Disclaimer: NCIS isn't mine.
Warning: Language sprinklings. Spoilers for seasons 11, 12.
Credit: Cover picture by Kelly Brown Photography.
A/N: Maybe I'm crazy, but this has poked at me since July. There are reasons it stayed in my files. I don't know how far it will go, or how often I can water it and put it in sunlight. It just wants to be, you know? I have to get it out. So I'm gonna try.
—
Craftsmanship has been said to consist simply in the
desire to do something well, for its own sake.
Matthew B. Crawford
—
Chapter One - Gouge
Leroy Jethro Gibbs might have left his house unlocked for the past twenty years, but he wasn't stupid. After the girls were taken from him, he'd done it in challenge. Go on—come and get me. Who was it he was goading back then? Ghosts? Dirtbags? Company in the dark…
It was dark as hell in his living room, now. Dark and empty, to anyone else. Not to Gibbs. Crawling the death jungles of Panama had given him a sense for when the air wasn't his alone. Something else drew short, nervous inhales opposite him.
His hand hovered over the service weapon at his hip, thumb on the leather snap. Habit more than precaution. He pretended not to look right at her.
"Gonna hide forever… Ziva?"
Her breathing stopped; his, too. Holding, holding. Don't run.
The floorboards whined. Her shadow moved in shadows, the silver buckles on her boots catching moon glints streaming through the windows. He couldn't make out her face, but there was a rich voice—
"I was not hiding."
Gibbs finally exhaled. "No? What do you call this, then?"
"I was waiting."
"For?"
Her hands waved, fluttered. He'd always meant to teach her to sign. Add another language to her repertoire. She had thin, expressive hands—good hands for it. The gesture they made now said, who else but you?
Gibbs squeezed the back of his neck, misdirection for his rolling advance: heel, toe, heel. "What're you doing here, Ziva?"
Her single, jittery laugh snapped through the air. "That is, uh…not an easy question to answer."
"Why now?"
"Again, it is not—"
"Easy, right." Half the distance gone. He saw her clearly: the guarded eyes, the coffee-brown hair slicked back so tight the skin of her face stretched taut over the cheek bones. Still damn young. Not much older than Kelly would be…
How long had it been? His dry eyes flipped to the ceiling, counting. Year and a half? Nah, had to be more. DiNozzo came back. Bishop came to them. Dad. Then, Zakho. Almost two?
Two years and she was a shadow, clinging to walls. Haunting.
Two years and it still wasn't 'easy.'
Two years, goddamnit.
His sidestep was sudden, but Ziva— Feet planted. Forearms up. Hands like blades. She would've had him.
And any other day, Gibbs would've smirked it off.
She caught herself, dropping her arms at her sides. "I am sorry, Gibbs. I—"
He swept around her. Treads heavy, strides long. His gun went in the safe; his suit jacket in the front closet, swapped out for an insulated vest, work shoes for boots. She didn't budge. He retraced his steps—out the door.
"Let's go," he called from the last step off the porch. Like hell I'm letting you stay here alone.
Gibbs entertained driving around the block, making her really wait for him. He gunned the engine loud enough to earn complaints from the neighbors in the morning. His foot left the brake—
Ziva slipped into the passenger side, slamming the door shut. She didn't ask where they were going. She didn't say anything at all.
He told her to buckle up. Click.
They whipped down the driveway, onto the road, and into the night.
…
The white blaze in his chest receded with each passing highway mile marker. The Virginia wilderness was blue-black when they arrived at the cabin. The headlights of the Charger cut and the gloom deepened.
"You have kept it."
It was the first she'd spoken in forty minutes. Gibbs preferred quiet, but nothing she had to say that night would be extraneous or trivial. Why else would she be there?
"I converted it to a woodworking hutch awhile back."
"The projects in your basement—"
"Bring 'em up here now."
"It is…peaceful," Ziva approved, weaving the overgrown trail ahead of him. At midnight. With cloud cover. Good 'ol Mossad training.
He noted how calmly she walked toward the little prison. Toward interrogation. Could he blame that on Mossad, too? How'd you hold the past accountable?
Gibbs nodded at the pyramid of chopped firewood aside the porch. "Grab a few, would 'ya?"
Ziva did, and they went inside. Her remark that the interior was almost as bare as his living room won her a sideways quirk of his mouth. It was as if she'd gotten him to belly laugh, she was so proud.
