Disclaimer: Somewheeere over the rainbow ... I don't know how the rest goes.
Spoilers: 10X24 "Damned If You Do." Given recent spoilers, it's also AU to S11, and will in that manner make you heart ache. You have been warned.
Notes: This was prompted by an Anon on Tumblr, who wanted 'Tony taking care of drunk Ziva.' Much thanks to that Anon!
-Soph
Drunk
"Porcupig!" Ziva gave a high-pitched giggle, pointing somewhere about a foot above Tony's head. He frowned against the brightness of the light in his apartment building's corridor, his arm shooting out almost out of reflex to grab his former partner as she stumbled backwards.
"Ziva?" he asked hoarsely, confused. Her appearance at his front door was nothing out of the ordinary nowadays; her appearance at his front door in the middle of the night, while drunk out of her mind, was literally unheard of.
"That's me!" she announced brightly. "Ziva David. Dah-veed."
"I can see that," he drawled. She gave him a comically lopsided smile, and he sighed before dragging her into the hallway of his apartment. "Do I even want to know how you got here?"
"I took a cab." She giggled. "They're big and yellow, and the driver wasn't pleased."
He frowned. He doubted the driver's displeasure was due to the colour of the taxicab, but he was not about to argue that with her. How she managed to flag down a cab was a mystery, let alone how she had been able to give the cab driver Tony's address.
"C'mon," Tony grumbled. "You need bedding."
"Like hamsters," she offered, and he rolled his eyes.
"Like hamsters," he repeated perfunctorily. And then he stood stock-still for a moment, unsure of where in his apartment to put her. Bed? Couch? Living room floor? Bathroom floor? He had never taken care of a drunken Ziva before, and had no idea what she could or would do; that fact made him very nervous. He didn't really want to wake up in the morning to find that she had thrown up everywhere or turned his beloved, well-kept sanctuary upside down.
Ziva, apparently, took his lack of movement as disagreement with her statement. "Hamsters need bedding!" she insisted. "They need beds! You don't give hamsters beds?"
"I don't have hamsters," he muttered.
"Oh." That news seemed to sadden her greatly, and despite knowing that the whole conversation was bizarrely illogical and out of this world, Tony's heart ached at the expression on her face.
"C'mon," he said once again, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Let's get you to bed."
With surprising obedience, she let him lead her into the bedroom and settle her down beneath his blankets. Her rate of blinking was slow and infrequent now; she was quickly heading towards dreamland, he could tell, but she still clung tightly to his hand.
"Let go," he urged her softly. "I'm going to get you a bucket just in case you throw up in the middle of the night."
"Don't throw up when 'm drunk," she slurred in what had to be her most lucid sentence of the night. He furrowed his brows. He wouldn't take her word for it, but he did not have a choice, because her grip was evidently as strong when she was drunk as when she was sober.
"Can you let go, anyway?" he tried. "My hand hurts."
That earned him something that was half-sob, half-hiccup. "You're going to kick me out."
"Of course not." He brushed her hair back from her flushed face with his other hand. "Why would you say that?"
"You kick hamsters out."
Tony slapped his forehead with his palm. "Ziva, you're not a hamster," he snapped impatiently at her wide-eyed stare.
"'M not?" she asked with wonder.
"No!" he exclaimed. "Oh my God, are you high? I don't think a person could get that drunk. Just … let go of me, for God's sake, and lemme go get that damned bucket. Close your eyes and sleep."
She promptly let go of his hand and shrank back, watching him warily. With another sigh, he turned away.
Retrieving a bucket couldn't have taken more than three minutes, but she was already asleep by the time he got back, on her side with her face pressed into the pillow and her fingers curled up tightly around the bedclothes as if she was afraid that he would drag her out of his apartment and dump her in the hallway. He let out another long breath as he sat down next to her on the mattress. She looked so peaceful in sleep; without nightmares, for once.
Leaning over her, he risked stroking her cheek once. Her skin was warm to the touch, but she didn't stir. It made him wonder what she had done, or what on Earth had happened, to make her get this drunk—Ziva was Ziva, and that was self-explanatory. She didn't get drunk. She had never wanted to get drunk (truly drunk, that was) in all the years that he had known her. To get drunk was to let down inhibitions, and Ziva was nothing if not the most cautious, inhibited, self-disciplined person he had ever seen. He had no idea what could have made her surpass tipsy and go right into … whatever she was right now.
He rubbed his eyes tiredly as he lowered himself to the floor and sat with his back against the wall, his head against the wooden leg of the headboard. He wasn't keen on having to spend the whole night that way and waking up with backache was certainly not on his list of priorities—but if Ziva had somehow managed to find her way to him when she needed help?
He would help her, no matter what.
xoxo
He jerked awake when he heard muted sobbing.
Through the thin rays of early morning sun, he could see Ziva's tiny figure burrowed into his bed, her eyes screwed shut against the tears tracking down her cheeks. He frowned. For a moment, he wondered if she was having a nightmare, but she seemed too … awake … to be dreaming. Slowly, he reached out to touch her shoulder.
He had the bucket under her face before she had even really begun retching.
He shuddered at the sound of semi-solids hitting the walls of the bucket, but stayed his ground, waiting until Ziva was done heaving before delicately taking the bucket from her. For the first time since she had shown up at his front door the previous night, she finally looked like Ziva, with her face stoic and her figure stiff as she gingerly sat up and picked her way out of his bedclothes.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To wash up." Her voice cracked, but she never looked back even as the bathroom door closed behind her.
