Ok so this is like the very beginning, like way back before my story starts, but I felt it should be included. It was only going to be the bombing, but it got to be much bigger and more elaborate. Ziva will seem a little out of character because I threw her into a situation she isn't normally in, at an age we haven't seen her, with people we haven't seen or I have made up. So bear with me. Consider this character building for her. To see how she learned to hold everything in.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters you recognize. Well maybe Tali's personality, but not her. Just the ones I created. =]

Hot. That was one word Ilana would always associate with Israel. Of course the fact that she was there in the middle of August, sleeping in a tent with three other girls her age, off to the side of their dig site, didn't help her impression of the heat. She was just twenty years old and had finished her undergraduate degree two years ahead of schedule. She was on a dig with the Anthropology and Archaeology program at her college. It was not to say that she wasn't used to heat, she had grown up in southern California where hot summers, and occasionally hot winters, were not uncommon, but she had been in New England for a while and was accustomed to the cooler weather.

She had been there for about six weeks and found that she had made friends with a few locals. She traveled a lot but normally she stuck with her mother or school friends, though this time her mother was at home and she wasn't friends with any of the others. The girl she had befriended was two years younger than her and looked for all the world like a sister to her now that Ilana's hair was dyed to fit in to the natives.

The girl, Ziva, was an operative of Mossad. The agency that, she knew, held utmost power in the country, and, much as she denied it, Ziva was the liaison and it didn't bother Ilana one bit. Most days when her presence was not needed at the dig, Ziva and Ilana would go into Tel Aviv, sometimes accompanied by Ziva's little sister, Tali. The professors mostly allowed this because the promising young anthropology student had decided to write a paper on the culture of the society from the inside, as she not only could fit in visually but understood the language well and spoke it better than she thought.

This day was no different. Ziva and Tali had met Ilana in a small café in the city and had been chatting for a while, occasionally switching languages to practice the few they all knew. They stayed away from English as they were all quite fluent, and used Hebrew mostly because of their location, though using Spanish and French was fun. Ilana tried to teach Tali German and increase Ziva's vocabulary while they tried to teach her Italian and a little Arabic or Kurdish. The American had long since given up trying to teach them Latin, as they had quickly pointed out that it was a dead language and of more use to a scientist than an operative. She had to concede that they were right.

They had been eating their lunch like normal when Tali spoke up. "Ziva. I need to go. Ari asked me to meet him in ten minutes. I'll see you both later." she said with a smile. She was as independent as her sister. They three began their normal chorus of goodbyes, repeating them in different languages as if they would be gone for years. "Shalom." Tali began.

"Ma'as salaama." Ziva replied.

[Egyptian Arabic]

"Ahoj." Ilana added.

[Czech Republic]

"Au revoir." Tali continued with a giggle, expecting one more round before they let her leave.

[French]

"Chao." Ziva replied again with a smile.

[Chilean Spanish, had to through that in. =)]

"Auf Wiedersehen." Ilana finished, smiling now at the obvious interest they were attracting. They had not only managed to look like sisters in the six weeks they had been together, but they had begun to act like sisters as well.

[German]

"Bye." they said together before laughing as Tali left the café and waved to them from the other side of the window. Ziva and Ilana had gone back to talking, though it was much less happy than it had been before. When the youngest of their group was not present they talked mostly of contact after the dig was over, which was surprisingly soon. The time difference would not be as bad as it could have been, considering that Ilana would be attending Oxford, but e-mail was a must. They made promises to make contact at least once a month but more if they could, unless Ziva was undercover or away from communication for an extended period, then she was exempt, but Ilana was not.

"I don't see how that's fair, but alright." she acquiesced with a grin.

Boom. There isn't really a word to describe the sound of a bomb going off, but it was unmistakable. The young women sprang to their feet and ran from the café at the protest of many of the older and, supposedly, more sensible patrons. They ran to where they knew the bomb had come from, where Tali had been going. It was two city blocks away. Of course it was two blocks of big buildings and a lot of running people. How they knew what to do neither would be able to say, even years later, but they did what they had to, helping paramedics and civilians alike to save lives. But it was the worst thing Ilana had ever seen. She had been through the Rodney King Riots, but this was worse, much worse.

