Disclaimer: Wax on, wax off.

Spoilers: Mother's Day. Which is hopefully still in May, or Mama sheep is gonna be maaaaaaad….

Summary: Because Tony and Ziva didn't teleport to Arizona. Unless they did, in which case this fic is completely irrelevant. Does the US government possess that technology? If you answer, they'll come find you. In coach.

"No."

Tony poked the screen of his laptop, making a fingerprint he knew he'd regret during the movie, barring some kind of Kleenex-intervention. He unbuckled his seatbelt, in direct defiance of the sign, and turned toward Ziva. "You'll love it. I promise."

"There will be a movie during the flight," she said, never taking her eyes off her book about American…blah blah blah.

"I've seen it!" he whined in response to the George Clooney vehicle extolled by the female flight attendant, which had admittedly been a solid A-minus when he'd seen it on opening weekend; the flight crew was a C-plus at best. He turned to his middle seat-mate, who would not be receiving a mental grade of A, maybe A-plus in the interest of…his staying alive. He pawed at her book, trying to distract her attention from fourscore and…was that even the right thing? "C'mon…"

"I do not speak Japanese."

"And that is why the good Lord invented subtitles! Swords! Samurai!" He held up the case of one of the DVDs he had packed. "Throne of Blood!"

She perked up slightly, as expected, at the mention of blood, though she was still dedicating too much attention to her book. "What is it about?"

He delivered the dagger. "Macbeth."

She gave him a wave of dismissal. "There were no samurai in Scotland."

"The movie is based on the play," he clarified, "which is…um…well, it's better than the play in some ways. It's Shakespeare, so it's culture. You can't say no to culture. Did I mention the samurai?"

"You have been talking about them since we arrived at the airport," she said, returning her attention to her book. "That is probably the reason that you were once again asked to step aside to have your bag searched."

"I really don't like TSA. You show them your badge, you should be allowed to breeze right through." He stretched to reach into his pocket to caress what should have been his express pass through the terminal. "I think they've got a complex because they're a step below mall security guards on the food chain. Seriously, I'm allowed to keep my…" he pulled his jacket closed to cover the weapon he wasn't supposed to talk about on board the plane, "y'know, but my laptop is suspicious? Hey, are you listening?"

"I am trying to read."

"Democracy, hatred of tea, baseball, apple pie…what more is there to know?" He snatched the book from her hands. "They're gonna think there's something suspicious if you know too much, won't they? Didn't you say that was a thing when we had that case where, uh…okay, movie time!"

"Give it back!"

He fended her off, saying, "You can have it after the movie."

"I am not watching your movie. I want to read my book and…"

"Excuse me," the older woman in the window seat interrupted, "but I'd like to get back to the bathroom before you two settle on having sex in it."

Ziva looked at her in alarm. "We are not…"

"Keep telling yourself that, girlie," she replied, pushing past as they rose to allow her out of the row.

When the woman had ambled down the aisle, Tony took his seat and found that Ziva was inserting the DVD into laptop. "What, now you want to see the movie?"

"Yes. I have decided that I will watch your movie if I am allowed to read on the return flight."

"But I brought Rashomon for the return flight! And besides, our elderly row-buddy just told us to join the Mile-High Club!"

To his consternation, she merely raised an eyebrow. "Join?"

"Yeah, I hear you get a free drink from the service cart after the fifth time, but…really? You're just gonna drop it?"

"She was not elderly. I would not have put her age past forty-five." She yanked her book from the seat pocket where he had foolishly placed it, though she didn't open it. "Perhaps she was extending an invitation to you."

"Please. She was at least seventy with a bad dye-job, and stop trying to change the subject. I'm trying to have a perfectly civil conversation with you."

"About sex in an airplane bathroom?"

Tony could feel at least five pairs of eyes trained on them after her (probably intentionally) too-loud question, so he glanced around the vicinity with his best charming smile. "She's just confused about what the movie's about. It's a good one, though. Clooney's great. You should watch," he concluded with a wink at the row of coeds across the aisle, who went back to their magazines and iPods with triple eye-rolls in his direction. He decided he'd have time to work on them later as he turned his attention back to Ziva, who was unlikely to allow him any flirting time anyway. "So you don't want to talk about the fact that we're sitting with a stranger who wants us to hook up?"

She responded with an eye-roll that would defeat a hundred of the kind the sorority sisters had given him. "You had to get that into your head, didn't you?"

"Hey, I'm a man. That is always in my head. It's not my fault the old lady has an equally active imagination, probably due to post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy. You don't even want to address this?"

"You are asking if I want to have an in-depth conversation about a throwaway comment from a stranger who is returning to her seat as we speak?"

