You reduce, I'll oxidize.
Disclaimer: I was offered a choice between owning NCIS or a new pair of shoes. Now I have a blister.
Spoilers: The preview from the season finale. Oh, yeah. I went there. Of course if you missed Semper Fidelis, you should probably skip this one.
Summary: Because all the negativity is bad, but humor and rum are good. Ziva sucks it up and finishes what Michael started, as ordered by Daddy Yellsalot. Cracky.
Ziva blinked as the world in front of her eyes blurred in spite of her best attempts to maintain her razor-sharp focus. The fluorescent lighting offered no shelter and the murmur of voices immediately behind her had long shifted from annoying to mind-numbingly hypnotic. Sinking further into her uncomfortable seat, she decided that three-month-old used-by-a-very-coarsely-hairy-man razor-sharpness was all she would be able to dedicate to this particular enterprise. She shifted the book in front of her to her lap as she folded the attached half-desk back alongside her chair to make room to prop her knees against the seat in front of her. This was the last time she would be forgetting her iPod on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon.
The room was a little warm, but it was a nice contrast to the chilling rain falling outside. Ziva closed her eyes and felt herself begin to relax. She had assumed that carrying out her father's order to finish what Michael Rivkin had started would be simple, but after three fairly standard assassinations, she was finding out that it was anything but. Her mind drifted back three months and five thousand eight hundred some-odd miles, presenting the scene as if it had been taken from an overwrought telenovela. She watched herself drop into a chair in a grainy version of the Moussad Director's office, a hand splayed out to cover her forehead. "What am I to do?"
Her father stroked a curling moustache she never remembered him having. "You do exactly what I said! You finish what Michael started! Everything he started!"
Flopping in a different direction, she begged, "I need to see the file on his mission. Surely you can at least give me that!"
"I can, but that is not all I expect you to complete. And do not call me Shirley."
She laughed, not used to hearing such silliness from her normally serious, un-mustachioed father.
"Ms. David, is there something you would like to share with the rest of the class?"
Ziva blinked hard and looked up. She was nowhere near her father's office; she was sitting in a nondescript classroom, being stared at by gawky freshmen and an ornery English professor as she dozed through class. "Excuse me?"
The tweedy Professor Costello pulled his glasses to the very tip of his nose as he surveyed her over the tortoiseshell rims. "I was just curious about why you think a man suffering horrible burns and blinding in a fire is worthy of your derisive laughter."
"Well…" She didn't blush as she glanced at the copy of Jane Eyre in her lap. She had read the final chapters just last night, so there had to be something she could say. She finally blurted out, "Rochester is a dick."
Her classmates' giggles were silenced by the professor's squawked, "How dare you!"
"I'm sorry. My English…is…I am still working on it. I did not mean to say something offensive," she lied. "What I meant to say was that he deserved to suffer consequences for his actions throughout the novel and…"
Roughly fifteen minutes of arguing later, she felt that she had at least proved to Professor Costello that she had attentively read the novel, even if their interpretations differed. She had even managed to restrain some of her own opinions about what she might do to someone who attempted to chain her in an attic. She stopped at a bubbler outside the classroom, wishing, not for the first time, that her father's order had not been a condition of her return to the US. Had she known the full extent of what she was meant to finish, she would have gladly stayed in Tel Aviv.
Why Michael had even started a BA program in English at George Washington was the most mysterious of her new commitments, and certainly the most time-consuming, as the University had forced her to start an entirely new degree instead of awarding her the year's worth of coursework Michael had already completed. At least her new third-shift switchboard duties at NCIS allowed her ample time for reading and paper-writing. She was also saved the trouble of contact with DiNozzo, but… She hitched her backpack up on her shoulder as she stood from the drinking fountain. There was no need to think about that when she was still in the midst of pointing, laughing classmates. Well, so what? She didn't have a problem being labeled the argumentative bitch for the rest of the semester. She walked out of the building with her head held high. There were things to do before she had to be at work.
Her apartment was less welcoming than she would have liked it to be, but she had settled for the first place she'd looked at after deciding she couldn't keep living in a place where she constantly pictured a corpse in the living room. The move had occurred about a week after her return and two days after finishing off the mission Michael had not been able to complete. Metro had handled all three cases and never connected the bodies to anything beyond random acts of violence. Her true penance had already begun by the time she'd gunned down the last man from the safety of her car with the radio on.
The roast beef sandwich would have been all right if she had returned home from Israel a few days earlier. She still wasn't sure why she had finished the thing, especially as it was slathered in honey mustard, which she hated; it must have been some misplaced ambition to follow her father's instructions to the letter. The unfinished bottle of Grey Goose had been less of an effort, but had made her just as sick. Those halves had both been finished before she'd moved into the apartment where she now dropped her backpack, heavy with books and an unlicensed concealed firearm. Professor Costello would probably be less condescending if he knew she had that in her bag.
She sank onto her sofa and propped her feet on her new oak coffee table as she turned on the TV and took up her knitting. The blanket for Michael's new baby niece wasn't going to finish itself.