A/N: This starts off kind of dark, but trust me, the ending makes up for it!
Ziva looked up from the paperwork she was trying to finish, and her hand moved instinctively towards her gun.
She'd been late getting back from lunch that afternoon, returning to a huge stack of file folders on her desk which she'd known was her punishment for tardiness. It was now almost midnight, and she still had a good hour of work ahead of her. Everyone else had left for the night - Tony, of course, had been gloatingly obnoxious about it. And as far as she knew, she was the only one on this floor, which meant she definitely should not have heard a footstep.
She waited, wondering if she'd imagined it. Then she heard it again, definitely footsteps, and the sound of the door to the emergency stairs opening. Ziva unholstered her weapon and stood up, her eyes fixed on the darkened area of the the office space. Moving silently, she approached the doorway, hearing the door slam shut, and the sound of feet moving rapidly on the steps. Ziva opened the door cautiously, then slipped through and listened for a moment. The footsteps were above her, going up, so she started up the stairs, then froze again as the sound changed and the steps began to approach her.
She trained her gun on the point where she expected the intruder to appear. Moments later a shadowy figure appeared, a man in a long dark coat, and a gun in his hand. "NCIS, drop your weapon!" she snapped out. The man above her swung the gun to point directly at her, and Ziva knew she had no time to hesitate. They fired at approximately the same moment, and the sound of the gunshots were shockingly loud in the stairwell.
The man's head snapped back and he collapsed, the dark red stain spreading rapidly around his head. Immediately behind Ziva, someone else fell, and she turned to see another man, gun in his nerveless hand, with an identical bullet hole in his forehead. With horror, Ziva realized that the man she'd shot had not, in fact, been aiming at her, but at the unsuspected assailant behind her. He'd probably saved her life, and she had killed him for his trouble.
Ducky was the first to arrive.
Ziva's first action had been to call Gibbs, who had summoned the rest of the team. Paramedics had moved the two bodies down to the morgue, and Ziva was waiting there for him, still feeling numb. She'd killed many times in the course of her career, but that didn't mean that killing an innocent man was something she could easily shrug off.
As Ducky took off his coat, he glanced over at Ziva. "Perhaps you should wait upstairs," he suggested. Ziva shrugged. She knew she couldn't do anything constructive down here, but she couldn't shake the need to explain what had happened.
She was staring at the man she'd shot – almost heartbreakingly handsome, with chiseled features, and crisp dark hair. The paramedics had removed the man's clothes, and covered him with a sheet to his chin, but as Ducky drew back the sheet, Ziva could see that the dead man had been in amazing physical shape.
"I though he was aiming at me, Ducky," she said quietly. Ducky had been on the point of telling the young woman more firmly to go and wait at her desk, but the tone of her voice told him that this incident had shaken her more deeply than he'd ever seen her before.
"My dear, you had a split second to react. For all you knew, he was trying to kill you. And perhaps he was – you assume the other fellow was his intended target, but you can't know that for sure. If you hadn't reacted as you did... well, it could have been you lying on this table."
Ziva wasn't convinced by this argument. The shot in the second man was too clean, too central. She shook her head, and decided to take Ducky's advice.
She was halfway to the door when the corpse groaned.
Ducky had experienced the unexpected revival of a corpse before. It was something that wasn't completely unheard of. What was unique was the complete disappearance of the bullet hole from his forehead. And certainly, the previous reawakening had not involved the subject sitting up on the table, putting a hand to his head, and saying, "Man, those headshots are a bitch. Right through the frontal lobe. You got any idea how much that stings?"
The man got off the table and stretched, completely unfazed that he was stark naked.
Then he saw Ziva, and favored her with a devastating smile, his vivid blue eyes fixed on hers. Extending a hand, he said, "Hi. Cap'n Jack Harkness. Are you doing anything? I know this great little club, open all night. We can dance until dawn!"