A/N: So here I am, writing something and publishing it over a year after the fact but I've recently been rewatching and my little shipper heart has been hurting so I thought I'd turn it into something productive. I don't know if there's anyone left around in this part of the fandom to read this, but if there are, hello, and welcome to my little something that I began just under a year and a half ago and just yesterday picked up and finished it off. I hope you enjoy.

If you forget the way to go

And lose where you came from

If no one is standing beside you

Be still and know I am

~'Be Still' The Fray

Tali is sixteen years old when she finally works up the courage to ask her father about what happened.

She's known for quite a while that something was just different about her. She didn't quite match up with all of the other children in her year at school, or indeed anywhere. Apart from having the dead mother, the American father, the Jewish upbringing, and the accent that she can never quite work out where it came from. No, she knows that all of that is partly what makes her different.

There is not much she knows about her own childhood before she started school. She knows that her mother died when she was almost two in a house fire. She knows that she lived in Israel for a while, and then in Paris before finally coming here, to England. She knows her father used to be a federal agent in the US, and her mother was Israeli and worked with her father. She knows that she has a family in America that isn't her blood family but she loves them all the same. Except that's it, that's all she knows, and, up until now, she's been too afraid to ask her father for anything more.

He gets a strange look in his eye when she asks about her mother. He rarely ever gives her information that is more than a fact. Mostly he just brushes off the question and asks her about her schoolwork, or her dancing, or her martial arts, or if she has considered different universities yet. Sometimes he won't even do that but will look past her and look at her but see something or someone else entirely.

Except now she can't tolerate that anymore. She can't handle not knowing because she has as much a right to know as her father does. More, in fact, as this is her own mother, her own childhood that she wants to know.

She waits for a day of the week that she knows her father will be happy. A Thursday is his favourite. He has a half day teaching and so after her school finishes they'll go for dinner and catch up on what's happened throughout the week. Then they'll come back and watch a movie while she'll do any homework she has and her father makes comments on literally every single scene.

Today, though, once they've come back from dinner and her father is making the popcorn for the movie, Tali works up the courage to ask her father what happened.

"Aba?" She asks him when he comes through from the kitchen. "What happened when I was younger? Like when ima died? What actually happened? Because you never tell me anything and I think it's about time I know because I can handle it I swear and I promise nothing will ever make me love you less if that's what you're worried about." It comes out in a sort of rush, and not what she was going for at all.

Her father sets down the popcorn and then eases himself into his chair. He's so silent for so long that Tali wonders if he'll answer at all. Eventually, he looks at her and says, "What would you like to know?"

She's so delighted she almost falls off the sofa. "All of it."

Her father laughs, but it's not a funny laugh, more disbelief. "There's a lot to tell."

Right. Right. She knows that. She knows this is a difficult topic for her father so she should probably be specific. "What made you leave Israel? After Ima died, why did we leave? I mean if you had a job and a life and stuff." This is so less eloquent than Tali made it out to be in her head.

Her father swallows. "Tali, the truth is, I never lived in Israel."

She's confused. Oh so confused. "What? No. Of course we did."

"No, you did. You and your ima. Not me." He looks at her and she sees within his eyes a kind of sorrow she thought only existed in movies.

"No," she says, shaking her head in disbelief. "Where were you? Why weren't you there with us? Did you have to leave? I don't understand."

"Tali, I didn't live with you both in Israel because I didn't know you existed. I found out about you the day after I found out your ima was killed. One of her friends brought you to me. That was when I found out about you."

It hits her like a sucker punch to the stomach. She doesn't know what to think, what to say. Tears begin to gather at the corner of her eyelids. She's never been one for crying easily and so she doesn't reach up to wipe them away because her father would see.

"Okay…" she breathes. "Ima didn't tell you about me?"

Her father shakes his head. "No, she didn't. I wish she had, Tali, believe me. If I'd have known that Ziva was pregnant I would have been there, believe me. I hate that I didn't know you until you were almost two, you gotta believe that."

"Why didn't she tell you?" She asks, feeling smaller than she ever has done.

"I don't know. Your ima was such an independent person, and she'd already asked me to leave her. I think that she didn't want me to come back after she'd already made me leave. She loved you, Tali, she loved you so much and I honestly believe she was going to introduce us when she thought the time was right. The fact that you knew my picture when I first met you proves that."

Aba. She knows the picture. It sits on her bedside table and she says goodnight to her mother every night while looking at it.

"That's why I call you Aba. Because I've never known anything different."

Tali looks at her father and she swears that there are tears in her eyes. He clears his throat. "You know, when I met you, you didn't speak any English at all. I had a hell of a job trying to ask you things and trying to tell you off when you did something bad." He laughs a little sadly. "I didn't mind though. You were the only real tie to Ziva I had, and when you spoke Hebrew you sounded so much like her. The day you came home from nursery and started babbling in English I went out to the garden, to your ima's stone, and cried."

