Title: Mirror, Mirror
Disclaimers: NCIS, the rights to the show and its characters do not belong to me.
A/N: English is not my native language. So please forgive me my grammar and spelling mistakes.
Spoilers: none really and everything at the same time
Pairing: Ziva/Michael Rivkin, Ziva/Michael Locke, Ziva/Roy Sanders because they were canon, and Ziva/Namir Eschel because there may have been something and Ziva/McGee [McGiva] because it just happened while writing
Summary: "There are small pieces missing, distorting her image. And she wonders, if this is a reflection of herself, what pieces she is missing."
WARNING! Contains child abuse. And another warning, this pretty much rambles on and on 'cuz the road is never ending. But hey, at least we're on our way, right?
The first time she breaks a mirror she is four years old. Her mother has just told her that she will get a little sister or brother in a few months. She is mad at her, at them, at her parents and the Gods that do not answer her prayers, and storms from the room. She slams the door to her bedroom, the pink lair of a princess she is not, and it falls down from the wall. Slowly, she walks over to it, and sees the splintered image of herself. Her small hand reaches out to trace the broken lines of her reflection, but the door to her room flies open, and she jumps back in fear and begins to cry even before the hand connect with her cheek. She cries in fear, but those tears are quickly replaced by those of pain as the belt hits the bare flesh of her bottom. She will not be able to sit down for a week. And finally, she learns the lesson. Even though she is a princess, her father is the king. And everyone obeys the king. You simply do not talk back. Never. Unless you do not cherish your health.
·:|:·
The second time she is eight. She sees the way her father treats her brother. Her tomboyish side has already shone through before, and she has begun to prefer pants to dresses, but still loves skirts and purple and pink and red and all those beautiful girlish things that her little sister adores, too. But then he tells Ari how proud he is of him and pats his back, and she is done. She changes, over night, and her mother knows why and is sad, and her father does not see it and is so proud, and her sister is happy because she gets her dolls and frilly skirts and everything. The furniture in her room is replaced; pink and purple have to make room for dark blue and green. She demands new paint and gets a subdued dirty green, and she likes how it reminds her of mud. Then she does the thing that is hardest. She wants a haircut. Her mother fights, she did not say anything about the dresses and skirts and the dolls and the colors, she accepted that she wants to take martial arts all of a sudden and is willing to let her give up a bit of her ballet, but not everything. But when she tells them she wants her curls off, her mother starts fighting and screaming fills the house. She gets send to her room, and hears her mother sob downstairs as she begs her father not to give in, begs him to see what he is doing to her. She gets nowhere. Three hours later, her long, rich curls are a short bob that does not reach down far enough to be put into a ponytail, and she is constantly brushing at them with her hands to keep them out of her face. Later that evening, she is in her room, in her new PJs, dark midnight blue ones with small yellow stars on them. She takes out her flashlight, and gets the small mirror out from under her bed. Looks at herself, takes in the way she looks with the chopped off hair, the way she resembles a boy now. But she is not, and suddenly, she wants her long curls back. With a anguished sob, she throws the mirror against the wall and cries herself to sleep.
·:|:·
She is thirteen when the third mirror breaks. She walks into the office of her father to catch him talk to someone on the phone in Arabic. Some kind of insurance so she and Tali cannot catch what he is saying when he working from home, because he thinks they do not understand Arabic at all. She never told him that Ari and friends at school have been teaching her, and that she cannot simply understand the language, she can read it, too. She hears him order and airstrike, and thinks nothing of it, because this is Israel and her father is Mossad. Death is part of their lives, it is a constant in hers, and air strikes are too common to be out of the ordinary. In the evening, after the last guest has left, Ari turns on the television, even though their father told him not to. But he is too old to get a spanking, so he does not listen anyway. She stands, shocked, as she sees the results of the simple order her father has given. She stands and watches images of death and destruction and devastation, of dead children being carried away by sobbing adults. Blood is red on the dirty road, and then Ari drops the remote as the news anchor announces where those pictures come from. She recognizes the name of his hometown, of his little village in Gaza, the place where his mother is now. He turns and walks over to the phone, punching in a number, as she stares at her father and sees the horrible truth in his eyes. That night, she throws another hand mirror against the wall. Because she cannot see the person she is, cannot see who did not warn her brother so his mother could be saved. She cannot see the monster she is.
·:|:·
Two years later, she punches a mirror as sobs wreak her body, before she hits the floor as all strength leaves her. She has slept with him, he was her first love and she would have done anything for him. Would have killed, would have died for him. But her father found out, and now he is dead, her ahuvi, her everything is dead, and she is the one to blame.
