1991
"When are we going back to Tel Aviv?" Ziva asked her mother, arms crossed, hips squared-off defiantly.
"We shall see, my dear," Rivka answered, without looking up from her book.
Ziva scowled. That was always the answer. Time for a new question. "Is Daddy still out of the country?"
"I believe so."
"Where is he?"
"So many questions, my Ziva. I have told you before, he didn't tell me."
"Why can't we live at home while he is away?"
Rivka sighed, and turned to look at her daughter. "I grew up here in Haifa. You do not like it here?"
"I like the beach," Ziva conceded. They'd come out to the coast right after the school year ended like the always did. But unlike most summers, her father didn't join them. "Are we going to have to go to school here?"
"Is that your problem with living here?" Rivka asked.
Ziva looked at her mother silently for a few moments before nodding slightly.
"The schools are very good here."
"I have friends in Tel Aviv," Ziva argued.
"Friends like the little boy you punched last term?"
"He deserved it," Ziva muttered, staring down at the floor.
"You cannot solve arguments with your fists."
"Daddy was proud of me!" she stomped her foot on the floor for emphasis. "I am going to make a good warrior, he said."
"Warrior? You are not old enough to be a solider for ten years," Rivka countered, voice steady.
"Nine," Ziva argued. "I am almost nine, and I will graduate from high school when I am seventeen, so nine years."
"Nine," Rivka accepted. "Still many years away. You must learn to resolve things without a fistfight. With words. You will be a good soldier when the time comes."
Ziva glared at her mother. "Will Daddy be back for my birthday?"
"I do not know," Rivka answered, a slight hint of exasperation in her voice.
Ziva flopped on the couch beside her with a huff. Her mom never knew. "I think he will be. He's never missed my birthday before."
1994
"It's my doll, and I want her to wear a dress," Tali argued. "Your dolls can wear the army uniform. Mine are going to a party." She pulled the drag, green jacket off of her Barbie, and flung it at her sister, then undid the French braid as Ziva argued, "I don't have any girls left."
"You dropped them out of the tree yesterday."
"They were on a mission."
"Well, my dolls aren't broken, because they go to parties instead of parachuting out of the tree," Tali retorted.
"You know what? I'm too old for dolls anyways! Dolls are for little girls!" She advanced on her sister as she yelled, but then paused and took a deep breath. Daddy was okay with her solving any argument with her fists, except for arguments with her little sister..
"What's going on in here?" Rivka asked, appearing in the doorway.
"She broke all her dolls yesterday, dropping them out of the tree, and now she wants to play with mine," Tali explained, slipping a pink ball gown onto the Barbie doll in question.
Rivka turned to her older daughter, who was lining up small plastic soldiers on the footboard of the bed.
"I gave it back," Ziva answered simply, sitting back against the headboard and raising the bright yellow gun. Plastic darts flew out of the end, and took down the little green figurines. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. No misses. She crawled to the end of the bed and replaced her targets., then repeated the shots.
"You didn't miss a single one," Tali noted in awe.
"Nope," she gloated at her little sister. Her mother looked on with concern. "And the Nerf gun is a little harder to aim than a real one."
"Your father took you to the shooting range." The way her mother said it, it wasn't a question.
"Last month. For my birthday. He said twelve was a good age to learn to shoot a gun." He'd also said, 'Don't mention this to your mother,' but in her moment of gloating she had forgotten.
"And you enjoyed it?" Rivka asked evenly.
Ziva grinned broadly as she retrieved a large folded paper from her top dresser drawer. She unfolded the target sheet. "This was my last one." All fifteen shots were through the head.
"Wow!" Tali exclaimed.
"You are very good," Rivka told her.
Her mother didn't seem as excited about it as her father had been.
1998
A pounding on the door woke Ziva in the middle of the night. She slid her sock clad feet into her boots, and crept down the hall. Tali was peering out of her door. Usually if people showed up at that house in the middle of the night, they were there for her father. He'd been out of the country for two weeks. She figured his associates would know that by now. This meant trouble. She started for the stairs.
"Stay up here," Rivka ordered.
"But—"
"I said, stay up here with your sister."
"Get a gun before you open the door," Ziva told her mother.
Rivka took a deep breath. "Take your sister, and hide,"
"I can handle—"
"Protect your little sister."
"Do not go down there yet," Ziva instructed, and flew into her father's study. She quickly entered the code in his safe, and extracted two 9mm Sigs, and slammed a clip into each of them. One she tucked into the waistband of her pajama pants, the other she held out to her mother as she re-entered the hallway. "If you are going down there, at least take this."
"How did you-?"
"He taught me that code years ago."
"You will stay up here with Tali."
"We will go to the study. I will stand guard."
Rivka nodded.
"Be careful," Ziva instructed. Her mother was a very smart woman, mentally tough, but not physically tough. So she was worried. "Get your shoes, Tali."
The younger girl scurried into her room to grab them, and Ziva took her hand to lead her into the study. "Do you want a gun?"
Tali shook her head. "I hate shooting those. I am not good at it."
Ziva nodded. "Call Ari. Tell him to come immediately." She stationed herself in the doorway, listening as well as she could to what was going on downstairs.
"He is not at home," Rivka said.
"We know."