She slowly moves next to her father. He lifts up his arm and she settles into his chest like she has done for as long as she can remember. She feels an urge to apologise but she doesn't know what for. For the first time, she thinks about what it must feel like, being her father. What she has just learned has hit her so hard and she really doesn't know how things will be able to go back to normal after this. So is that what it has been like for her father all of these years? Looking at her and re-living all of those hellish moments? She knows her father loves her, and yet she wonders if a small part of him resents her for putting him through this pain.

So she apologises anyway. "I'm sorry, aba."

He immediately spins away and looks at her with an intensity that she's only seen a handful of times. "No, Tali, you have nothing to apologise for. You hear me?" Within his eyes, she sees a reflection of herself. "I love you so much, and the only thing I would change about the past sixteen years is that I'd drag your ima on the plane home with me, instead of leaving her in Israel. Alright? That is the only thing I would change. I would rather have her here, believe me, but if I had to live these years all over again then I'd do it without a second thought. My life is infinitely times better with you in it."

Tali hugs into her father again. He hugs her back and she relishes how familiar and comfortable her aba's embrace is. How for fourteen years the two of them have conquered the world together. How much she truly loves him.

But he knows her too well. He always has been able to decipher her, so he says, "There's more you want to know? Isn't there?"

And oh my yes there are so many things she wants to know. She wants to know more of the two missing years where it was just her and her mother. She wants to know of the day her aba found out about her. She wants to know how he did it, taking a strange child and travel the world with her before settling down in an entirely new country. She wants to know more about her ima, more about the kind of woman she was, how she could keep a baby away from her aba for two whole years. She wants to know how they fell in love. She wants to know how they walked away. She wants to know how her aba did it alone and uncomplaining for all this time.

But there aren't the right words to express that, so instead she says, "Everything."

He gets up and turns off the TV where it was waiting patiently for a movie they hadn't yet selected. It's always his choice. He goes through to the kitchen and makes them both hot chocolate whilst Tali waits anxiously perched on the arm of his chair, wondering how this will affect him. Perhaps she's being selfish, asking him to tell her things when it will only cause him pain. She doesn't want to cause him pain. She only wants to know.

"Aba," she begins, when he comes back through with two steaming mugs. They were gifts to her when she was younger, and both have TD hand painted on them in blue, with an Israeli flag on one side of the letters, and an American flag on the other. For as long as she can remember having these mugs, her father has taken one and she has taken the other.

"Yeah?"

She's forgotten, caught by the mugs and all that they suddenly seem to hold, what she was going to say. She shakes her head to clear the thoughts. "We don't have to talk."

"You change your mind about knowing?"

"No," she says insistently, "of course not. I just… don't want to make you talk about things that you maybe don't want to talk about."

He sets the mugs down on the coffee table and gathers her face between his hands. Looking up at him, she sees tears in his eyes and it causes something inside her to snap because he looks so young and vulnerable in this very moment. Her aba is big and strong and he protects her from the monsters. She has never, even on the anniversary of the death of her ima, even on her birthday late at night when he gets tears in his eyes and talks to her when he thinks Tali can't see him, even at the beginning of October when he gets melancholy for a few days, she has never seen him this sad before.

"Oh, Tali," he murmurs and yet she knows that he isn't talking to her. "You're so like her."

His hands drop away from her face and he eases himself back into the chair. She cuddles into him and a memory pops into her head of her being two years old and terrified from a nightmare. She had been crying and screaming and he had cuddled her into him and kissed her on top of her head and said things that she couldn't understand but his voice had soothed her and she hadn't been frightened anymore.

"You need to know," he says. "No matter how much it hurts me to talk about it, you need to know, Tali, because this is your life. It's yours and I can't hide it from you, can't protect you from it no matter how much I want to."

Only now does she see the sacrifice he's made all these years.

"Do the family in America know too?" She asks. "About ima and you and me?"

He laughs. "Do they know about it? They were there for it. All of it."

And she realises their sacrifice too. Uncle McGee and Auntie Abbie and Grandpa Gibbs and Auntie Ellie and Uncle Jimmy. All of them made a sacrifice for her, to protect her from the knowledge that might have hurt her, made her feel less than who she was. She waits for hate to come, rage and indignation at being left out of a family secret of her own beginnings. She waits in vain and no matter how deep she searches within herself, she can't find it. She doesn't hate them for it, she loves them.

She waits for hatred for her ima, for keeping her aba away from her for two years. She finds nothing except a sadness. Tali wonders how she could do it, but she suspects her aba will tell her soon enough.

"Tell me about her," she requests. Tell me about how you two got together. Tell me about the complex and winding path that was your relationship. Tell me about a woman you loved so much that you found it the most painful thing you ever did to let her go. Tell me everything about it, so I can feel that she's here. Tell me, so I don't feel like I have a missing piece of my soul anymore.

"She was Ziva David." He laughs again even if it is a little sad. His eyes seem happier. "She was… my best friend."

Tali smiles and nestles further into her father, letting his voice lull her into a world of assassins and terrorists and glances across desks that were so full of everything. She imagines it and lets herself be filled by it, by a world that has shaped her and made her who she is today, even though she's never known it.

She lets her ima be brought back to her through these stories, and she lets it be enough.