So after a fairly bad bout of insomnia and a very difficult decision between writing the philosophy essay that needs to be written or writing some fanfiction, I went with the fanfiction, and finally wrote up something on a subject that has been bothering me for a while now (honestly, a couple of years.) and so here is my take on the crucial problem that really needed addressing and never was.
My big problem was that Tony's late night visits to Ziva's place were never really explained, and I, wanting to know everything, felt a great desire to know what was going on. And since nobody would tell me, I decided to write what I thought happened and how these little late night visits started.
This did end up being a lot longer than I expected, I got a tad carried away, and I do not know whether certain parts will make any sense to anybody else, but they do to me and I like them how they are, so I will be stubborn and, although taking any criticisms on board, I will not change it. For anybody.
Enjoy. Only if you want to of course. I would not want anybody to feel pressured into enjoying themselves. Oh, look at me, my notes are getting to be longer than the story itself. I feel many mental comparisons to Ducky cross my mind as I type.
Everything Starts Somewhere, Although Many Physicists Disagree.
She looked at her watch and frowned as the tapping came from her front door, her sleepy mind struggling to figure the strange sound. When the second round of knocks came her mind had managed to disentangle them as someone wanting desperately to be let into her apartment. She looked at her watch. 2300. She never had people visiting her, let alone late at night. They knocked again and she sighed, placing her book down and walking to the door. She eyed her SIG Sauer on the table beside the door and checked who it was out of habit knowing fully well that anyone she knew who would want to kill her so much would have a much better plan of entry than beating her door down. She jumped back as the eye she would recognise anywhere looked back through the peephole from the other side. "Tony, what are you doing here?" She stared at him as she opened the door. He held a six-pack of beers in one hand and a bottle of merlot in the other, and already smelt of alcohol. "Come in." She opened the door wider, regretting her choice of scruffy old t-shirt, riddled with holes, and jogging bottoms. She had dressed for comfort. He walked in, staying silent, and looked around her apartment.
"Nice place you've got here." He nodded.
"How do you know where I live, Tony?" He didn't look so great. Pale. Tired. Verging on drunk.
"I, er, I looked in your file." He shrugged. "But I brought alcohol." He held up the bottles in his hands and grinned. She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips before closing the door to her home.
"Which of course makes the invasion of my privacy perfectly alright." She laughed dryly. "You did not drive, did you?"
"I got a cab."
"What is wrong?"
"Why must something be wrong?" He smiled unconvincingly.
"Because you looked up my home address, caught a cab, you smell like a low class bar and you came armed to the nose with alcohol."
"Teeth."
"You are having problems with your teeth?" She tilted her head.
"No. Armed to the teeth."
"Oh." She shook her head and tried to commit the idiom to memory. "So what is wrong?"
He started to speak and stopped himself, uncertain of where to start. He walked over to Ziva's couch and sat down, uninvited. She smiled and shook her head, taking a seat in the armchair opposite him. "Pick your poison." He held the bottles up again.
"I shall take a beer." She pointed. He released two bottles and passed one to her, twisting the cap of the other and taking a swig.
"I don't think I'm doing a good job." He stated. She laughed and shook her head. "What? It's not funny."
"Tony. What makes you think you are not doing a good job?"
"It has been a week and you all hate me." He glared at her.
"If I hated you you would not be inside my apartment right now." She smiled softly. "I do not think you are doing so bad."
"Ziva, I can't be a team leader. Not after Gibbs."
"Yes. He is a hard act to follow." She studied his face carefully.
"You'd have to get that one right." He looked away from her and up to the candles along the mantelpiece. "Were you expecting someone? Oh, God, you're expecting someone, I'm sorry, I'll go." He began to stand up.
"Tony, stay." She looked up at him. "I was not expecting anybody."
"Oh." He relaxed back in the seat. "It's been a tough few weeks."
"I do not think it will get better any time soon." She sighed and curled her feet up to sit on them.
"Gee, remind me not to come to you for a pep talk."
"It is better to face the truth than hide from it."
"That how you handle with things?"
"Define things." She picked non-existent fibres off the arm of the chair, suddenly wishing for a change of subject.
"Things of the heart. Things of the soul."
"Sometimes." She said quietly, keeping her face hidden by her hair and glancing up at him through her eyelashes. She closed her eyes and bit her lip when she saw him staring back.
"Are you ok?"
"Yes. It has just been a long day, that is all." She smiled weakly, her expression faltering slightly. "I was about to go to bed."
"Oh, I'll be heading off then." He stood up and pointed to the beer and wine. "You can keep those, a thank you for listening."
