I am in turmoil, uncertain whether to upload this now. I had in fact written this as the third chapter to a story that is not yet finished, which will be only two chapters, but now I have completed it, I actually really like it on its own. Oh, I do not know. Well, since you are reading this, it probably means I have uploaded it separately. Hm. I did want the other one to be only two chapters anyway, so I guess this has solved that problem.
What was I going to say? Oh, yes, I remember now. I watched Family First finally yesterday, even though I have not seen the rest of season 13, because it was on the television and I wanted to know what happened and how Tony left. I started crying from the 'Previously on NCIS' screen and continued for half an hour after it finished. But when my tears had dried, I wrote the other story, which may or may not be uploaded any time soon, for it still needs some work, and then this morning I wrote this. I knew what was coming of course, I am no fool, but that does not mean that I am good at controlling my emotions when it comes to fictional characters.
I loved Tali though. She was perfect. I think I cried even more when I saw her.
Anyway, I cried when I was writing this as well, and it is not even that sad. Well, it might be, I do not know.
My, I have been emotional these past few days. Anyhow, I think this and the other one will possibly be my only post season 13 fictions, because, without seeing anything else from season 13 it is difficult to write the characters. They all seem so changed. I watched Kill Ari afterwards, and they all looked so much younger, even Gibbs. I think that might have made me cry too.
Oh, I still need a title. That might take some time to come up with. I shall have to ponder that for a moment. I feel this deserves a good title.
Guardian Angel
Two men sat at a café, one older than the other, but other than the grey hair and the aged face, there was little difference between the two. If they were the same age they could be mistaken for twins. And, in fact, the younger of them was looking older than he had been four years earlier. His face was wearier and his eyes looked older. But they weren't twins – they weren't even brothers – they were a father and his son. A few years ago they hadn't been close, they would see one another maybe once a year and there would always be an argument, but they had grown close, what with everything that had been happening. Between the two men was a highchair. In it sat a little girl, only three years old. Her curly hair was longer than it had been and behind her bright, innocent face was hidden something that she was much too young for. It was a deflated expression of sorrow. But she still smiled when she blew the three candles on the small cake out and her father and grandfather grinned. Both their eyes contained the same mix of sorrow and grief. A fine gold chain hung around her neck with a Star of David. It had been given to her father when she was conceived. Of course, he hadn't known that at the time.
A woman sat across the Parisian street, a few shop-fronts down, her face partially veiled by a headscarf that concealed her wild, untamed curls. A tear slipped down her cheek at the scene she was watching: the girl, her father and her grandfather. She reached up to her neck to grasp a pendant that hadn't hung there for four years, her hand hitting only empty air. The tear that had slipped down her cheek let go from where it was clinging to her jaw and tumbled down, marking a patch on the words she had been pretending to read. The child looked up at her and frowned when their eyes locked; making both men turn to look in her direction too. So she shifted to face the opposite way, looking down at a book opened to a random page. It was written in French. Not her first language, or even her second or third, but it was definitely in her repertoire, and it was easier to blend in with the people of the capital of France when not reading a book written in Hebrew, or Spanish, or Arabic, or English. She glanced up through her long, dark lashes to see the older of the men's attention back on the child and the child now focused on the gold chain, but he, the other man, was still staring at her. His father was talking to him, telling him that it was just a coincidence; she wasn't who he wanted her to be. She used all of her training to ignore him whilst making sure he wasn't going to approach her, or follow her, or do something that would make things difficult for her.
