Came up with this on my injury day off school today. Small one-shot. Inspired by FanCote's YouTube video,'NCIS: Tiva "No matter how far away you are, you can always feel them"'. I believe the quote is from Glee. Italic's are Tony's thoughts. Warning this is a darker story.
When you love someone, like I loved her. They are a part of you. It's like you're attached by this invisible tether, and no matter how far away you are… you can always feel them. And now every time I reach for that tether… I know there's no one on the other end, and I feel like I'm falling into nothingness. It feels like a piece of me has been ripped off. Just one more time I wanna hold her. Ten more seconds, is that too much to ask?
It rips him apart so much to know she is gone, that he will never get her back. And even though it is not him that is gone, he feels as though he has fallen too. She was part of him. She was so harshly ripped from him, in a way that jarred his heart and cut him open with the sharp blade of Death. Now he is left with that open wound, gathering the dust and dirt of sadness and loss.
He doesn't know if he can take life without her. Her being across from him everyday, it was normal, he couldn't think or deal with the fact she isn't there. Sometimes when the well-known 'ding' of the elevator goes off he looks up, hoping and wishing to the gods he doesn't truly believe in, that she will walk out of that cab and back into his life.
But his hope is too unrealistic. It would never happen. Why? Because she died in his arms, he felt her heart stop and her skin grow cold. And he never let her go, not willingly until his arms were pried from her by Gibbs. He didn't want to let go, he couldn't. And his bloodstained suit with the evidence of her loss hangs in his closet. Why? He needs something to remind him she is truly gone. If he didn't see it every morning he would expect to see her, he hasn't quite come to terms yet that she's not coming back.
He cant either, if he does he knows he would be incapable of anything. She was his everything and how can you do anything if your everything is gone? He cannot factor into his mind, his heart, that she won't return.
He wants to hold her again and he cant, he can never feel her soft hands on his face, her radiant skin under his hands, her gentle lips upon his. Never again will he have that and it kills him inside. He lives in his dreams of her and feels trapped in a nightmare when he's awake. His world is upside-down without her.
When he wakes after each dream and realizes that it was only that, a dream. He cries. He cannot help it, he is lost without her. He's thought about leaving this cold, dark life to join her, follow that tether that joins her to him. However he cannot push himself to do it, cannot take that final step. He doesn't know what awaits him if he does and he cannot take that risk. Not yet anyway.
He can feel her in his heart, can feel the memory of her smile, her laugh, her kiss. And he cannot take the feeling of regret, of wishing he could have stopped her from being taken from him. He's slowly falling into nothingness and no one can help it. She is the only one who can stop this. But she cannot, her being does not exist anymore. And he needs her being, he has her soul and memory trapped in him, it's the only thing keeping him going.
He worries though; he cannot last on just that. The heartache it gives him not having her.
When he wakes he reaches out for her, thinking she'll be right there, in his bed like she used to. And she's never there. He'll cry again and Gibbs will show up when he doesn't turn up for work. He knows it pains Gibbs so much to see him like this but he cannot change it, it's what she does to him. The past cannot be changed; he will always be like this. Miserable.
Gibbs will put him in the shower, help him dress, take him to work. He feels like an unable child and Gibbs is his father, he cannot do the basic necessities to make himself acceptable at work anymore. Gibbs tries his hardest to get him back on his feet, but it doesn't work. Tony has such a connection to Ziva that he cannot function; Gibbs has felt it before, but nothing like this. And to think your wife and child didn't mean as much as your partner did to you? Gibbs wondered just how deeply the two of them went.
Ziva had clasped herself around his heart, holding all his pieces together. And now that she is gone, his pieces begin falling and his heart begins to struggle to have the want to keep beating, it wants to give up. This is all too much.
His heart almost gave up on him the other day, not in the emotional way but physically his heart stopped beating. It's not untypical of a man his age and with all the stress and heartbreak pushing and pulling at him, he broke. He was saved, saved by the medical expertise of a man that works with the dead. Tony only wished Ducky had let him go that day, let him finally rest in peace because really that would his liberation.
And he cannot take it, not anymore. He's tried, but he cannot do anything. Vance is on the edge of letting him go; the only thing keeping him in work is Gibbs. And then as soon as his job is gone what is he left with? Nothing. He doesn't have a family or anyone to go home to. That was taken from him. Ziva was that person. One day he was going to marry her and have children with her; she was his and no one else. She had said so herself. And just a week before her death she had asked him what he felt about having a child together. He would never get to find out how he would honestly feel, not now.
Gibbs, Tim, Abby, Ducky and even Palmer all tried to get him on track again, nothing worked. She would be the only one to change anything. But she was gone, out of his reach.
His heart weeps for her and no one could realize just how much she has been imprinted in his heart. He has been permanently marked by her, and he would have it no other way. On the horizon he can see his death, it is inevitable. Just as the two of them were. His soul has already perished; his body would soon follow.
And one night when her absence is just too much, he gives up. He finds himself at her apartment, it's dark and empty. Nothing living inside, just like her body in his arms that night when she became cold and lifeless. The sheets of her bed are just as cold. They have been empty for far too long. And he clings to the memory when these sheets were once warm, warm from the heat of both their bodies.
He doesn't think twice when he drinks a bottle of vile medicine he found in her cupboard that would surely take his last breath from him. He doesn't just want the salvation from life, he needs it. Because without her he is nothing. He cannot hold her and it kills him, he couldn't have the ten more seconds he needed to hold her. He has given up because his heart is too weak without its Israeli bounds.
When you love someone like I loved her, nothing else matters.
Would love to hear your thoughts?