A gunshot rang out, then a thud. "Stay here!" she hissed at Tali, and shut the door behind her as she inched into the hallway. A strange man turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, gun drawn, and she shot, and he fell. Footsteps charged in her direction, and she fired again, the moment the second man turned the corner. Slowly she inched down the stairs, scanning the room. Her mother lay on the floor, blood pooling at her side.
"Ziva?" Rivka croaked.
"I am here."
"Tali?"
"Upstairs. Safe." Rivka was fading fast. "Tali! Come down here now!" She raced over to the phone in the kitchen to call for an ambulance. Tali screamed as she descended the stairs, and ran to their mother's side. "The ambulance is on its way." The ambulance wasn't going to make it in time, and she knew it. There was no way she could stop the bleeding to a shot to the chest.
Tali sobbed, holding tight to Rivka's hand. Ziva quickly kissed her mother's forehead and stood up. She could not bear to kneel there and just watch the life seep out of her.
Ari appeared in the doorway, gun drawn. "The men?"
"Dead. On the stairs."
He looked past Ziva to where Tali knelt with Rivka. "Your mother?" he asked softly.
"She will not make it," Ziva told him. "The ambulance will not arrive in time. She is losing too much blood."
"Ziva, I think…" Tali cried.
Ari crossed in quickly, and knelt beside Tali, who threw her arms around his neck. He placed his fingers on her neck, and shook his head sadly at Ziva. "I will call father."
"You know where he is?"
He shot her a look.
"Of course you know where he is."
"Take Tali to the other room."
Ziva nodded, and led her sister to sit in a chair in the kitchen, holding on tight. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for what was to come. She needed to remain strong for her sister's sake.
Present
Ziva twirled the small Israeli flag back and forth in her hands. Perhaps Gibbs was right about perspective. Her mother may not have ever told her explicitly that her father was a bad man, but it was there underneath. Even if she had said it, would Ziva have been open to hearing it at 8? At 12? Even at 15? No, probably not. As a girl, she'd idolized her father.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Tony stood leaning over the partition beside her desk.
"How long have you been standing there?" Ziva scowled.
"Not long."
"I thought you were right behind us."
He had been waiting for her. "I…needed a minute."
"That's what Gibbs said," Tony noted, crossing around her desk and perching on the corner near her.
"What else did Gibbs say?" she asked warily.
"Just that you were still sitting at your desk when he left."
Ziva nodded and put the flag back in her pencil cup.
"Need a drink?" Tony asked hopefully. "My treat."
"N—" Ziva started to say, 'Not tonight,', but paused. He was looking at her with such concern. It always made her nervous when he looked at her like that, like he could see right through her carefully constructed façade. Because he could. And that scared her. "Okay," she told him finally.
He grinned broadly. She stood up and put her coat on. "I don't know that I want to talk," she warned him.
"That's fine," he assured her. "There's a baseball game on."
She couldn't help but smile.
Later
Two drinks into the evening, Ziva was feeling a little better. She was sitting by Tony's side, leaning against the back of the padded bench. They'd ended up side by side because Tony wanted to see the game on the TV across the bar, and she refused to have her back to the door. But she wasn't complaining. His arm was casually draped around her shoulder, and she was pressed into his side.
The baseball game went to commercial, and he turned to her. "Do you want another drink?"
"I should not. I need to drive home."
"There are still five innings left," Tony pointed out, then paused. "Oh, you were going to leave before the end of the game."
"No," she insisted. "I wasn't paying attention to the game. I am not going to leave you here alone."
"Another?" he grinned.
"Fine."
He raised his hand and gestured to the bartender for another round. They had been sitting mostly in comfortable silence, with him watching the game and leaving her to her thoughts.
"Which team are you supporting?"
Tony shrugged. "Neither is my team. I just watch cause it's the World Series."
"Right. The world of the US and Canada."
"Well, yeah," Tony laughed, giving her shoulder a squeeze. She took the opportunity to lean in closer. "How are you doing?"
Now it was her turn to shrug. She was about to blow him off with her usual 'I'm fine,' but thought the better of it. He had been very good about respecting her wish not to talk up to this point. "She reminded me of my mother."
"Is that good?"
"It is…complicated. Like everything with my family," she sighed. He waited patiently for her continue. That was another of those unnerving things he did lately: actually listen carefully when she talked about things like this. "My mother and I had a…difficult relationship. As a girl, I idolized my father…" He tugged her closer as she hesitated. "I wanted nothing more than to be his perfect warrior. She never told me what he was really like."
"You were a kid."
"I've been thinking about it all night." A long (creepily patient) silence passed. "The more I thought back, the more I saw it in her words, her mannerisms. I never would have listened back then, and she knew it," she choked. She let her head tip against his chest.
He kissed her hair, and ran his hand up and down her back. "Everything is clearer in hindsight."
She nodded against his jacket. "The game is back on."
"Is that your way of saying that you don't want to talk about it anymore?" he asked softly. "Because for the record, the game is way less important to me."
Did he really just say that? She didn't quite know how to respond to that yet, so she affirmed, "I do not want to talk about it anymore."
"If that changes—"
"I'll let you know." They resumed their comfortable baseball game silence, though she remained nestled against him.