She wanted to be able to look at him, to lock eyes with him, but such a thing was impossible. She couldn't. He would know it was her as soon as their gazes met, and she couldn't have that. She was keeping them safe. She was there to observe them, to be their guardian angel, watching over them and allowing no harm to come to them. She was, of course, far from an angel, except maybe in his eyes. She had definitely forfeited any right to be called an angel with all the lives she had taken throughout her career, but she was acting as a guardian angel, concealing them as best she could from the dangers that may come to them because of who she was and because they are so closely associated with her, whether she be dead or alive. But she wanted more than anything to be able to run across the cobbled street and close the meagre few yards that separated them, to wrap her arms around them and never let them go again. She wanted promise them that she would never leave their sides again, that she would never hurt them again, but she could not. Life, hers or theirs, was not something she could promise, not to them or to anybody else. She did not have that power, whether she wanted it or not. She had the power to protect them, but only from afar. She could never walk up to them, tell them that she was sorry, that she had not known what was going to happen, and if she had she would have taken her daughter with her that night when she disappeared, never left her with the woman who looked after the child on the occasions in which she could find nobody else. If she were granted the opportunity to do so, she would do it in a heartbeat. They were her family. They were her life. She had nobody but them, and they did not even know that she was still alive.
He suspected, of course. He would never have left America if he had not had a gut feeling that she was still alive, and he would definitely not have dragged his father along for the ride. Or maybe he would have. The older man seemed to interact well with the young girl – quite a surprise when she recalled all the tales of his son's childhood. But then, maybe it was not such a surprise – he was making up for his errors, redeeming himself for past sins.
But even when everyone else had given up hope, he still retained it, convinced that he would know when she was dead, convinced he would feel it within him, like a part of himself had died with her. He wasn't as stupid as everyone thought. He could see when nobody else could that she was still alive – to him she was invincible and immortal, so strong that she could deny death the honour of taking her from him. But she was not invincible, nor immortal, just very lucky. But her luck came with a curse. She was never allowed to touch her daughter's cheek and sing her a lullaby again. She was never allowed to kiss the man she loved, never allowed to look into his eyes tell him that she loved him. She had to suffice for whispering their names in her prayers, something she had stopped doing for over a decade, until the night she had no home to return to. She never prayed for her self, only for the two people she loved. Only for their safety. Of course, she would never rely on only a higher power to keep them from harm's reach – no, she had seen to much for that – so she stayed with them, wherever they went, like a ghost. And she was, really, just a ghost. She never left a trail, physical, virtual or on paper. She used methods of transport that could not be traced and stayed in places that never asked questions. To everyone she loved, she was dead. To everyone she trusted, she was dead. Not a soul alive knew otherwise. Her identity changed with every place she moved – a new name, a new history. Only her appearance stayed the same. Not for vanity – only for greed. She wanted for them to recognise her if they caught sight of her. She wanted for them to know that she was still alive, still with them. She knew it could get them all killed, put them all in danger, but she wanted them to know that she still cared – that she would do anything for them.
She had watched as he walked with their daughter in America, the first few days of their union. The way they had been around one another – he cautious and restrained, she curious but pleased. She knew who he was, and had known her whole life, whereas he had known of her existence for mere hours. She thought, as she saw them emerge from the Navy Yard the first time after their meeting, that she had seen betrayal in his eyes, and she was probably right. She had carried his child and never told him, and then, when he needed her help and explanation and comfort most, she had been unavailable. Dead. He had a right to feel betrayed by her. And yet, she could have, physically at least, walked up to his door and knocked, stopping him from completely upheaving his life and leaving his country on a fool's errand to find her. But then she would have risked their lives. The man who had attempted to kill her was still out there and who knew how many others there would be that wanted to hurt her, either by turning a knife or gun on her, or by turning the same knife or gun on her family. It was safer for all if she stayed dead. Some bodies were best left buried.