With the fire going, Gibbs claimed his rocker near the hearth. Ziva took a sanded tree stump opposite him, her torso leaning parallel with her thighs. The heel of her right boot bounced. Her coal eyes darted. Panic settling in.
His wingspan opened over the arms of the chair. Well?
"I do not know what you want me to say, Gibbs." As if she hadn't been the one skulking in the dark of his living room. "I am sure you have questions for me, why I left—"
"Try something I don't know."
Their eyes met. Echoes of her tear-soaked, self-loathing rambles dripping over the phone line rang in his ears—clear as goddamn morning reveille. Ziva looked away first.
"You quit," he reminded. "You wanted to go. I couldn't stop you."
"That is not…untrue." There went her hands again, grasping at invisible words to explain herself. Ziva interrogating Ziva.
Gibbs rocked on the curved runners. Taken two sittings to sand them down smooth. He rocked, and waited.
And waited.
"Ziva."
Wild eyes flicked up to him. "I should not have come."
"Maybe," he agreed, but she wasn't moving. Practically glued to the stump. "You in trouble?"
"No. Why would you—"
"Need something?"
Silence.
There it is.
"Do not mistake me, Gibbs."
"Then start talking, Ziva."
Her dark brow furrowed; she huffed. No wonder Eli went gray. Would she stick her tongue out at him, too?
No. She began. "Ever since I left, I have sought to make amends with my...past actions. It is a long list, as you might imagine."
Gibbs scoffed, loud.
"I tried to do good," Ziva bit back. Hating him, probably. But needing whatever this was more. "It was an effort to make up for all those..." Something caught up to her, choked her off, and she tried again. "For those I have…hurt." Once formed, the solitary word destroyed her mouth, gnashing with the blades of every sin she'd committed, every tortured soul she'd torn from a body with a bullet or her knife. She closed her lips over the wreckage.
The rocker slowed, slowed. Stopped. Gibbs leaned over, arms on his knees. The maple planks under his feet warped and his breathing tunneled through his ears. He'd let her go, and hoped. Heck, hoped to God. It kept him sane about her. He deleted her number. He found a replacement. Why was the knife still in her belly?
Ziva tilted sideways on the stump and he envisioned her toppling like a wobbly toddler. Instead she eased to her feet, paced. She came in and out of his downward gaze.
"For a long time, I spared little thought for NCIS. It was easier that way. It was not until last year, when I saw the news bulletin out for Tony's arrest in Marseille. I knew the murder charges must have been a misunderstanding. I was staying with an old friend in Paris. I almost tried to…" Her steps lagged out of his sight.
Gibbs recalled the case. He rummaged for other times the agency made international press she might have seen and—ah.
Her voice returned, scratchy with smoke. "I heard about Cairo. My condolences for the loss of Agent Dorneget."
"He was a good kid. A good agent."
"I also know about the incident in Zakho, from which I see you are sufficiently recovered."
The pockmark below his ribcage itched dully. It was a mistake, trusting a kid tangled in grass-roots. In something so chaotic, so addictive. Gibbs ached with his age.
"Mostly," he replied. "That was three months ago."
"Yes."
"You've been gone two years, Ziva."
She thawed, rotating her body toward him. Her eyes were not beautiful in the firelight, but murky caverns. "Yes."
Gibbs blew out a rough breath. "And you just thought to show up now?"
The same clawing rage from the house mounted his spine, shredding into his hunched shoulders. Then the workbench was under his hands; the empty rocker kicked wildly behind him. He hadn't moved that fast since a child terrorist shot him point blank. His gasps came raspy, a baby rattle in his chest. Maybe he was developing asthma, like McGee.
"Where is that damn…" He patted around for the bottle of amber liquid on the shelf and overturned two small Mason jars. Screws and nails clinked, scattered.
"I have upset you." The screeching door hinges acted as snitch, giving away her retreat.
"Where the hell are you going?"
"I thought you would not want me—"
"I'm your ride, remember?" He pointed with the bottle. Her, the stump. "Sit down. We're not done."
That she obeyed the command without rebuke—again—almost sent him running himself. Where'd his Ziver go?
Gibbs spilled out her finger's worth first. He overflowed his own and downed it. Poured another. The liquor ripped up his throat. His eyes watered, and the fire was burning through too fast. They were both sweating inside the tinder box. He sat, taming the inferno within him.
