Author's Note: I know nothing about Mossad, so anything in here pertaining to that agency is probably wrong.
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Until she was eight years old Ziva had slept in a wide canopy bed in a large room with light blue walls. She wasn't like Tali, who insisted that everything in her room be a shocking shade of pink, but the room did have an abundance of horse models and pictures. Ziva's bed was covered in light sheets, thin enough not to overheat her in the humid Tel Aviv air. The mattress was of the best quality, and every morning when her mother woke her up for school, Ziva treasured the last few moments of being cocooned by a cloud.
When she turned nine, Ziva told her father she wanted to follow his footsteps in Mossad. He took her by her word, and the blue bedroom and luxurious mattress were gone. Ziva was sent to a military academy until she turned eighteen, sleeping on a hard cot with a blanket much tougher than that she'd been accustomed to. It took some getting used to, but the harsh training camp gave her the ability to sleep almost anywhere.
A month before she turned nineteen, Ziva put those skills to use.
Tali's death shook Ziva to the core, and her father accepted her request (if a tearful shouting match in his private office in their home counted as a request) to be sent out for fieldwork. Despite her age, Ziva was more than ready, and performed her duties well enough that she became a full officer at age twenty-one.
For the next eight years, Ziva received operations in more than twenty countries. Most of them involved life-threatening situations and all of them were, at the very least, extremely dangerous. Ziva received on-the-job training for the very best in the fields of hand-to-hand combat, projectile weaponry, martial arts, interrogation, espionage and assassination, among many other disciplines. Throughout all these years, sleep was never a guarantee, and Ziva gradually became able to make herself fall into a light but rejuvenating sleep under most circumstances.
Ziva had slept under heavy enemy fire in a bunker forty feet underground in a roomful of men. She had curled up into a thin cotton blanket for a hour-long catnap five feet from the edge of a cliff. She could doze on the deck of an oil tanker during a rainstorm, ignoring the saltwater spraying her from all sides. And she could wake up five minutes into her first sleep in forty hours at the sound of a door being picked.
So really, the place or circumstances in which she slept meant nothing to Ziva. Having another person in her bed, if it was for the conservation of warmth or because neither was able to move after a long round of love-making, didn't affect her sleeping patterns at all.
But somehow, whether they were together in their bed or tied to chairs facing each other in a hot room in Somalia, Ziva always slept easier when she could hear Tony's breath rising and falling near her.
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I really hate this. Please tell me it's not as horrible as I think it is, or please tell me I'm right. I need to know if I'm really losing whatever writing talent I once had.