"Tony, I have a spare room if you want to stay. It is late, you have been drinking. I would say that you are possibly not in a sane state of mind, but I do not think you ever are." She smiled, trying to lighten the mood and failing.
"You sure?" He frowned as she blew the candles out. "I don't want to intrude or anything."
"Tony, you are you. It is your talent – intruding into other people's lives." She smirked. "I would not have offered if I was not sure."
"Thank you." He nodded. She led the way towards the two bedroom doors and veered to the one on the left.
"I apologise for the bedspread. It was the first one I owned when I moved out of my parents house and I guess I had a moment of weakness when I brought it over from Israel."
"Why are you apologising about a bedspread?"
"It is floral." She opened the door and pointed to the bed.
"How very un-Ziva." He laughed and she shook her head. "Thank you."
"You are welcome. The bathroom is on the right if you need it." She left him to stare at the empty room.
"Thanks for letting me stay." Tony smiled, handing her a mug of coffee.
"You are welcome." She shrugged.
"You want to go out for breakfast? My treat, a thank you."
"Tony, it is fine."
"No. I insist." He flashed his prize-winning grin.
She chuckled quietly and shook her head slowly. She had withstood interrogation; she had spent years being trained not to cave, under any circumstances, and yet his smile made her forget all of her training. Just a glimpse of that damn smile and she would do anything for him. Her father had often told her that she was a powerful weapon, not to fall into the wrong hands. Hands belonging to a man who could make her do anything with just a smile were definitely the wrong hands. Or were they? She knew she could not trust her father, and she had very little idea behind his motives, which would surely make her father the wrong hands for her to be in. And Tony was working for the good of the world. She could see no bad in Anthony DiNozzo, no evil. He just didn't have the heart for it – or even had too much heart for him to do evil. She was brought out of her mental labyrinth by Tony tapping her lightly on the back of the head, no-where near as hard as he would have done were it McGee he were hitting, or if it were Gibbs hitting her. Breakfast. He had asked her about breakfast. She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes, one of her arms folding to her opposite hip and the other's elbow resting on that hand. Her finger was resting lightly on her bottom lip as she thought. It was just breakfast. It could not hurt. He was her friend, was he not? There was no harm in breakfast between friends. "Only so long as I can chose where."
"Deal." A lopsided, elfish grin broke out across his face.
"Go home, officer David. It's late, that paperwork can wait for tomorrow." Tony looked up into the dark office space, only their two desks illuminated by their individual lamps.
"And you? You will stay here and work on paperwork throughout the night before going and sleeping in Abby's lab?" She angled her face towards him.
"More than likely." He went back to reading the file that was in front of him.
"It is not healthy."
"It's the way Gibbs used to work."
"And you are not Gibbs." She had walked silently to stand before him. "You need to get some sleep."
"I'm fine." He cracked his knuckles and attempted to stifle a yawn.
"When was the last time you ate?" She asked, only receiving a shrug in reply and presuming that meant the lunch she had brought in for him yesterday. "I will cook you dinner. It will do you good to get out of here. The paperwork can wait for tomorrow."
"Yours, maybe. Mine was due on the directors desk lunchtime today." He leant back in his chair and yawned again, this time not attempting to hide it.
"Then I shall help you whilst I cook. Let me be a good friend, Tony." She had moved silently again to perch on the edge of his desk and placed her hand on his cheek, running her thumb along the dark shadows under his eyes. He swallowed. With anybody else he would have said it was a romantic gesture, one that even he wouldn't go so far as to make with one of his skirts, but with Ziva it was just another sign of friendship. To her it was just a platonic motion. How could it be anything more? And yet he wanted it to mean more to her. He wanted her soft hand resting on his cheek to mean a lot more than just that she was his friend and she was there for him.
"Well, who can argue with that?" He looked up at her, smiling at the warmth of her hand as it gently caressed his skin. She walked to her desk to pack her things away for the night and he immediately felt colder at the loss of contact. Regretting his one weakness – Ziva David – he folded the file into his bag and stood up, flicking Gibbs' – his – desk lamp off before turning to her and smiling. The Israeli wrapped her arm around the one he had extended for precisely such a purpose and they walked over to the elevator. She rested her head on his shoulder as they rode down in a comfortable silence, neither wanting to ruin the little moment they shared, each wanting it to mean more and knowing that the other did not want such a thing. To an external eye, they would look like a young couple, past the stage of a romance so new that they did not have the strength to get their hands off one-another, but new enough for their relationship not to be tainted by hours of battles and arguments won and lost. The perfect point of love. Alas, of course, they were just friends, and at this point in time they could not imagine having a closer friendship without it becoming anything more than just that.