She had watched as they moved to Israel, the three of them, and stayed in an apartment near the centre of Tel Aviv. She watched as he drove himself to insanity as he tried to follow a gut that, although well developed, was not as honed as their old boss, her father figure's, was. He had gone around in circles, searching for any indication that she had not been killed in the fire that should have claimed her life. But he found nothing. And yet he continued. In the end it had been his father who had started packing, stuffing their clothes into a bag and searching online for a house in Paris. It had been the first, and last, time that she had seen them argue in public since she had been keeping watch on them, that day that his father had stuffed all of their bags into a taxi and paid a driver in a lorry to transport the small upright piano that had been purchased after living in Israel for half a day, along with a few other larger items, to the airport, where they would be packed into a shipping container and transported over separately. He had screamed that he was not leaving until he found her, and his father had shouted back that he was ruining his life chasing ghosts. Then the child had started wailing, for even though her English was rough, there where questions that had been translated into English for her to ask, and she had picked up some of the meanings of words that had been spoken between her father and her mother's friends, and she understood now that her mother was never going to return to her, never going to sing her to sleep or tell her tales about her father. The child realised then why her father shed a silent tear every time she pulled a certain face or pointed at a certain picture or mentioned a certain person.
It had also been the first time she had seen him cry in public. Ever. It was not even just a few trickling tears. He had fully broken down, sobbing loud, watery sobs into his hands. People had turned in the street to cast a cursory glance at him as he keened for his loved one who was never to come home, and then turned back to their daily routines – knowing that one day it would be them on the pavement rocking back and forth and wailing 'til their voices where hoarse and they had no tears left, and hoping that if they turned away soon enough and looked straight ahead the plague of death would not infect them and they would not be tomorrow's unlucky one, mourning for their husband, their lover, their sister, their mother.
She had watched as they built a life in Paris, setting a routine and sticking to it. But by then they had been little more than carcasses, the husks of people who had lost all meaning to life, the shells of people left empty by the departure of their souls. Even the child, who had not four months ago been so innocent and peaceful, so happy to be alive and not realising why, now carried the weight of a dead mother and a grief-laden father. And the old man, who had always been so full of life, just like his son, now had to force a smile that used to come so naturally, and looked tired and haggard by everything, the nightmares that woke his son in the room next to his, the crying of both younger residents, his own heartache for a woman who he wished he could have spent more time with. She had noticed that he had been making a particular effort to try and keep the spirits of the household up, the first effort being to remove all alcohol. The second had been to introduce a new diet, consisting mainly of fruit and vegetables, with the occasional piece of meat or fish thrown in, and he had been learning to cook. And she was proud of him, because he was being a father and a grandfather, both of which were concepts that were relatively new and abstract to him.
And he still wouldn't give up. Not fully. Every time he saw a mass of dark curls, she saw a light flicker though his eyes, hope that was two tough and deeply rooted to die. This hope was hardy, strong enough to push through the anguish that consumed him and bring back a short-lived moment of colour to his grey face, like poppies on the Somme, determined to bring a flash of optimism to a land of desolate darkness. But unlike poppies, his hope faded and withered when he saw the face of whoever it was with the dark, curly locks, for it was never her. The nose or the eyes or the smile was always wrong. She was always too tall or too short. She was never the perfect woman he was searching for. And every day, when he woke up and began his quest of picking out every detail of everything around himself to try and find her in a crowd of people, he looked too closely, because she was always right before his eyes, hidden in plain view.
The girl's birthday was the first time he had laid eyes on her, but after ten minutes of staring his father had convinced him that it wasn't her, even though this time he had a slight doubt in his voice when he said it. They had all seen her, just a glance, and she knew that from then on she would have to be careful, she would have to sink further into the shadows, do a better job of watching without staring. That day was her daughter's birthday, and she told herself that that was reason enough to have been lax with her precautions, to have slipped up, but her error meant that it would never be so easy to be able to get so close again. She would never be able to sit across the road, three tables down, and watch as her daughter blew out the candles on her birthday cake. She would never be able to walk only footsteps behind the man she had once dreamt of marrying, and still did if she was fully honest with herself. She would never be able to properly hear their voices, not even muffled by distance, because even though she would still hover around them, guarding them and sheltering them from any evil forces that might want to wrap their bony fingers around them and take them from her, she could never be so close to them again.
For my reference: 39th NCIS fic.