Disclaimer: NCIS doesn't know how to respect these characters anyway.
Gratitude: I would never have written this story without the love, encouragement, and support of my dear friend & writing partner, Allison (mon-petit-pois).

Alright folks, here we go again…

Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
Ruth 1:16

Prelude

When they ran the days away through the fields of orange trees and giggled in their shared bed at night until fatigue claimed them to the galaxy of dreams, their mother wove tales of their origin, swearing with no guile or exaggeration to the line of woman from whom they descended—and to their ability for intuition. Divinity. Visions.

The elder daughter, formed of the logical, modern world and her father's rough, guiding hand, scoffed at the notion of foresight, at the preposterous thought of knowing things yet to pass. The younger daughter was still taken by fairy tales.

Their mother, raised on the myths of the Ancient Jews, clung steadfastly to one vision in particular, divined before her marriage, that prophesied her bearing two girls, a hand-and-one apart; daughters for a future husband who would desire sons. The vision, she claimed, that showed the two becoming responsible for each other when everything else fell away.

They would be achayot. Sisters.

Part I

The doctors said the nightmares would go away.

But night after middle-of-the-night, she startled out of the vivid, phantom fears of Somalia and into the blackness of their bedroom, miles and months away from the epicenter of pain; she shivered from the cold perspiration on her skin, her heart thumping from subconscious exertion, slimy bile climbing the walls of her throat. It never did matter how hard she fought them off…

The doctors also said she would be able to carry a baby, afterwards. Lies were easy.

Ziva David was accustomed to disappointment. She was through asking God why she was given this lot. Why she was chosen to be a daughter who buried her mother and disobeyed her father; a sister who couldn't save her half-brother and left her youngest sibling behind; an agent who got captured. A woman who could not escape thieving hands and groping tongues.

And so it was. Nightmare. Startle. Cold flesh. Skittering pulse—

His arms reaching for her.

H-how did you find me?

The sheets she bought new just a week earlier bunched as the strong arm around her waist drew her rigid body close against him; he was warmth and a nose nuzzling her neck, lips pressing behind her ear. She knew him, his touch and scent, and did not mistake him. Tony DiNozzo was as predictable as the nighttime terrors themselves.

"It's okay, babe," he slurred, like always. "Just a dream."

Normally, that would be enough to soothe her—perhaps not enough to deliver her to sleep again, but his steady heartbeat and steady snores and steady presence grounded her, gave her the illusion of steadiness for herself. She could make it to morning on the intervals of his exhales, waves over her collarbone and down under her sleep shirt, the heat of his life a bonfire from which she derived hope. That she was here. That she came back. Alive.

On that night, though, she recognized that neither memory nor distortion had woken her; even if the effects were the same, the usual cure was useless.

Everything was different now.

Ziva lifted his arm off her waist like a harness on an amusement park ride. From this, he did not need to keep her safe.

"I have to go," she whispered in response to his sleepy whine of confusion.

"Hm? Case?"

Her eyes, adjusted to the dark, flicked to the pair of cell phones on the nightstand. It had been over a year since anything as mundane as a call to a gruesome one a.m. crime scene had disrupted her sleeping patterns. A twinge in her chest told her maybe she longed for the past; its immediate recession, that maybe it was misplaced. Beyond their bedroom, there were textbooks splayed out beside her laptop on the dining room table and one gun in the locked safe on the mantle.

"I have to go," she repeated, her legs adopting gooseflesh in the cool air out from beneath the covers. Away from him. "You will stay."

The mattress dipped and she sensed him propping up on an elbow without looking behind her for confirmation. "Where you going?"

"She needs me," Ziva stated quietly, offering no explanation for how that was so evident to her at the unreasonable hour and without any discernible—logical—summoning to the effect.

But Tony had seen both sides. He understood, perhaps even better than she herself, for it wasn't a guess he voiced along the curl of her back.

"Your sister."

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Across the bedroom, Ziva padded softly on feet that still reverted to tip-toeing around her father's anger and sidestepping ugly truths as often as roadside bombs: the stealth of her first lifetime. She dressed and tied her hair back and washed her face in the sink of the en suite—all amidst grey shadows. It was not just her feet that slipped unthinkingly into the soles of old habits.

Her efforts were in vain.

She was stuffing an overnight bag when Tony tossed over with a sigh and switched on the bedside lamp, sunset glow washing away the dark. He cringed against the light, a big paw scrubbing at closed eyelids.

"Why don't you just stay over there? It'd be easier than this back and forth every—"

"You know," Ziva countered, tugging at the bag's zipper, a sliver of her thumb catching in the metal teeth. Ow. "She wants to do this herself."

Flipping the covers off, he leaned out of bed and grumbled, "You David woman…so stubborn."

