This was meant for Ziva David Appreciation Week, Day One over on Tumblr.
I decided to take the prompt "Favorite Quote" somewhat loosely.
"Just out of curiosity, who taught you to drive?"
"I did."
-Tony DiNozzo & Ziva David, 3.13 "Deception"
"With traffic, I wasn't expecting you for another hour."
"I drove."
"Enough said."
-Eli David & Ziva David, 6.25 "Aliyah"
"Slow drivers."
"Bad drivers."
"What is so hard? You go as fast as possible; when something gets in your way, you turn."
"You're quoting Better Off Dead. I told you to watch that."
-Tony DiNozzo & Ziva David, 7.11 "Ignition"
"Most fathers teach their daughters how to drive. I have you to blame for this?"
"This, she learned from her mother."
-Leon Vance & Eli David, 8.08 "Enemies Foreign"
Not that her future coworkers would ever believe it, but Ziva David did pass the driver's school course. At sixteen, she passed the written and the practical examinations, passed the eye test, passed the medical check.
In fact, she passed them all twice, because one month after receiving her license, she ran a traffic signal and the officer who noticed and pulled her over ultimately sent her backto driver's school.
Ziva's mother scolded her on the way home from the first day of Ziva's second set of lessons. Then Rifka swerved between two cars, an ambulance, and a dozen pedestrians in a sharp leftwards veer that nearly pressed Ziva's cheek against the window.
"You will figure it out," she said eventually, sighing, looking away from the road to examine Ziva's face and taking a hand off the wheel to cup her cheek. "You are a smart young woman." Her thumb stroked across Ziva's cheekbone; the car bumped and Ziva found herself sitting a few inches higher than usual. "But if you would just be more patient--"
"Ima!" Ziva lunged for the wheel and jerked it to the left, until the right-side wheels jolted down off the sidewalk.
Her mother swatted her hands away. "Your father used to do that. It is very annoying. I have not killed anyone yet, so let me drive."
"And they are making me take all the tests again?!"
"Don't be disrespectful, Zivaleh," Rifka sighed. She almost skidded through a traffic signal, slamming on the brakes halfway through the intersection so that the cars and motorcycles trying to cross the street had to dodge around her. "Do you want the 'New Driver' sign on the car until the day you are dead, announcing to the world that you are a bad driver? Or do you want to take the course and the tests again and this time learn to be cautious, so you will receive no more tickets and one day have fewer restrictions? Hm?"
Ziva sat back in her seat and crossed her arms. "My driving is already fine. Abba says I am a natural."
Her mother's chuckle complimented the sound of squealing tires. "Well," she said cheerfully, "we all know that your father is often wrong."
Ari recommended taking the bus.
"Your mother's driving is horrifying. As a medical student, I cannot recommend it for anyone's health."
Ziva, at fifteen, had laughed. Ziva, at sixteen, protested.
"Her driving is just fine! And so is mine!"
"Oh, Ziva," he groaned. "You know the bogeyman comes to get children who lie, yes?"
She kicked the back of his knee and tried not to smile when he playacted at being wounded.
"At least promise me you will attempt to follow the speed limits better than your mother does."
"Oh, like you can talk!" Ari was something of a speed demon. Just weeks ago, he had gleefully told her about driving on the Autobahn in Germany; how his motorcycle had hit 280 kilometers per hour, how exhilarating it had been.
"Sounds like fun," she had grinned at him. "I would like to drive on that road."
"You drive like you are already on that road!" he had laughed, flicking the ash on his cigarette to the side.
But now, his face is serious. "You need to practice having control. Control and patience, Ziva."
She rolled her eyes.
"You want to follow our father into Mossad, Ziva? You want to go on missions, be important?" Ziva gave him an impassive glance. He knew she did. She was training for it, and when he was home, he helped her. "Yes? Then trust me. More than speed, you need control. You need patience. Recklessness is enjoyable, but it is not your friend."
She remembered Ari's words frequently over the next few years. Yet-there was nothing so satisfying as feeling the car respond to her touch, feeling her spine press into the seat back as she accelerated, turning up the music so loud she could feel the beat in her bones.
She never got into an accident, and at eighteen, Mossad welcomed her.
Of course they did.
She was a legacy.
Also when Ziva was eighteen, she and Tali left early for a holiday weekend in Haifa. Once, they would have spent this weekend together as a family. This year, though, their mother was going out of town to visit an old friend in Amman, Ari was busy packing for a trip back to Scotland, and their father was...somewhere. Somewhere classified. And he and their mother were out of touch, anyway.
Ari helped Tali carry her bags to the car at daybreak, and reminded her to put her seatbelt on. When he reached over and tugged at the strap to check that the clasp had a good connection-as if they were at an amusement park and he were the teenaged attendant-Tali rolled her eyes at him. At fourteen, she was very sensitive to being babied.
"Humor me, little sister. Ziva is driving."
"I will run over your foot," Ziva called from the driver's seat.
"Coming from you, that is a real threat."
Hurrying to the car in her bathrobe, Rifka lightly smacked his side , then leaned in to give Tali a kiss through the open window. "Ignore him. Be safe. Call me when you get there. Do not forget!"
Ziva did not look back as she pressed the pedal to the floor and zoomed down the road, but in later years, she would wish she had. She never saw her mother and siblings all together again.
Ari was wrong about the control thing, it turned out. She drove fast and she drove wild through dozens of countries, and she received much praise from Mossad for the way she conducted herself on missions. Differentiating successfully between the moments for silence and subtlety, the moments for forcing the fear of God into a mark's eyes, and all the moments in between turned out to be a difficult skill to teach fully grown adults. Ziva was young, and it was a skill she possessed naturally.
