AN: So this is much more angsty than I expected, or anything I've ever written. But I promise it'll get happy, and it'll get Tiva. That is, if I can overcome my horrendous updating habits. But I will do my best!
Any comments and reviews are much appreciate.
He's forty-four years old and he's lived through a hell of a lot of days.
But never have they seemed so long that they bleed into each other. His life has disintegrated into an indistinguishable mass of mondaytuesdaywednesdaythursdayfridaysaturdaysunday . He's not accustomed to free time; he went from boarding school to OSU to Peoria to Philly to Baltimore to his former home at NCIS. He's never had these stretches of hours upon hours with no purpose but to stare at the wall, or even worse, get lost inside his own head.
At first, it was a welcome change. He was finally able to clean his apartment, stock his fridge with edible food, and catch up with some old buddies from his college days. The latter had been a wake-up call of sorts, though. All of those self-proclaimed lifetime bachelors, all with the exception of him, have wives and families and warm beds and homes filled with laughter to come home to at night.
He's different. He has a television, a DVD player, and a six pack of beer. He has a twin bed with cold sheets and a sterile apartment whose silence at night is deafening. He opens the windows as wide as they can go in vain hopes that a car rushing by or a bird twittering in a tree will allay the solitude.
For the past ten years, he's indubitably been part of a family- not a biological one, really, or a conventional one, but a support system nonetheless. Now, this resembles the time Senior abandoned him in the hotel room in Maui, only realizing his sorry existence when served with the room service bill. Abandoned. That's the key word here; he made the biggest sacrifice of all for Gibbs and has received no recompense but loneliness and a surplus of trips to the liquor store. He surrendered his beloved job, the only arena in which he's achieved lasting success, and with his badge, his sanity.
He takes another swig of beer from the bottle carelessly tossed next to him on the couch. He can't recall if it's his fourth or fifth, and then dismisses the thought- why does it matter? The burn as it coasts down his throat makes him cringe a little, but he isn't scared of pain. He beckons the pain in, because with it comes the numbness he's seeking. When he's anesthetized, he doesn't have to toss over and over in his mind all the things he's lost: the deafness incurred by entering Abby's lab, the discomfort on McGee's face when he probes him about his love life. The ringing in his ears after a well-deserved headslap, the lilt of Ducky's voice when he regales them with a story. But most of all he misses her- the clean, fresh scent of her perfume, the wave of her hair, the curve of her hip and her lip…he could go on for days. But while he undoubtedly aches for her, physically, he also misses his best friend. Now he has only the wall with which to share his secrets.
That he feels abjectly useless. He's caught bad guys his whole life, and he doesn't think he's qualified to do much else with a degree in physical education. McGee's got his techie skills, and Ziva's could do anything, really. As he said one summer in the African desert, he got his B.S. on the streets. He's too dejected to go hunting for a job he knows he's not going to get, so he passes the hours in careful meditation, watching the sun rise and set from the comfort and safety of his couch. Sometimes he pops a movie into the DVD player or rewatches a beloved episode of Magnum, P.I. And for an hour or two, he loses himself, sometimes in the plot, but mostly in the characters; he becomes, mindful of the cliché, part of their world during the time when they grace his screen. But when the credits roll, real life slaps him in the face. There are no happy endings for guys like him, guys who've hurt more people than they can count. And what Ziva said their last day at NCIS reverberates in his mind- that she's never depended on happy endings.
But she, more than anyone he's ever met, deserves one. All of the horrible, traumatic things she's endured, merely in the eight years he's known her, are more than should be experienced in one lifetime. She's a good person- smart, compassionate, empathetic, independent. He cannot bottle her essence, put it into words that adequately describe the depth and complexity of her psyche.
He just knows that he loves her, more than is healthy. And he misses her, because her absence is not just the coldness at his side where she typically stands, radiating heat and warmth and beauty. It's like there's a gaping hole inside of him, that he's an empty shell waiting for the end of days. He's fully aware he's being melodramatic and hyperbolic, but he's never been a happy drunk, but a despondent one. He's also a self-actualizing drinker- like right now, he realizes that this path he's heading down is far from a good one. The last time he drowned himself in a bottle was five years ago when Jenny died- god, has it really been that long? And now he feels guilty; he's been so self-absorbed and introspective that Jenny hasn't even crossed his mind in months. Now he pictures her in his mind's eye. Fearless, strong, driven, with that curtain of red hair settling around her shoulders, revenge burning brightly in her eyes. Much like Ziva, he discovers.
