Title: through the ashes
Author: Shannon
Rating: PG
Warning/Spoilers: Vaguely for Season 7.
Summary: Ziva changes, over time.
A/N: For the Awesome Ladies Ficathon, from the prompt of 'these are not who I am but what skins I shed'.
through the ashes
Someone once told Ziva that her second nature was to lie. She doesn't remember his name anymore, but she remembers his face: so smug, so sure, and then so blank as she snapped his neck, shedding his life and her current one behind her.
Later that night, she scrubbed clean her hands, before reporting the good news to her father. And after, when she returned to the bathroom and glanced in the mirror, she'd shaken her head and gazed at herself. That man, he had been very wrong: there was nothing second about it.
Her father would boast that she were his spear and Ari his mole. She thinks her brother would not wish to be compared to an underground rodent that cannot see, but she holds true to the spear, as her father points her where to go and when to strike.
Tali shakes her head and tells her the metaphors are wrong; that the story is wrong. "Ari is water, and sometimes he flows and sometimes he floods, but mostly he is frozen, and one day he will dry up. You are a phoenix, Ziva," her sister says, "but you're trying to be a snake. I'm afraid someday you'll try to lose your skin, and instead you'll run out of fire."
Ziva strokes Tali's head and settles her strange worries for now, but later Ziva forgets; for she knows that she is not the one who'll burn.
The desert heat strips lie and life away, and you discard all you can to escape. At the end, Ziva wonders if she had ever known the girl who was left, or if she'd only ever known the husk at her feet.
"It feels so long ago," Ziva murmurs, as the cadence of a promise builds over her whisper. Her voice joins the promise and she raises her hand, swearing a new life and allegiance and flame in her heart. She thinks maybe this is what her sister was trying to tell her: that a snake will keep trying to leave herself behind, while a phoenix will stay through the ashes; and that only now that she is who she is, will Ziva hold true to herself.