·:|:·
Years pass, she grows, changes, the shadows in her life become visible in her eyes more than ever before. It is her first mission in the Mossad, the first time she kills someone and stares right into their eyes. In the safety of her apartment, she rushes to her bathroom and empties the content of her stomach into the toilet. There is no mirror over the small washing basin; she does not care for her reflection in the morning before her first cup of tea, so she has taken it down. There is, however, one on her vanity. A present from her mother, an attempt to get her in touch with her girly side again, a part of her she does not allow to show any more unless it is for the benefit of a mission. She sits down and looks into her eyes before slamming the thing down so it hits the floor. Shards of glass fly everywhere, and she sits, transfixed before getting up and slowly putting the glass back into place. She cuts herself multiple times, but does not give up, because she hopes that if she just puts the pieces back together, the aching in her heart will stop and her soul will be put back together, too. She is twenty, and for the first time, when she is finished, she notices that little pieces are missing. The big ones are all back, yes, but there are small pieces missing, distorting her image even more than the rough lines of the cracks. And she wonders, if this is a reflection of herself, what pieces she is missing.
·:|:·
Namir breaks a new mirror. They are fighting, because her sharing his bed does not mean she will take his orders and not give in without a fight. There is hot, passionate sex, and then they are at each other's throats in a completely different sense. She briefly wonders if she has met her match with him, because he possesses the same raw energy she does, but then the first cup comes flying at her, and she realizes that while she may take out her anger on her silverware, too, she does not use it for target practice. The mirror hits the wall behind her, missing her by a mere inch, and she takes out her gun and tells him to stop it now or he will regret it. Slowly, she backs up and opens the door to her apartment, glancing at the broken mirror briefly in passing. It was only a short glimpse, but the image of her holding her gun with fear in her eyes haunts her for months.
·:|:·
She lives with her brother, because there is no way she will go back to the house of their father. As they learn of Tali's death, she simply takes the mirror down, not even looking into it, because she knows what would happen if she did. She would see her sister in her reflection, and she would never be able to destroy that and live afterwards. Ari is different, a completely different kind of dangerous and fearsome, and he takes a baseball bat and takes out his grief and pain and anger on his furniture. She watches him as he destroys the china vase that her mother has given him as a present to his own apartment, watches as he trashes the TV, and finally sees small splinters of silver flying everywhere when he hits the mirror with all his might. And she sees her soul shatter and fly through the room in the tiny silver pieces, and she realizes that there is no way to put her back together. She will never be whole again. Perhaps she never was.
·:|:·
The next mirror gets smashed when her brother dies. When she kills him. Because she cannot bear to look into it and see his eyes staring back at her, in the face of a monster. Ari was a monster, but she is a different kind, a completely different kind of disgusting and condemned. She throws the mirror down and stomps on it and kicks it across the hotel room before she breaks down and sobs and cries, mourns the loss of the only person she had left that ever loved her, mourns that she has become a monster just like him, a puppet for her father, a tool to be used to his liking.
·:|:·
Her first week at NCIS, she slams her fist into the mirror of the downstairs ladies room. Everyone is treating her with disdain and she knows that coming here when she wanted to escape Mossad was just torturing herself in a new way.
Jenny simply hands her the bill after a new mirror is installed, not losing any word over the incident. She knows her too well to not know about her small problem with mirrors and her reflection, has seen her very close to throwing one down when they were in Cairo, but kept her from it with her superstition. Jenny had begged her not to do it, not to jinx their mission, and she had listened. If she hadn't been there, she would have done it, even if the superstition were true. Because what's another seven years of bad luck when your life is a nightmare, anyway?
·:|:·
The mirror that replaced the one she smashed during her first week is the one that shows her her tears after the two slaps she received from Abby, after she hit a new low, even for her. And for the first time, she does not want to take her anger out on her reflection. She feels too weak to summon up any anger, really; she is only pain and grief and sadness, and even though her reflection is whole, she is not, she has not been in such a long time that she has forgotten what feeling whole means.
·:|:·
The man that gives her the power to feel whole again back dies within an hour after he does. She has fallen for him, fallen so hard so fast that her world is spinning out of control, and she needs something to hold onto.
Tali once did a Mosaic when she was in primary school and gave it to her. It has small shards of a broken mirror worked into it, and she takes it out of the box she keeps it in. Sitting on the floor of her bedroom, her back against her bed, she turns the Mosaic slowly, watching bits of her reflection. Sad eyes, a small, sad smile, a tear running down her cheek. And it is so much easier to take in the different pieces than the whole thing, because the sum of them is so much more frightening than the little parts are.
·:|:·
She would never have gotten herself a new expensive mirror, but Abby buys her one, anyway, after she sees that there is one missing in the bathroom on one of her visits. She thanks her, and hangs it up for her sake. Once she is out of her apartment again, though, she immediately goes to her bathroom and takes the mirror down again. She sleeps with Michael Locke, and the beautifully ornamented mirror dies a loud death when it crashes onto the tiled floor. Tony is right, she has to live with what she has done, but even though he looks into her eyes and sees their haunted look, he does not have the knowledge that it is the soul within that is haunted. He would never understand why she cannot look into her own eyes when she has faced so many killers in her life. He doesn't understand that when she looks into a mirror, she sees another killer, another person that deserves to die. And she is just waiting for someone to finally put her out of her misery.
