Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS.
Spoilers: Eh ... Season 11?
Notes: This was from a prompt by an anonymous asker on Tumblr, who wanted a fic whereby Tony returned home after a long day of work to find Ziva sitting on his couch on a surprise trip from Israel. I ended up kind of changing the idea a bit, but I like how it turned out, so here you have it! Enjoy!
-Soph
Home
His loafers went off immediately inside the front door.
This wasn't something he was accustomed to doing; he had once upon a time tended to keep his shoes on everywhere he went, even within his own apartment. Those things hadn't remained the same in recent years, though. Ever since Ziva had left for Israel….
Well. He just didn't want things to be the way they used to be.
He shrugged off his coat in rather too urgent a manner, tossing it into a corner with the carelessness that had marked him for the past twenty-four months.
"You are just going to leave your coat like that?" a voice spoke up, and he froze in the middle of picking up Kate's container of fish food.
"Like what?" his mouth asked automatically, so used to his and that voice's unique brand of dialogue that he was hard-pressed to keep from responding to it.
He really hoped he wasn't hallucinating, though. It was bad enough that he dreamt Ziva every night; it was bad enough that he thought about her when he woke up and thought about her over his meagre breakfast and thought about her while he was at work and just, in general, thought about her. His mind had turned into a catalogue of everything Ziva, from her hair to her skin to her mouth to her eyes to her scent—he really didn't want to be hearing her voice when he shouldn't be, as well.
The silhouette of the woman that came forth from the depths of his unlit apartment made him want to drop everything he held and run.
He wondered briefly if this was what a horror story was truly like. Not the overdramatic scene with a hapless woman succumbing to her murderer's knife as the background music came to a crescendo, but rather a middle-aged man, much too prematurely past his prime and with absolutely nothing left to live for, finally gone insane over the unceasing yearning for a love which had long since been lost.
Yet he knew, when the figure brushed past him with a huff and hung up his coat properly, that this Ziva was the real deal. (See, in his head, the first thing she would have run to was him, not his coat.) "Your apartment was very messy, so I tidied it up for you," she remarked, and he would forever blame the sudden brightness of the room for the tears that sprang unbidden into his eyes when she flicked on the lights.
"Ziva," he murmured, ignoring the tremble in his voice. "Ziva. Ziva. Ziva. Zi—"
Her lips on his cut him off. (Soft, gentle, pliable, just like he remembered. Nothing like his vivid imagination could ever have been able to come up with.)
"Yes," she whispered against him, her arms curling around his body and coming to rest on his lower back.
And he began to sob.