He jumped out of his seat and gallantly gestured toward the row for window-seat woman, who was probably closer to the age Ziva had guessed, if he employed the Price is Right system of closest without going over. She was definitely too old for him, any stealth propositioning notwithstanding. He did a covert assessment that also indicated her pants were pretty damned unflattering and called undue attention to her…rear…area. He did an elevator-eyes sweep of Ziva to make himself feel better in regard to feminine assets before they retook their seats. He set up his laptop on her tray-table and poked around until he found the button to play the movie. "I only brought one set of headphones," he hissed, attempting to shove one earbud into her left ear, "so we have to share."

"You are completely ridiculous."

"Ssshh, movie time!"

She had fallen asleep on his shoulder a little over an hour later, allowing him to steal the rest of her pretzels and bottled water. He had the feeling she was also hiding some peanuts or maybe even a chocolate bar in her bag, but he wasn't about to wake her. He liked her asleep. He liked her awake, too; she was just harder to appreciate so overtly. And she smelled nice.

"So do you two have one of those Everest/Mariana Trench relationships?"

Tony tore his attention away from Ziva-scented samurai to look at window-seat woman. "Huh?"

"Severe highs and lows that would rip apart lesser mortals as you move in a binary orbit which neither of you are capable of breaking?"

"Uhhhh…" He tried to resolve the meaning of whatever the woman had said, coming up with only, "Do you write comic books or something?"

She frowned. "Go back to your movie. If we keep talking, you'll wake her."

"I, uh…hey, earlier, you didn't really mean…?"

"Oh, I was being completely serious."

"But you…"

"I'm reading, sir, and you're watching a movie."

"Right." He turned back to Toshirō Mifune. Subtitles. Why did so many good films have to come from other countries with other languages? Eh, better reading than Godzilla-style dubbing. Still, he always appreciated Spanish films without the little yellow words at the bottom of the screen. Learning a second language had been a bitch, though. Would it really be worth learning Japanese just to appreciate Kurosawa on a deeper level? French could be more useful. Ziva could help with French. She hadn't gotten any funny looks when they'd been in Paris, so he could only assume that she didn't get quite as lost in translation outside US borders. She shifted suddenly, pulling the wire of his earbud. He let it fall to his lap. He knew how the movie ended, so it wouldn't hurt to rest his eyes, just for a moment.

The moment was beginning to stretch when window-seat woman said snottily, "I don't write comic books. I'm a novelist."

Still mentally chasing sleep, Tony muttered, "I work with a novelist."

"Hopefully a better one than this Gemcity fraud. My agent suggested I read some recent successes to see if I could figure out why they've been so popular but I can't get published. So far, all I've determined is that I should be writing crap if I want it to sell."

Tony bit back both his initial impulse to make a sarcastic remark about the copy of Deep Six he had just noticed her holding and his secondary impulse to stick up for McGee, settling on, "What do you write about?"

"The philosophical and moral dilemmas of being undead. Imagine if you had to feast on the flesh of the living just to survive. How would that make you feel?"

He suddenly regretted his failure to feign sleep and avoid this increasingly odd conversation. "Excuse me?"

She yanked a bag between her legs and dug through it for a moment before emerging with a sheaf of papers. "Would you like to see a side by side comparison of my prose versus that of this Gemcity? I'm sure you'll find it very easy to select the superior work if you just read a few…"

"Tony is scared of zombies," Ziva mumbled, not opening her eyes but giving him the impression that she'd been listening to window-seat woman get crazier by the minute.

"The undead, not zombies. My agent insists that I make that change and I refuse. Zombies are far too commercial."

"So are bestselling novels," Tony remarked.

"If you'll excuse me, I believe I need to visit the ladies' room."

Ziva didn't bother to get up, instead tucking her legs under her body to allow window-seat woman to pass. He noted that she was carrying her papers as she left their row. Ziva didn't settle her head back on his shoulder when he sat. "Odd that you put so much stock in what she thought we should do to entertain ourselves during this flight."

"In my defense, she didn't seem crazy until about ten minutes ago." He couldn't imagine Ziva embellishing the situation to make it sound more embarrassing, but he didn't really want her to try. "I don't suppose I can convince you to forget this flight ever happened."

"On two conditions – first, that you will not tease McGee."

"Ever again?"

"About our seatmate's unkind comments."

"Done. What's the second?"

"When we arrive, I am driving the rental."

He sighed. "I guess that gives me hope that our return flight will be via medevac chopper."

"Hope?"

"Less chance of sitting with a crazy person." He glanced over his shoulder to ensure that he was safe from zombie-related reprisal. "Crazy stranger, anyway."