A/N: Drabble. Circa-S7, Tiva angst. Could be either POV, or both (the way I see it).

Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS.

We Are Not

And there's no use pretending there's something there, when we both know there really isn't. It isn't what we want that matters; it's what we have and don't have, and we don't have what it takes. We are not in love—even though we wish we could be.

We're both looking for something that maybe we can't find; maybe just for now or maybe for forever.

There are too many maybe's.

We've been through so much and yet not enough; know so much and yet nothing about each other.

This is not going to work out, because it's only temporary, only until we find someone we can be in love with, like we have before, and then it will all change again and we'll be left wondering who tricked us into thinking everything was simple. Because it's not.

We are not in love, but we're not out of it, either, and we're circling each other like tigers circling the kill, and in the middle of this great big circle we have put our hearts, torn out and scratched and hurt and bleeding and yearning for something to fill the void.

We can't fill it, not you for me or me for you, but how we wish we could.

When everything changes, nothing changes. We have been hurt, lost, abandoned, and we were both there when the world tried to realign. Except each time pulled us a little bit further apart, because scars don't go away, and they don't really fade.

You can't completely hide a seam when you've had to sew something back together again, and we're both rag dolls, so sewn up that the slightest nudge pulls up apart, and then it's jigsaw time again, and we play twenty-second pick-up with the pieces we can find.

In a world so beautiful and ugly and good and evil, contradictions reign and opposites don't attract. Not really. But we're not opposite at all—and maybe that's the problem. You're not the north pole and I'm not the south, and we're not pushing or pulling; we just are.

We are not in love; maybe that's why we can't stop dancing in and out and out and in.

Can't—or won't?