He sat staring at the bucket. Oh, he really, really wanted to look away, but he still had to figure out what to do with the damned contents (short of tossing the whole thing, bucket and all, into the trash—and then the trash, double-bagged, down the garbage chute) and he still had to figure out why the hell Ziva had thought it was okay to show up at his apartment, drunkenly giggle her way intohis bed, throw up into his bucket, and then wash up in his bathroom.
Ugh.
Shifting the bucket aside, he stood carefully. He thought that beneath the sound of running water, he could hear her crying, but he couldn't be certain. He sat down on his bed and waited for the clicking of the lock which would tell him Ziva was coming out of the bathroom.
She headed straight towards the bucket upon emerging.
"Wait," he said, and she froze in place, obviously not daring to move. "I want to know why you're here."
She didn't lift her head. "I don't know."
"You don't know?" he asked sharply. "You don't know why you got so drunk you couldn't even remember your own address and showed up here instead at three in the freakin' morning?"
She took two sharp breaths, one after the other. "No," she mumbled. "I suppose I just … happened to be thinking about your apartment at the time."
He scoffed incredulously. "Okay, say that happened to be the case. You gonna run now? You're just gonna clean up that vomit and pretend you were never here at all?"
"Please, Tony." She sounded upset. "I am very ashamed of how I acted, and I am—I am trying to make it right. Please just let me fix things, and then I will be on my way. I am sorry to have bothered you."
"You're-… I don't care that you bothered me," he said honestly, moving to stand in front of her. "What I want to know is what the hell happened."
"I don't remember," she protested.
"What happened to make you get drunk," he elaborated. "What made you want to get drunk in the first place."
"I hung out with McGee yesterday," she blurted.
"He got you drunk?" Tony asked, confused.
She shook her head and then winced in pain. "He just-… He was so happy. And it reminded me of the things I would never have."
"Which are?"
She lifted a shoulder and dropped it. "Everything."
"That's not explaining anything at all."
"I don't know what you want me to say."
"Tell me what happened."
She exhaled deeply. "I met up with McGee yesterday, and he told me he has a new job."
"So, you want a job too?" Tony asked, still unsure of where she was going with this, if she was going anywhere at all.
"More than that," she answered. "McGee has … so much. He has an apartment paid for in full. He has a girlfriend who adores him, and whom he adores. He now has a job he is very good at, and a steady pay check and a routine to get up to every day. He has all of that, and I am still struggling to comprehend … where the life that I came to America to get has gone to."
Tony swallowed the lump in his throat. "Oh, Zi…" he murmured.
"It just got to be a bit too much yesterday. I wanted to just … forget everything for once, and I didn't see a reason to stop drinking after McGee left. I had no job to get to in the morning. I did not think anyone would want anything from me now that I had quit both the agencies I had spent my lifetime in. I had no one waiting for me to come home. So, I could get drunk without repercussions—and I did."
"And then you ended up here instead of at your own home," he summarized lightly.
She glanced up at him and flinched visibly as she did. "Clearly, I did not think far enough into the future. I am very sorry for that; it will not happen again."
He pursed his lips, studying her distraught appearance. "C'mere," he said, tugging on her unwilling hand to get her to accept his embrace. She ended up leaning heavily against him, her own hands wrapped around his back and bunching up the fabric of his shirt; he held her close for however many minutes she stood with her face buried into his shoulder.
"I'm not mad," he told her when she had finally lifted her head and pulled away slightly. "You don't have to be all oh-I'm-sorry-I'll-just-clean-up-and-pretend-I-was- never-here, y'know."
She looked away, biting her lip. "I gave you a lot of unwarranted trouble."
"Yeah, well, that's why we're partners." She gave him a bewildered look and he explained, "Once partners, always partners. I can't be all saving your life for eight years and then suddenly not care that you're trying to give yourself alcohol poisoning."
She chuckled, her cheeks tinting pink.
"There's not much I can do to help you get a job, but my door's always open, Zi, you know that," he added gruffly.
"I know," she whispered.
"So, come. Come find me the next time you need someone to talk to. Come find me when you need help—when something's bugging you. Before you get drunk and start knocking on random doors all over town."
"But I-… You have done too much that I cannot repay you for, and I have … never thanked you as I should." Her voice was rough.
They both knew what she was talking about: Ilan Bodnar, Adam Eschel, and everything that came before and after and during. And they both knew that they had never truly dealt with it.
"Come anyway," he said, and her chin trembled and she blinked rapidly. "I said nothing was awkward between us, and nothing is. We've both … gone too far, together, to just talk about who did what for whom like it can be measured. We're partners, that's all. I mean, it's practically in our blood by now to watch out for each other."
She nodded, drawing in a shaky breath. "Thank you, Tony," she said thickly.
He pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. "C'mon," he said, gathering up her hand once again. "Let's go get some painkillers for that headache of yours. And then we'll burn that damn bucket, and then we can go out for some breakfast. And then, Ziva? You and me, we're gonna come up with a game plan for the jobs we're gonna have by the end of this summer."
And he was certain that her smile, all hopeful around the edges and lighting her whole face up, was a more-than-adequate reward for his having had her back.