A/N: Basically this is the antithesis of the story I posted the other day. Maybe mildly angsty but with a happy ending. Enjoy! Please leave a review.
As usual, cross-posted to AO3 under Elsie_Snuffin.
She is headed home.
One simple errand had taken the better part of an hour. All she needed was shampoo. Even with her hair cut shorter, she runs out quicker than she expects.
The first two stores don't carry her brand. The American brand that she started using years ago because it smelled nice - like vanilla and orange peel - and kept her curly hair from getting frizzy. Something she never used to care about before.
She finally finds a bottle in a different part of the city. It costs double what she would pay in DC, but she buys it anyway.
It's just a reminder that this country, the place of her birth, is no longer hers. Technically, she is still a citizen. But she's learned that week-long visits once a year are not enough to maintain ties. Especially with Tali, Ari, Eli, her mother all gone. Especially when she hadn't lived there in eight years. Even longer taking into account the missions she was sent on for Mossad before she became the liaison officer for NCIS.
She revs the engine and zooms around someone taking too long to make a right turn. At least more people drive like her here. Tony would constantly be claiming heart attacks.
Tony.
If she wasn't already waiting at a stoplight, she would have slammed on the brakes at the thought of him. She mutters a swear in Hebrew for thinking of him.
It has been months since she practically pushed him onto an airplane. The only contact they've had since was a short exchange over text message.
He wrote, I just need to know - are you still alive?
And she responded, Yes.
That was it.
Before he left, she had put the communications embargo in place.
"A clean break," she had explained, "must mean no contact."
The look in his eyes still haunts her. "Forever?" he had asked.
"I do not know."
And with the one exception, he has honored her wishes.
Breaking contact with him, the man who she saw almost every day for eight years, in whose hands she placed her life time and again, was like detoxing from a drug. It was compulsion to pick up her phone to text him when something made her laugh. But she broke the habit because she felt she must.
Keeping him from her mind was more difficult. Still is. She estimates that she is successful about 90% of the time now. But in that remaining 10%, he sneaks up on her like he is playing one of his pranks. Surprise! his ghost exclaims in those moments.
Then she swears at herself and moves on with her life.
Let go of everything and start afresh.
Until she can't anymore.
Her house - officially her house, with her father leaving it to her in his will - is as sparsely decorated as it was when she first came here almost a year ago. Boxes of her stuff from DC, packed up carefully by Ducky and Jimmy Palmer, line the walls, fill otherwise empty corners. A few boxes are open and her summer clothes hang in a closet, but the majority of the items remain. She considered donating it all but found herself somehow unable to part with them.
So much for letting go of everything.
It is this inability to give up the things she had in her DC apartment that cracks her otherwise iron willpower.
You don't have to leave everything behind, you know, someone with brown hair and sad hazel eyes had told her.
He was right.
It has been possible to feel like she is atoning for the sins of her past while keeping possessions from her old life in boxes. She volunteers at an orphanage, reading books to children hungry for attention. She donates a chunk of her inheritance from her father to refugee organizations.
She had planned to volunteer at one of the refugee camps in Jordan until one of the lead organizers recognized her name and told her that she would make them all a target, that Eli David's only living child would be a trophy for the terrorists.
Yet another way that Eli's shadow continues on after his death.
When she found herself unable to give away the things from her old life, she knew. It was time.
She found a buyer for the farmhouse. The house is not modern but has good bones, or so the realtor says, and it is impossible to ignore the beauty of the adjoining olive orchard. The house had been her father's, and his father's before that, but they were both dead and it is time for the house to be part of someone else's family.
Maybe it will live again.
The flight back to DC feels longer than usual. She has a three hour layover somewhere and finds herself sitting in a mostly deserted airport.
She pretends to read, puts in headphones so nobody will talk to her. The album to which she is listening ends eventually and nothing starts in its place. She barely notices.
Instead, she wonders if she should have told anyone she is coming back and then thinks about the ramifications of being back in DC. Abby, Ducky, and Palmer will celebrate. McGee will look up from his computer and smile. Gibbs will smirk and tell her it took long enough.
She won't let herself think about what Tony will do. Then it's all she thinks about.
Eventually, she manages to hear the announcement that the flight to Dulles is now boarding. As she settles into her seat for the last leg of her journey, she is derailed by a single thought.
She is going home.
She is outside his apartment, suitcase resting next to her.
If she had been thinking, she would have wondered if he would even be home. It is morning, on a Saturday. More often than not, he is at the office on Saturday mornings. Grumpy, complaining, but there.
But she doesn't think.
For once, she just acts.
She knocks. And remembers to breathe. In, out. Steady. The hallway smells newly vacuumed, as it always has.
Footsteps, approaching from the other side of the door. The click of a lock turning. The door opens. And he is there, in sweats and an Ohio State shirt.
She watches the emotions play over his face silently, her eyes steady.
And then.
He takes a step forward, bridges the space between them. And folds his strong, familiar arms around her. He doesn't say anything, just holds her tightly. She inhales his scent and the world rights itself.
She is home.
END.