Ziva smiled slightly as she pulled the blanket over the sleeping form on her sofa, his extremities overflowing the couches boundaries. He looked the most relaxed she had seen him in a long time, since Gibbs left in fact. He had collapsed on her sofa as soon as they had finished eating and fallen swiftly asleep. Kneeling by his head, she lightly brushed her lips across his forehead. "Lilah tov." She whispered quietly, slipping into Hebrew as she wished him goodnight. She stood up and folded away the files they had worked on through their dinner, placing them in a neat pile on the coffee table. She flicked the lamp off and smiled once more at the sleeping man on her sofa lit only by the yellow-orange glow of the streetlamp outside her living room window, his soft snoring reminding her of their undercover operation. Turning her back to him, she readied herself for bed and for the second time in a fortnight drifted off to sleep with thoughts of Tony being only a wall away.
Tony woke from the second night of decent sleep he had had in a fortnight, unsurprised by his surroundings as he surveyed Ziva's living room. The light of dawn emanating from the window gave the room an almost ethereal golden glow as he sat up and smiled. It had to be that it was only in Ziva's apartment that he could actually get some sleep. And it was only under her supervision that he actually ate something. How many times had she brought food in for his lunch over the past week? At least three out of four times so far. Which meant that in the past two weeks since Gibbs had quit, he had brought her one breakfast, spent two nights at her place and she had made him three lunches. To him that would usually constitute as a serious long-term relationship – if it weren't Ziva, obviously. But it was Ziva, and all she could be was his friend.
He had noticed her looking at him funny recently. He'd thought it was just worry for him, but then he'd realised that she had been looking at him in that way since before Gibbs left. He couldn't remember when it had started though. Maybe she had always looked at him in that way and he had only just seen it. He jumped as a pair of delicate hands came to rest on his shoulders and a light kiss was pressed to the top of his head, another platonic action in the eyes of Miss David. "You look happy this morning, peaceful." He felt Ziva's cheek beside his as she crouched behind the sofa, the soft smell of her coconut shampoo gracing his senses. They sat staring out of the window at the rising sun, their skin mere millimetres from one another.
"Breakfast's on me this morning, David." He grinned and turned his face so he was looking at her as she mirrored the movement, their eyes locking, each daring themselves, or one-another – neither was quite certain which – to make a move.
"Deal." She whispered quietly, breaking the stare and standing up, looking for any distraction to take her mind off of her temporary boss's eyes.
Tony wasn't even certain how it had happened the third time, let alone the forth or fifth, but on the sixth Thursday without Leroy Jethro Gibbs sat on the throne in the NCIS squad room, she did not even bother to offer dinner and her spare bedroom, it had just become a presumption that they would leave at the same time, once everyone else had disappeared into the night, arm in arm. It had become routine for Ziva to drive them back to her place, for her to cook Italian. For them to sit and share paperwork, a bottle of red wine and all but their most personal of personal feelings. They would part at the adjacent bedroom doors, a wish of goodnight in English from Tony and Hebrew from Ziva, slowly morphing into Hebrew from both of them. Every Friday morning Tony would drive her red mini to the little café where he would buy her breakfast and coffee every morning before she would drive them both to work, fast enough so that no-one noticed the fact that Anthony DiNozzo was arriving with Ziva every Friday morning. It had become such a regular occurrence, almost a ritual, that articles of his clothing had begun to accumulate in her spare bedroom, the room that was not too dissimilar from a second home to him. There were nights when one of them would wake from, in Ziva's case a nightmare, in Tony's an 'unpleasant dream' – refusing to admit to the nightmares – and the other would wake, not for any other reason than knowing their friend was in distress, and Ziva would pad through into what had been decisively labelled as 'Tony's room' and curl up in his arms, no words needing to be said and only the presence of one-another a comfort great enough to settle them each back into their slumbers, entwined in one-another's arms for warmth and security and nothing more.
This was their pattern, their habit, their modus operandi. This was their way of functioning, keeping going through the absence of the only man who could really sit at the head of their NCIS team.
It was their coping method.
Just in case you were unsure, the title comes from 'The Hogfather' by Terry Pratchett, or at least it comes from the film, sadly my copy of the book is three books deep on the top shelf of one of the larger bookshelves in the house and I had trouble reaching it to check at half three in the morning. Sorry. But if anyone does know if it is in the book as well, I would be very grateful for the heads up.
For my reference: 8th NCIS fic.