Breath
For Tony, following Truth and Consequences. We all know Tony has two personas, one goofy and one serious. And I personally take the latter to be his real self. With Saleem, tied to a chair, he let his goofy side do the storytelling. But what darker moments might he have obscured in his tale?
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That first night, Tony avoided McGee and Gibbs and Abby, heading home alone and letting it sink into his brain that he lived in a world without Ziva David. It had felt like falling earlier when Gibbs told them, like vertigo, but slamming the door to his apartment behind him and crumpling to the floor felt like death, like a crash landing onto rubble at the bottom of the cliff.
His breath slammed in and out of his lungs, forcing him to live, tearing in and out of him in sobs that had no words.
At some point a thought flitted through his mind that this was even worse than Kate. Kate he got to stand next to, got to bury. Ziva had been dead for two months and half that time had passed before he had even started to look for her. The last three days of their friendship fell away, and he remembered her as his best friend, always trying to protect him, fiercely loyal even when she thought he might be deceiving her.
He had a mental image of her sitting across from him at her desk, catching his gaze and holding up a single paperclip with a pointed stare until he laughed and went back to work. Tony wasn't sure how old the memory was, or what case they'd been working on at the time, but he knew that he would never see her again, and it made him want to hold his breath forever.
Instead he lay gasping on the floor, replaying a thousand memories: phone sex and weapons and the softness of her skin, reckless driving and wild hair and the butchering of English idioms. It was the thought that he would never correct her again, never see her glare and return the look with a smirk, that brought the tears. He had had two months to face her absence, but anger had kept him from noticing it. Now it was completely real, and more permanent than he'd ever imagined.
Later, Saleem standing over him, Tony would manage to skip over that moment in his life, to conceal in alternate layers of truth the one that had threatened to consume him. When he said impertinently that he didn't care about his own team and saw McGee twitch in surprise at the words, Tony regretted it for a moment, but he couldn't lie. He didn't care about anything except ending this, and Saleem too if he could.
But minutes afterward he would thank whatever powers were at work in the world that he had kept the story of that first night to himself, because there she was, and the sound of her air passing her lips brought him joy he hadn't imagined he'd ever feel again.