He was, simply, raw.

The picture was too small. Too small to capture two lives that had struggled and scratched and clawed to find each other in a horrible moment. Too small to capture years spent becoming reluctant teammates, then friends, then partners – in every way.

Tali was too small. Too small to know the woman her mother had been, the woman her mother had made herself into. Tali was too small to know her mother, and it broke his heart to realize that she never truly would. For that, Tony knew that he would never forgive Ziva, in the same moment that he knew he always would.

Oh, how he had loved her. He had loved her with every moment of his life, every smile on his face, every flutter of his heart at the mention of her name. There was never a moment that he would not love the woman who had broken him so completely with her passing, and yet had given him a reason to live on.

He thought back to those moments where their eyes had met and there had been so much in so little. The heartbeats of silence where they knew the other's thoughts were raging as surely as their own were raging, where they wanted to let go and forget about their pasts, forget about their jobs, and just be. For them, they simply could not be without each other.

"Will you still love me in the morning, Tony?"

When she asked him that question, she could not have understood the sheer weight of it. She could not, that stormy night, in the heat of their kiss, have understood what her life meant to him, and what its absence would do to him. Could not have predicted their daughter, the simplest and purest proof of the answer to that question.

Oh, but he was raw.

He was raw when he and McGee were sitting on that bench, when he asked if it had been going on the whole time. Too raw to even begin wondering how to explain what they were, what they had hidden, what they meant. That they were they. He had been too raw when he looked at Gibbs and finally understood. Too raw to continue pretending that he could do all of this without her.

His fingers slid over the photograph, the simple frame. Somehow even this combination was so simply Ziva: nothing given away on the outside, but so much emotion within. Yet still, the damn thing was too small.

"Will you still love me in the morning, Tony?"

Forever.