As she pulled survivors from under pieces of rubble and pressed kind hands to flesh wounds and handing the more serious injuries over to the professionals, she could not stop thinking. 'What happened here? This kind of thing shouldn't happen. The Gulf War is over… it has been for years, no more rocket attacks on Israeli citizens. What's happening to the world?' That was when she saw the shoes. They were attached to a pair of feet like any normal shoes would be in the middle of the street, but what stopped her was who those shoes belonged to. Ilana had found a loved one dead before, so she mustered up her courage and walked over to where Tali's head was. Her body was intact aside from the obvious shrapnel wounds. With trembling fingers the young American searched for a pulse on the wrist and neck of surrogate little sister. Finding none and satisfying herself that nothing could be done, she got the attention of someone more capable and directed him to Tali in Hebrew, quietly explaining who the girl was. The man nodded and she went with him.

In a few moments he came to the same conclusion and Ilana left him there, she would break down with her friend, not in front of this stranger. She found Ziva explaining something to another paramedic type. Ilana tapped her friend on the shoulder and led her away. She sat the younger girl down on the curb and took the seat beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Her fluency in Hebrew nearly failing her, she composed herself enough to tell Ziva the truth.

"I found Tali. I'm so sorry Ziva, but she's gone." With that final word she dissolved into tears, quiet, but not silent tears. Seeing the girl who rarely cried, really cry made it real to Ziva. She wanted to see her sister, to prove it was true, but she already knew it was. It was what had pulled the two of them from the café and toward the street. They hadn't known it then as they did now, but they knew Tali had been involved, and they had probably felt that she was gone, without having any proof until now. Ziva moved to get up and run away from it, or run to Tali, she didn't know. But Ilana's hand on her arm, pulling her back down, was enough to stop the normally stubborn girl. They cried together for a long time. Until, it seemed, nothing was left around them. They cried until the tears had dried on their cheeks and all that was left were the racking sobs that followed the death of so loved an individual. Ziva knew Ilana had been through more than her fair share of death, but how she had found the courage to prove Tali's death herself was a wonder to her.

"Who did you lose?" Ziva asked in French, wanting to be overheard as little as possible. Ilana took the hint and followed suit.

"My father. We were very close. You would have liked him. He would have liked you a lot. Tali too. I don't know your personal beliefs on the afterlife, but I imagine they're up there together looking down on us and yelling for us to stop being so stupid and to get up off the street and go somewhere safer. They would be good at ganging up on us." Sad smiles spread across both their faces as they imagined being yelled at by their lost loved ones for staying in such an unsafe place just to cry. Ilana looked down at their sneakered feet. "Want to run back to the dig? Runner's high?" Ziva nodded and they took off, letting the endorphins and wind wash away the traces of their outburst.

They matched pace the whole way and made it back to the site in record time. Everyone was still working, but the pair couldn't figure out why. A girl of about twenty-two looked up at them from the trench and groaned. "The dynamic duo. Where's the other one? No trio today?" she asked spitefully, as she detested the girls for their young success though she was perfectly capable of the same if she applied herself.

"A bomb went off in the city." Ilana explained in English, pausing to let Ziva repeat it in Hebrew. They relayed the events of the past hour or so in this fashion until they had answered all the questions they could. They had finished and the group of people in front of them were bustling about for more news. Ilana turned to Ziva and began in low whispered French. "The daughter of a higher up in Mossad dies in bombing on her way to meet his illegitimate son and his only other child falls off grid for a few hours, maybe or maybe not with an American student who could pass not only as an Israeli, but as her sister, and who no one knew very much about. That doesn't look good. Even if your father isn't worried, someone will be looking for you." She was concerned and honest, knowing, without stating, that the both of them would be at the top of the search list, not just Ziva.

"I need to stay away from them all tonight. Can I stay here?" Ilana sighed. This could mean trouble, but she had slept on the living room floor for a week after her father died, she could not deny her friend one night away from Mossad, to mourn her sister. "And you will come to the funeral, yes?" Ilana agreed to both.

The next few days passed in a blur for the pair of girls. Eli David had yelled and screamed at them both for a considerable amount of time, and they had tuned him out with the expertise of teenage years. They already knew what they had done wrong and since one was an American citizen and relations were good and the other was well on her way to becoming a great agent and his daughter, neither got more than a boring a loud lecture.