Plus, she found it fortunate that her spy skills allowed her to evade traffic tickets in most places.
None of her family members had died in car accidents, so Ziva knew there was no particular reason for their presence in her thoughts when she drove.
But sometimes, even as she maneuvered her mini through D.C. gridlock in a very different country and a very different atmosphere, the front seat felt very empty.
"Jesus Christ," a white-knuckled Dinozzo said, early on. "Is something chasing you?
She just accelerated a little more, because she liked watching him turn green. But when she was driving home late that night, his words came back to her. Was something chasing her? Of course not. She liked the thrill of it, was all.
But if she were strictly honest with herself-and, for just a second, speeding through Silver Springs, she let herself be-sometimes it did feel like she was always running, speeding away from something. Putting the pedal to the metal, as DiNozzo might say, because stopping could never be an option.
She swung into a parking space and pushed the thought from her mind.
As it so happens, the one time she was flung around like a rag doll in a car crash, she had not even been driving.
Nor, for that matter, had she been exhibiting any control. She had been holding her partner's hand, with tears in her eyes and childhood tragedies stuck in her throat.
Figured.
Twenty years later
"I thought Dad was going to be driving with me today," the girl called into the open window as she leaned against the hood of the running car and plucked pine straw from underneath the windshield wipers.
The car behind theirs honked. Until the girl climbed into the driver's seat and took the car out of park, the line of cars slowly piling up behind them was at a standstill.
Ziva, freshly buckled into the passenger seat, motioned her daughter into the car.
"Your Uncle Tim had a dental emergency and Dad is helping him out. Come on, now."
"I like driving with Dad."
"And I like being on time to pick your brother up from soccer," Ziva replied. The car behind them honked again, and Ziva sighed. "Come on, my love. I promise I will try to do it just the way your father does."
The girl reluctantly climbed into the front seat. "You'll remind me every single time there's a stoplight or a stop sign?"
"Yes."
"And you'll say 'turn' before the turn actually comes up?"
"I promise."
"And you won't tell me to pass all the slow cars?"
"That was just one time," Ziva protested. "And we were very late."
"It was only my second time driving!"
Ziva held up her hands. "Okay, okay. I will help you to drive like an old grandmother. Now, fasten your seatbelt and put the car in drive."
Her daughter did so, and gingerly stepped on the gas, smiling just a little. "Just not like my grandmother, right?"
Painfully aware that-in this world, at least-her children would be able to meet very, very few of their blood relatives, Ziva and Tony had made a conscious effort over the years to share stories about their families with their own family. It had been hard at first. As deeply as the two of them had come to know about each other over the years, it was still difficult to vocalize things that continued to hurt. But they found that, like anything else, it was an acquired skill. By the time their children were old enough to really notice, it seemed normal. And it had its benefits: It had been thirty-some years since Ziva had been able to drive with her own mother, but her daughter knew all about Rifka's terrible driving, and Ari's speed demon tendencies, and how much Tali had loved that trip to Haifa, and so much more. She thought they would be pleased to be remembered this way.
"Only I am allowed to drive like your grandmother," Ziva affirmed, chuckling. "Just ease around this circle, and straighten out right here-yes, just like that."
The very tip of her daughter's tongue was visible between her lips as she furrowed her brow and concentrated. It took a great deal of Ziva's willpower not to reach over and ruffle the girl's hair.
On the next roundabout, the car bumped over the edge of a curb, and her daughter breathed in sharply and stiffened.
"Just keep going," Ziva said. "You will come off it in a minute-" they bumped down, "-there you go. No big deal. We are almost home."
Except for Ziva's instructions, not another word was said until they were sitting in their own driveway, with the keys out of the ignition. It worried Ziva. Her daughter's perfectionist streak revealed itself in unexpected ways sometimes. She controlled herself too tightly. When she unwound, there were often tears. Ziva was determined to sit in this parked car until some such unwinding occurred, although a glance at her phone confirmed that she would be late to pick up her son. She texted Tony. McGee's paperwork could wait while he picked up their child.
Several minutes (and two slightly irritated texts from her husband) later, she heard a little sigh from the driver's seat. "I'm really bad at this, Mama," the girl said in a small voice. Ziva's heart ripped a tiny bit.
"You are very new at this," she corrected, reaching across the console to stroke her hair, after all. "There are those who would argue that I am very bad at this, but you? You are just new. And you will figure it out." She cupped her daughter's cheek. "You are a smart young woman."
She bit her lip. "I'm not so sure about that."
"I am very sure. All you need is time and practice."
A breeze sent fall leaves scuttling across the driveway in front of the car, and mother and daughter watched them dance in the fading light.
"Just time and practice," Ziva repeated after a moment.
Another silence, but her daughter looked marginally comforted.
Then, she smiled. "And ice cream?"
Ziva was amused. And heartened by the quick turnaround of her daughter's mood. Parenting a teenager was a confusing business sometimes. "Ice cream! Is that part of being a good driver these days?"
"Dad would take me for ice cream," she wheedled.
"Your father is a sucker," Ziva sighed. "But okay. We will go get ice cream while he picks up your brother. But tomorrow we are continuing this conversation. And practicing some more."
She had stopped listening after okay. "Yay!" She smacked a kiss onto Ziva's cheek. "Oh, but mom?"
"Mhm?"
"You drive."