This is my first story. It's kinda sorta a character study on Ziva as a child, and how her father trained her. Review, please, because I have no idea if this is good or not. I kinda liked it, but I guess I'm biased. Thanks! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Look! A flying pig!
It is hot. The air is thick, and walking through it is like wading through maple syrup. Movement is sluggish and requires extreme effort. There is no wind, the air is dormant, and yet still the sand is everywhere. The soil is the color and texture of dried, cracked clay. Fine filaments float lazily about, suspended in the almost tangible air.
Sweat seeps down Ziva's neck, trickling in lukewarm rivulets that itch her skin and make her clothes cling damply. The loose hairs that escape her ponytail plaster to her face. She peels them off and her hand comes away moist with sweat and gritty with sand.
She wipes her hand on her pants. The cloth is already a mess. A little more dirt can't hurt.
The sun is high in the sky, which is colored an odd shade of grey-green, like a week old bruise, and everything is painfully bright, searing the corneas. Her eyes water, but she blinks to expel the salty fluid. She can't afford foggy vision. Not now.
The sweat is pouring down her face, gathering in the crevice between her nose and lips and in the hollows beneath her cheekbones like puddles of rainwater.
Still she runs.
Her feet pound an uneven tattoo on the cracked desert floor, kicking up a mini whirlwind of red dust. The staccato slaps of combat boots on the desert floor mingle with the thud of her pounding heart in an off-tempo percussion line, and Ziva tells herself that she is not scared.
No fear.
No fear.
The words repeat themselves over and over in her head and, combined with the pounding of her feet, it sounds like a bad rap song.
No fear.
No fear.
She runs mindlessly, going into auto-pilot, leaving herself behind in a trail of red dust. She doesn't stop, doesn't think, doesn't feel.
She just runs.
No fear.
No fear.
It's been two days in the desert.
Two days of running.
Two days of salty sweat and gritty dust on her tongue, two days of beating sun and baking heat, two days of mindless movement, and the world is gone, enveloped by a tunnel of dark fuzziness that is slowly overtaking Ziva's vision. She's running down an ever-narrowing path of light, and the air is solid in her lungs. The hunger in her stomach is a feral, rabid beast that is a constant reminder of her father's last statement.
"If you haven't made it home by the third night, we will know you are dead."
But she will not stop now. She can feel the ground under her feet, so she runs. Everything is gone, but there is something beneath her feet.
So she runs.
No fear.
No fear.
She feels dead.
Her pulse roars in her ears, like a stormy sea in her head, and her breath rasps in her dust-lined throat, but she is not alive.
She is dead, and still she runs.
No fear.
No fear.
As long as she moves, she can fight it. As long as she runs, she can keep it at bay, because as long as the thud-thud of boots on the ground drowns out the whisperings of doubt in her mind, Ziva does not feel scared.
She can't be scared, but she thinks she might be.
So she runs.
No fear.
No fear.
Night falls for the third time, and the heat is washed away in a swathe of cool darkness, but Ziva does not notice, because today is the third night and all is lost.
No fear.
No fear.
She's forgotten what it means.
For a moment she lets the creeping walls of fuzzy darkness envelop her, but then she stops.
This is not how her father's daughter would die. Her father's daughter would die trying, die making him proud, die running.
She gets up.
She runs, and the walls recede.
No fear.
No fear.
The fourth day breaks, but she doesn't give it a thought. She is her father's daughter, and she will run. It is hot, but she doesn't feel it.
She doesn't feel anything.
No fear.
No fear.
She stumbles into camp in the heat of midday, with the sun on her back and darkness in her eyes. Numbly, she registers shouts, but they are lost in the roaring of her own heartbeat. Her knees are threatening to give way.
They do, just as arms envelop her, and through the fuzzy darkness Ziva can make out a familiar face.
Her father is smiling. He tells her he is proud, and she knows she should feel pride, happiness even.
She feels nothing, and she thinks this fact should scare her, but she doesn't feel anything.
Certainly not fear.
No fear.
No fear.
They give her food and water and she eats and drinks, but only to keep them from suspicion. She's eaten her fill, and the wild animal is gone, but there is no relief. Just an achy weariness in the pit of her stomach that is not, cannot, be fear.
No fear.
No fear.
Her father tells her she has succeeded.
She has lost her fears, left her weaknesses behind her, but Ziva thinks she's lost something else, and suddenly she wants to cry.
So she bites her lip and tries to smile and wonders why she feels so empty inside.
She's afraid she already knows.
FIN.