I am back, people! Sadly, it is not anything great that I have for you. I do not think most of it is even in character – although a lot of what I have been writing I have felt like that about recently. All of the happy stuff, at least. (That second from last sentence was written really badly. Sorry. I am too tired to think about how it should actually be written.)
Anyway, what did I get done when I was away? Not much really. I got a few of the chapters from my 50th fiction finished, but I am struggling with the second half of it. It is like, I want to write it, and I have the ideas, I just cannot transfer them to paper. Um, It Takes Two has the next chapter half written up, but it is still far from completion. I played around with a couple of the oneshots sat on my hard-drive, but again, they are not very good and need a lot of work. So really, I have done nothing but this, and this was not even done when I was away, it was done this morning.
This was written in the rain. I was sat in a cornfield with a pen and paper desperately trying to keep the paper from disintegrating and the ink from bleeding. It was a…unique experience. Do not even bother asking why I was writing in a cornfield in the rain – it is a long, long story and I am still not quite certain on some points. It all started as a game of hide-and-seek…
A Little Fall of Rain
She stood, drenched from head to toe, soaked through to the skin. The water that dripped from her hair blended with the water running down her back and the rain pouring around her. She did not move towards shelter, join everyone else in the buildings that huddled on the edge of the fields. She simply stood and smiled up at the raindrops that fell down from the dark, heavy clouds above her. The warm scent of the freshly harvested corn mixed with the clean scent of the rain. As the droplets splashed onto her skin with an increased amount of force, the mud at her feet grew slippery and slick, although she did not notice.
It was not until he laid a hand on her shoulder that her attention was attracted to anything other than the sensation of the water on her body, saturating her clothes and making her hair curl into tight ringlets. She turned to face him; his puzzled expression, and smiled. "It's raining."
She nodded, looking back up to the black sky. "I like the rain."
"The rain's cold and miserable." He grumbled, shifting uncomfortably as his already sodden jeans started to chafe. He hated the rain. The rain made everything more complicated – traffic grew worse, crime scenes were harder to work, visibility and slippery surfaces made chasing suspects difficult.
"No. No, the rain is hopeful. The rain brings life." She focused on his face. "I grew up in a desert, where we would have months on end with only the sun on our backs and our faces. We would have no rain to water the crops, and the only relief from the heat would be the meagre shade we could find. And then the skies would fill with darkness, and for a moment it would feel even hotter, but then, all of a sudden, they would break and the sands would become so wet that the lizards and the snakes would skitter off to shelter." Her eyes focused on some far-off point with the memories. "And then you would be able to see green and the trees would blossom and the plants would flower and the world would be full of glorious, wonderful smells. The rain brought life to the desert, filled it with colours and smells and sounds. It was the best time of the year, September, when we got the rains that cleaned away the dust and made our skin glisten when we played in it."
"Here the rain is just a nuisance. Nothing good comes from the rain here."
"I think it does." She looked at him wistfully before turning back to face out across the landscape of yellow and green fields. "After all, it was raining the day we met." A small smile graced her lips as she thought back to it. She refused to acknowledge in that moment that it meant it was also raining the day that Kate died, and that Tony had to work the scene in the rain, or that it was raining the day she shot Ari, she was in a good mood, and she did not want to taint that with memories that were painful for both of them.
Tony did not feel the same way. "It was raining when Gibbs was blown up."
"But he survived, yes? Is that not hopeful?" They stood silently, their hair plastered to their skin and their clothes hanging heavy, saturated.
"Do you miss the desert, Ziva?" He asked eventually. She stared at him, her brow furrowing as she considered his question.
"I do not not miss it, but I do not miss it, either. I miss the beauty of it, and the shapes and colours that I do not see here, but the climate…I like it here. It can be hot, but it can also be cold. I do not know if I would want to go back and live there permanently now."
He looked at her, confused. "Who says you are going back?"
"Liaison Officer suggests something less than constant, yes? I am an officer of Mossad before an NCIS agent. My father has been in a reasonably good mood for the past few years, but if he has a bad day there is a chance I will be recalled, and I will have no power to decline."
"Oh." Tony nodded, thinking that Ziva must be wrong about the rain, for of what their conversation had shown him, all it brought was sorrow. "When I was young, I used to think that the rain was the sky crying."
She was silent for a moment, absorbing his words. "Why was the sky crying?" For a moment her voice sounded so naïve and childlike, so full of curiosity and puzzlement, that he had to look at her to make sure that it was still Ziva that he was talking to, she was still the adult he knew and not a young child. But then he saw her, her hair plastered to her face and a youthful glint of wonder in her eyes as she held her hands out, as she tilted her head up and opened her mouth, allowing the taste of the droplets to fill her with memories, and he remembered that really, she was still young. She was so much younger than him and McGee and Abby. Younger than Palmer, even, and to him, Palmer was the yard-stick of juvenility, with his clumsy ability to say the most inappropriate of things without even realising. At least when he said inappropriate things, he meant to say them. But she was so much younger than all of them, just a baby really. Yet she had experienced so much more than the rest of them, seen so much more, and because of that he always forgot that she was about ten years younger than him. He realised he had been staring silently at her for a while when she cast her eyes away from the shifting grey sky to look at him.
"It was sad I guess. I don't really know." He shrugged. "When I was younger, I used to spend as much time outside as I could, because it meant being away from my dad. It was always easier outside. But I wasn't allowed out if it was raining. Later on, it turned into games and matches being called off due to the rain, and now life's always more difficult with rain, always having to remember an umbrella, or a spare pair of socks, or both, and so I guess to me it has always been a bad thing. I dunno." He shrugged noncommittally. "Don't you think the sky looks dull like this?"
"No." She shook her head and looked back up at it. "The clouds, there are so many patterns in them, so many subtle changes. I think the clouds are like people. They are never the same, they are of all shapes and sizes, and they are so interesting to watch."
"Yeah, I've never seen it myself." He shook his head, shivering slightly in his sodden clothes.
"Why are you out here, Tony?"
He could tell her the truth. He could tell her that he wanted to just stand and talk to her without any interruptions from Gibbs, or McGee, or Abby. He could tell her that he just wanted to stand near her, just watch her without being reminded of rule 12. But he didn't. He told her a completely different truth. "Gibbs is getting impatient. Says he wants to get back to the Navy Yard as soon as possible, and since the rain is starting to ease up for the moment he wanted you back inside." There would be times for other truths at a later date, maybe. Or maybe there wouldn't be.
Things like that were as unpredictable and rare as falls of rain in the dessert.
I do not know about this one. I wanted to continue it for more, but then it just got into a long, messy thing with no plot and no real place to end and nothing really other than strange, ramble-y paragraphs of nonsense about the rain.
For my reference: 43rd NCIS fic.