"No more stories, no more damn confessions. Tell me why you're here."
Ziva swallowed her bourbon as painlessly as room-temperature water. She stared into the ice-blue of the rifle scope. "Hearing about Tony, and you, made me realize that the list of those I had…it would not be complete without NCIS. I would like the chance to make things right, if you will have me."
More echoes. Gibbs wrenched his head away and there she stood in his basement, teary-eyed, jumpy from months of torture in that hellhole Somalia. It is your blessing I came for…
He blinked, hard, and there she was in his bullpen, looking nothing and everything like a girl who'd killed her half-brother. You requested this—
Gibbs pinched his eyelids shut. It shouldn't have come as a surprise.
Who else but you?
"Gibbs." Ziva, there.
"Yeah." He swiped at his jaw, mouth. Night sounds returned. The fire dared to crackle. The waves…they turned tail.
She dangled out her Mason jar, and Gibbs obliged. It was all he had for her.
They drank steadily together, but separately. They were quiet, lapsing into their own minds. So it went and went. The last leg of wood was fizzling when she wandered, feet dragging, over to the workbench. The neck of the bottle lolled from her fingertips. Sips remained. She'd had more than him, in the end.
The bourbon was abandoned for a carving knife.
In the smoldering dim, Gibbs watched her raise the blade. Eyed her. It didn't leave you. And he watched her take aim.
Three strides and he intercepted her hand, sparing a new plank of butternut from senseless gouging.
"I know what I am doing," Ziva spat, wrestling him.
"Nope." Gibbs wiggled the tool free of her grip and nudged her in the direction of a cot. "Not tonight."
Her head bobbed and bobbed, and she argued no further. She fell hard into the cot and harder into sleep, her boots still on.
…
Gibbs didn't sleep. Not well. Oblivion clawed him under for bits and spurts; little girls in chains and red fire pokers and fathers absent chased him out again. Had he not touched her, yanked a knife from her drunken grip, he might have wondered if he'd spent the previous evening in a nightmare. Or else conversing with a ghost. It'd been known to happen before.
When he woke for good, Ziva wasn't in the cot opposite him.
Outside, he picked up ladies size 7 boot-prints leading from the cabin down a side trail. A hundred paces due northwest brought him through the prickly forest to the lake. He'd discovered it awhile back, went fishing on occasion. Caught and released bottom-feeding Redear Sunfish, mostly. His rowboat could cross one end to the other in eighteen paddles. He'd counted.
Ziva stood at the jagged edge of shore, pointed out at the water. Her thumbs hooked the back pockets of her jeans. The ponytail was gone and her sleep-tangled curls hung down past her shoulders. He joined her statue.
"I did not notice this the last time I was here."
You were too busy throwing a fit.
Tony wasn't around to talk her down and Gibbs wasn't in the mood after the night they'd had. He swallowed dewy air. "I'll take you out on it sometime."
"I do not fish."
Nodding, Gibbs looked to the lake. Morning sun brought out the best in the aqua-brown depths. His fair eyes shied from the glare off the surface, squinted.
"I'm not telling the team for you."
"I know," Ziva said, breathless standing still.
"DiNozzo's got a new girl."
"I did not expect anyone to wait for me."
"Uh-huh."
"Gibbs. I did not."
"O-kay."
A tepid breeze sighed between them. A birdsong flew into the branches over their heads. The temperature would rise by noon; they were in the first days of September. The transition from one thing to another.
"Okay," Gibbs said again, slipping out of formation.
"W-we are leaving?"
"I'm getting coffee." The throbbing at his temples was Morse-coding a request for caffeine. Instant would have to do. "We don't leave till tomorrow."
Underbrush crunched and snapped. Her graceless chase was far from Mossad-issue. "Tomorrow?"
Gibbs pulled up, forcing her to do the same or slam into him. "Well yeah, David. Didn't think I came up here just because of you, did 'ya? I came to whittle."
Feet planted. Shoulders straight. Gaze narrowed. "And what exactly do you suggest I do while you are whittling? You know I am not a woodpecker." Those hands of hers, flying. Hands designed for work—art, maybe. Not for curling knuckles white, fisting regrets.
"Woodworker, Ziver."
"Still."
His smirk emerged, crooked as ever. "C'mon. I'll teach you."
Gibbs gave a jerk of his head, turning on the trail. She followed.