legs draped off one side.
"I still have to go to work," Kelly said, she was smiling again at least, her forehead tipped to rest against the agent's.
"I think I was promised a proper kiss."
Kelly leaned in, arms draping across the other woman's shoulders and around her back, pulling her closer just for a moment. They kissed thoroughly, and Ziva was ready to say damnit to cases and ghosts and assistants on vacation in preference of bringing her woman back to bed. But Kelly pulled away, leaving just one last chaste kiss.
Her eyes drifted across the open apartment, trying to ground herself in the good memories of familiar things. "I'll see you tonight. Be safe out there, please."
"Always."
Kelly stood up and slipped on her heels by the door. She was a lawyer, and god knows she would find enough there to keep her busy until this feeling faded on its own and she felt ready to return home.
Ziva was staring despondently at her paperwork when Tony walked in, rambling off to McGee about some asinine movie he had re-watched the other night for the hundredth time. He paused when he noticed her already there. "You must have seen something a little more depressing, eh David? I can feel your melancholy all the way over here. "
"Tony, I'm surprised you even know the word melancholy," McGee quipped as he sat down at desk. Ziva continued to concentrate on the reports in front of her, studiously ignoring them both.
"Seriously, Probie, you think she's all right?" He hovered closer to her rather then making his way to his own station.
"I am fine, Tony, I just did not sleep well last night."
Tony placed both hands on his desk, obscuring the paperwork in the process, and leaned down dangerously close to Ziva's personal space, staring her down.
"And not in the good way it seems. Maybe you should try that next time, if you catch my drift?"
"Tony, if you come a millimeter closer I will seriously injury you with this paperclip." The threat hung between them as the man tried to decide if he should take this as a warning or a challenge.
"Don't you have work to do, DiNozzo?" Gibbs' soft, clipped voice came from directly behind him, causing the agent to snap to attention, "We just finished a case after all. I was hoping you could take care of all these personal socialization needs in that afternoon off I gave you. Should I just keep you here until you're done next time?"
"Of course not, Boss! Just, uh, going over some of the facts of the case with my partner here."
Gibbs gave him a look that clearly said he was less than impressed with the excuse. However, being a man of few words, he chose to dignify it with little more than a shake of his head. Instead, he turned towards the sole female agent, "This was left in my mailbox downstairs, David." He dropped an envelope facedown on the woman's desk as Tony scurried away.
Ziva turned it over in her hands; it felt like there was something inside of it other than basic ink on paper. She grabbed the letter opener from her cup and mimed it carefully across her own throat while giving DiNozzo a stare-down. He swallowed noticeably while McGee smiled and shook his head at their antics. She looked down at the envelope in her hand, intending to slice it open neatly and decisively, but she noticed something that gave her pause. The return address was her own, belonging to the apartment that she and her girlfriend shared.
Something she did not understand began to knot in the pit of her stomach, something that said wrong. She opened it carefully on the short edge and tilted it down. A picture slid out, focusing on the two of them wrapped up in each other and asleep in their bed, the shear curtains offering a scat, gaudy cover. The resolution was clear enough to make out their features. In the bottom corner there was a time stamp on it from 5:23:02 this morning. A lock of hair was taped to the back; she would recognize that smell anywhere: lavender.
"What is it?" Gibbs asked. Something had shifted the attention of the group to the sole woman.
"Kelly. Oh god."