A smirk coiled the edges of her mouth, but it was only for his benefit; as soon as he'd stumbled into the en suite to hit the head, a frown settled. The accusation echoed a spring evening in Tel Aviv one year earlier; it echoed her sister's confused tones…

"I do not understand why you are being so stubborn." Tali David sat by an opened window, through which the last vestiges of the day's light dripped over the watery horizon. "Perhaps you are grieving Michael, not thinking clearly—"

"No. It is not that." Ziva felt honey eyes track her around the cramped bedroom. She fought ratcheting unease with constant movement, but a whirlpool stirred inside of her still, as it had since leaving the tarmac that morning. Since she sent them away. There was little to pack from her modest Tel Aviv apartment on the shoreline, a false promise over the past four years—that she would return to it, to the life she once led around its minimalist walls.

"One short?" she'd heard Tony bellow from within the belly of the roaring Guppy.

Gibbs, as the hatch lifted: "What she wanted, DiNozzo."

Stubborn. She wanted to scoff. To scream and growl, teeth bared to the heavens. Yes, she was being stubborn. He'd made her that way. Stubborn and unbreakable, his warrior daughter.

To her sister, she confessed nothing. "There are things I cannot tell you, Tali."

"You and Abba always say that when it involves Mossad."

Pausing in her bustle, Ziva looked to Tali—raven locks spouting from a widow's peak they shared; plump, vivacious features, a lithe body of curves never once used for deception; a natural performer stepping into professional waters. Ziva's mind flooded with the photographs she received par avion in D.C.: Tali as Isolde, Tali as Princess Turandot, Tali as Violetta. Photos all lost in the explosion that destroyed another of her apartments, one in a series of events that catapulted her onto this inevitable path.

But Tali was free. Unburdened.

Ziva did not want that changed.

"Then I do not have to explain why it must be this way," she furthered, though reason failed to abate the sense of déjà vu. She was leaving her little sister behind, again—as she'd done when shame over Ari first sent her fleeing to NCIS. At the time, Tali had displayed her displeasure with a fit of rage worthy of any grand stage.

"America is not your home!" Words like lighting, her true pain had thundered unspoken in their wake: 'You are my home. Do not leave me.'

Now Ziva's supposed Aliyah, too, was double-edged, and brief. "I do not expect you to understand. I ask only that you can…forgive me one more time?"

Unfolding thin arms from across her body, Tali's frown melted to gaping bewilderment. "Forgive you for what, Zivvie? Doing your duty? It is Abba who is sending you away—and so soon after you have been returned to me." A few years of maturity had gifted her grace, it seemed.

Ziva hesitated; how could she explain loyalty? displacement? betrayal? "For not visiting you more often."

Was it a lie if it answered another question truthfully?

A dove, Tali cooed and fluttered over the carpet, pulling Ziva to sit with her on the hard mattress. Their shoulders bumped, as did their hips, and it might have been a summer's night in their old house as they climbed into bed for secret whispers and mingled dreams. Her head rested on Ziva's shoulder.

"When you return from this oh-so-important mission, we will go to the beach for days, yes? Just you and me."

The breeze through the window tasted of the Mediterranean, of salt and sand, of olive oil and the pomegranate perfume their mother wore for the duration of their childhood, but there were beaches, and opera houses, and apartments in America, as well.

Her pack was…packed, sitting like a slumped homeless man at her feet. There was nothing left to do but wait till morning with her sister. She placed a hand over Tali's slender fingers while the whirlpool swirled, raged; into the briny silence, she offered up an answer to another hidden question.

"Yes, when I come back to you, my dearest achot…things will be different."

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

"Ziv?"

For the second time that night, she startled, not having expected him to follow her down from their bedroom to the foyer of their townhouse. She stomped her left foot against the tile, propelling her heel snuggly into the running shoe.

"I really must get to her…"

Tony swiped up the overnight bag from the floor and hooked it onto her elbow. "I won't wait up."

Ziva regarded him standing tall before her, bare-chested and unexpectedly imposing; the same body that proved salvation after the ghosts of Somalia chased her out of nightmares on a nightly basis; the same arms reaching for her, arms from which she'd flinched…and then fell into, allowing them to pull her out of a cell of desert torture. A cell of consequence—for the choice she made while in the circle of her sister's arms on a spring evening in Tel Aviv. Or rather, the choice she did not make.

Somehow, in all the fallout, she never lost Tony.

Mossy green orbs cast their line, hooking her in, towing, towing… "Come back home, 'kay?"

She was needed elsewhere, but granted herself a touch, an open palm gliding up his furry chest. Dohv, she called him with affection. Bear. Her bear. In her windbreaker, she shivered at the fire of his skin, still heated from slumber.

His eyelids drooped, dozing on his feet.

One fingertip tapped the notch at the base of his throat, a substitute kiss. "Go back to sleep, my love."

A nod. Shuffling feet. "Say hi to Tali for me."

"I will."

"And your squishy new niece, too," he mumbled over his shoulder, a fond smile rising and fading.

Sharing in his gentle gesture, Ziva gripped the knob on the front door, twisting. "I will," she said again, and took flight into the crisp night air.

They needed her.