The memory of her dichotomously brings a smile to his face and a tear to his eye. He never really got to have a mother, except in those formative years that he can hardly recall, and Jenny filled that void for him, in her way. She believed in him, in his abilities, as an agent when Gibbs had turned his back on NCIS and him, leaving him in the dust once again. And she had imparted bounds of advice to him, about love, about life, and everything inherent therein. Her last tidbit of guidance was his favorite- that she knew Jeanne had hurt him and she rued involving him in her vendetta. But that he should live while he could, seize the day. And by the day, she meant Ziva, the asset she had cultivated and brought to her agency and intended for him, in more ways than one.
Not that Ziva would think highly of Jenny for promising her to Tony like chattel. But he knows that Jenny's intentions were always pure- the wish of a dying woman to bring some peace and love to the world, to people in whom she'd caused nearly irreparable pain. Little did Jenny know that merely a year from her parting words, Ziva'd be pointing a gun to his chest and Mossad would be accusing him of murder. Ah, how times change.
And how radically they've transformed in the past…what is it? Days? Weeks? Months? He can scarcely bear to count the minutes, let alone passage of time. He'd then have to acknowledge that this wasn't just a temporary solution to absolve Gibbs of guilt, but undeniably permanent. Because he couldn't handle that, and he'd probably do something rash and stupid with that knowledge, that idea, in his addled head. Because he's got his personal weapon stashed just a room away, and more and more these days he dreams of himself staring down the barrel of it. He unearths the bottle of vodka from under the couch and takes a shot. And then another. Chased by one more. And the floodgates of emotion open up.
Because despite the fact that she'd never admit it, and nor would be without coercion, he's been so enveloped in the full-time job of taking care of Ziva that he's neglected himself. And by taking care of her, he really means the strict eye he's been keeping on her mental health, as he glimpsed in her eyes the vengeance he sought that July four summers ago. He knows full well it's not salutary; it's destructive and debilitating and all-consuming, and she should learn from his experience not to go down that road. It wasn't a pretty place, his head that summer, comparable to what it is now. Except then, he had something to fight for, or at least something to go down in a fight for. Now, what does he have? An amalgamation of memories, some of which evoke joy and others which make him grit his teeth. Because what is life but a collection of memories? And suddenly, he feels even more insubstantial and transient, just a passerby in everyone else's life and barely living in his own.
He chucks the now-empty beer bottle against the wall, where it shatters, the glass strewn all over his pristinely-vacuumed rug. And the irony of it hits him in one fell swoop. Their falling-out, rectified now, stemmed, at its root, from her being alone, after he told her she wasn't alone, and now he's alone, and he's falling apart, and he only has one person he can call. Clumsily, he stumbles to the bedside table on which the phone lays; usually, he can handle his liquor quite well, but the lethal mix of anger running through his veins mixed with the alcohol does not bode well for his coordination. With loose fingers and loose lips, he dials the number he knows by heart.
He lied before, about the number of days since he's resigned. He lies to himself quite often, in fact, because sometimes a carefully crafted lie is easier and happier to believe than the bare-boned truth. It's been seventeen days and sixteen hours since he's last heard his partner's voice or seen her smile.
So when he hears a crisp and inquiring "hello?" on the other end of the telephone, it brings to his face the first genuine smile in seventeen days and sixteen hours.
"''ello Ziva," he grunts, his head suddenly spinning from all the alcohol he's ingested. Or maybe it's just the guilt.
"Tony?" she questions, and he can hear the worry seeping in the edges of her voice. He nearly hangs up; he doesn't want her pity. They are much alike in that respect. They are both too strong and independent of people to allow pity from their partner.
"Ya, um, I know it's been a while, but um, if" maybe you could come over here," he rambles, nearly unaware of what he's saying.
"Tony," she puts to him concernedly, "are you alright?" The panic stretched taut across her tenses her voice, augments her accent.
"No, "he admits, the first honest thing he's said in weeks. And the hardest part is yet to come. "I need you, Ziva." And that's all it takes. He can hear the rustling of her keys that says she's on her way.