The funeral was as to be expected. Ziva and Ilana were roughly the same size, so Ziva dressed her friend for the funeral and fitted her with a necklace, so she could attend the ceremony as a Jew. She knew what to do and what to say. She considered it immersion as well as grieving. Ilana sat with Ziva as a sister would have, at Ziva's demand. It was at this time in their lives that Ziva would have pulled a throwing knife out of her boot and lobbed it perfectly at someone's head as a warning for Ilana, who would have killed for Ziva or cleaned up after her and left no proof. They were a team in those days.

After the funeral there were four days of Israel left for Ilana. Due to her proximity to the explosion and her assistance during rescue efforts, she was given the few days off to spend however she liked. It was on that first day off that she experienced Ziva's driving. They drove to Jerusalem that day. It was odd that Ilana knew she should be scared and sick to her stomach, but she found her friend's driving thrilling in a way, like a roller coaster ride that could get you killed. They arrived at their destination and got out of the car.

"Do you always drive like that?" Ziva nodded, a little confused, and Ilana shrugged. The spent the day being tourists. They took pictures galore to remember their time together, something they had often done with Tali, who had been more acutely aware of their lack of time together than either of them had been. They visited many of the tourist spots in the city before getting back into the car and driving the opposite direction of Tel Aviv. They drove at Ziva's breakneck speed into Jordan. They had stopped at a small hotel for the night before Ziva said anything. They had been listening to Israeli pop songs on the car radio, many of which Ilana had come to like, the entire drive.

"Tali wanted to bring you here. She said you would love Jordan as much as you love Israel. This place is our shared Holy Land, she would tell me, and that we needed to be more open and share its beauty with people like you who would appreciate it. Tomorrow we will get to Petra. I know you want go there." she said with a sad smile. This Ziva was unlike the Ziva Ilana knew, the one who had taught her to use almost every gun in the arsenal at Mossad, the one who had taught her how to flip a man twice her size, the one who had taught her how to throw knives and step silently in heels. This Ziva was broken. She was not the ninja chick Ilana loved. But she nodded anyway, with her own sad smile.

"Just promise me one thing, Zee?" Her friend nodded expectantly. "You go back to be my ninja chick soon. I know it hurts, but it hurts more to stay like this. She wouldn't want it. Promise?" Ziva let out a real smile and nodded.

"I promise." They slept soundly that night and Ilana even managed to talk Ziva into letting her drive for a little while in the morning, but eventually she got annoyed with how slow Ilana drove and took over. They reached Petra and did the tourist-slash-anthropologist thing before getting back into the car and drove west to the Jordan river, following it north to the Dead Sea, where they floated around for a little while. They got back into the car and found a hotel to stay the night. The next morning they headed up to Nazareth and then back to Tel Aviv. They reached there my late evening considering Ziva's driving.

"You'll come see me off at the airport right?" Ilana asked, before her friend pulled away from the dig site to go back to the city and her home. Ziva nodded.

"Of course. laila tov, my friend." she replied.

"Toda, and gute Nacht, Ziva." Ilana added just before her friend drove off into the night. The next morning the dig team was at the airport waiting at the gate. A melodic Israeli voice directed at them stirred many out of their reverie. It wasn't that they weren't hearing many Israeli voices -- they were still in Tel Aviv! -- but none were directed at them.

"Ilana?" "Zee! You came!" The friends hugged each other for what felt like the last time. "My father gave me a mission. I will not be able to contact you, but write to me anyways, yes?" "Of course." "Shalom, my friend." "Not goodbye Zee, just a see you later. If you need anything I'm not going too awfully far. I'm sure you could make it in a couple of days with the way you drive." They laughed a little. "Do not forget what I have taught you." "Don't forget what you promised." They hugged once more and Ziva was gone. It was only a few moments later that the plane boarded and Ilana was forced to leave, unknowingly sacrificing her chance to see her friend for ten years.

For clarification if anyone needs it, Laila tov means good night in Hebrew and gute Nacht means the same in German.

So did you like it, hate it, have suggestions? Drop me a review and let me know.