She'd always loved showers. When she was little, she'd loved them for their ability to soothe her young muscles, made sore first by ballet, then by the intense training at the hands of her father's best agents. In her late teenage years, after she'd joined IDF, she loved how clean she felt after washing the day's dust and grime from her skin. And later, after she'd joined Kidon, she found herself again turning to the spray, this time to cleanse her soul as the number of classified missions completed piled up in her dossier, as more and more redacted reports had to be placed in her file. She loved how she could almost pretend that she could take her soul, as bruised and battered and broken as it was, and purge it of the blackness that had taken root.
After she'd killed Ari, well. There wasn't enough hot water in the world to purify her of that sin, but oh, God, did she try. She almost drowned herself first trying to forget him, then trying to justify her sin. She was following orders, it was her life or his, but her father had asked her to commit the crime of Cain and slay her brother, and slay him she did. One clean bullet to the head, exactly where she'd aimed it. She never missed. Which made it all the worse when she heard the dull thud of Ari's body hitting the floor. Gibbs had thanked her for saving her life, but surely she must not be congratulated for the murder of her own brother? Every night as she stepped into the deluge, she would turn her face to the spray and remember him, suffer with him as he must surely be suffering, remember the moment she received her orders and the moment she had carried them out, the perfect soldier, the perfect daughter, but the imperfect sister.
Now, this. She hasn't needed a shower in a long time, not like she'd needed them before, but the years have made her an orphan, alone in the world, with nobody to blame but herself and herself alone. She thought she'd done her penance, those months spent in solitude being raped and tortured in the Somali desert, but apparently it hadn't been enough, and she knew that now. She does not deserve to be happy. She loves him, she does oh so much, but she cannot sit by knowing that he will eventually be killed because of her. So she does the only thing she can. She leaves, leaves them all behind, her adoptive father, her little brothers, her wise grandfather. The family that she found in her new life, she leaves them because eventually her past, her karma, is what will get them killed. She does it to protect them, hoping that this first step of sacrifice will start her on her path to absolution.
And now…now, all she has are her showers.