·:|:·
Jenny dies, and she has sex with her partner. She slips out of his bedroom and apartment in the middle of the night and hails a cab on the street. Before she boards the plane that will take her back to Tel Aviv, to Israel, to her home, she calls her realtor, telling her that her apartment is for sale, but she should be careful when she walks into the bathroom. A mirror fell down when she was packing, and though she tried to get them all, there may be some splinters of glass left over on the tiny cracks in the tiles. Because no matter how hard you tried, you could not reassemble a mirror. There was always a tiny piece missing. And it usually was the one you'd step right into, leaving you bleeding all over the place.
·:|:·
Michael Rivkin is cold and hard and everything she has ever been, before she came to NCIS. Therefore he is warm and comfortable and so familiar.
When she has to leave Israel again, she is not sure if she can ever be without him again. And then he comes to the US because she cannot come to him, and she stares into her own eyes after she has slept with him for so long. Because really, she knows what he has done. And somehow, she cannot muster the disgust she feels should be there.
It is as she told DiNozzo. Him and her, they come from two completely different worlds. And while she wishes that she could work, that she could live in his instead of just function, lately she finds that she can't.
And it makes her so sad and being sad makes her angry. And Michael is there, and Tony is following her, and he fights with Michael. And either one of them – she does not know which one nor does she care – breaks the mirror that had managed to survive longer than all its counterparts.
·:|:·
There are no mirrors on the Damocles. And none in Somalia. Which is good, really, because if she had gotten her hands on one, she would have smashed it. And then used the shards to slit her wrists.
As it is, Ducky is far too observant, and the doctors at Bethesda make sure not to keep anything sharp around her. Her new cell comes with a private bathroom, one without a mirror. The nurse tells her she can have one if she needs to, but only to get dressed and then she would have to surrender it again. She shakes her head. The psych ward is bad enough. She doesn't need someone watching her when she's undressing to add to the humiliation of it all.
·:|:·
It is Tim that gradually builds her up again. One night, she is too tired, and he offers to drive her to her place. Apparently, he does, but she is so fast asleep in his car that he cannot wake her. So he drives to his place and gently carries her to his apartment and places her on the bed, taking up residence beside the bed in his armchair.
She slips from the bed without him noticing, and goes to relief herself in his bathroom. But her reflection has her transfixed, and she stares until he walks up behind her. Gently, without words, he pries her fingers from where they were attempting to take the mirror down and then wraps his arms around her, hugging her to him.
He is Tim, silent and shy and emotional, and he is just there, and she buries her face in his neck and allows the strength she didn't know he possessed to transfer onto her.
·:|:·
The scarf is a present from his sister. He doesn't wear it because it's too girly and people - meaning DiNozzo - are making fun of him anyway. Though she cannot see why. He may not be the most masculine there is, but there is something to be said for his soft way and gentle nature that is so different from her fierce personality.
The soft green cloth hangs over the mirror in the bathroom of their apartment, and when he needs to use it to shave he takes the scarf down before putting it back up again afterwards. She doesn't have to see her reflection, and she actually likes the color. It reminds her of something she sees in his eyes when he looks at her.
It's a compromise, really, nothing more than that, and she can live with it - for now.
·:|:·
On their anniversary, he buys a huge full length mirror and puts it up in the study. She stares at him as if he has grown a second head. Which he might do next, judging by how much he has apparently lost it if he thinks she likes his present. And then he hands her a card, her real present, and she stares even more.
I want you to be able see what I see when I look at you.
It takes months, and he starts slowly, hanging a bed sheet over the mirror and using duct tape to keep it in place. He always focuses on one part of her anatomy.
When he reaches her face, she is standing in front of him, naked, like always, trembling slightly. Her eyes are closed, and when he is satisfied by the way the sheet is fixed, he moves to stand behind her, softly whispering into her ear to open her eyes as his hands wrap around her waist gently, hugging her to him.
She stands and stares at her face and then he tells her how much he loves her smile and her eyes, how beautiful they are, and she just can't take it and starts to cry like a baby.
·:|:·
She is pregnant with their first child when she walks into the study to get a sheet of paper for the shopping list. Her husband forgot to put the bed sheet back up after they used the mirror last weekend, and she freezes when she catches a glimpse of her reflection. Slowly, she turns and straightens, taking in herself, dressed in soft sweatpants and a purple shirt. She walks over, slowly, and stands right in front of it, her eyes travelling down to her belly. She turns to her side, and watches. Her baby bump is not visible beneath her clothing just yet. But Tim said he felt it. He wouldn't have lied. Would he?
Carefully, she pulls up the hem of her shirt and tucks it under her bra. She can see a few scars on her back, and a shiver runs down her spine. But she quickly shakes her head, focusing on her belly instead. Her jeans have been getting a bit tighter, haven't they? So there must be something there to see.
And there is something. A barely noticeable bump protruding from her abdomen, the golden skin stretching to make room for the life growing beneath it.
Her hand raises on its own, and she watches herself gently stroke over her skin, mesmerized. They are having a baby, and besides the stick with the pink plus sign, this is the first real evidence she has. And she can't help the small, content smile that takes up residence on her face.
Somehow, her reflection has never looked better.
THE END
Review? Pretty please?
The "rambling" warning contained a song quote from the Fiddler's Green song "On and On", I don't own that, either. And yes, I am positive that I finally lost it.