note: Hey there! Wow, it's been a while, I only just noticed. There's been no reason for my absence other than the fact I haven't written anything, really. But I have now, so yay.
This is… weird. It's set vaguely with the current canon, in that Ziva's gone, but there are few specifics relating to actual current instances because I haven't watched any of this season. It's all inspired by the horrific song Say Something, which has haunted my dreams for weeks now. And in the end, it turned into this.
It's choppy and picks up various bits in time again, and you'll probably all hate me for the ending, but I do hope you guys like it. I will say, though, that the ending is the ending. It's deliberately abrupt and I have zero plans to write something else, sorry if it leaves you unsatisfied, that wasn't the plan.
Anyway I'm rambling. Enjoy, and do feel free to leave a review as you go!
disclaimer: nope.
Say something, I'm giving up on you
I'll be the one, if you want me to
Anywhere I would've followed you
Say something, I'm giving up on you
Say Something; A Great Big World.
He starts off confident. The first few weeks, sad and exhausted though he is, his main thought is, it won't be forever. The chain of her necklace glints at him from his desk drawer and seems to ensure the fact.
He's sure she'll call, in good time. He'll take anything just to hear her voice again.
It seems that everyone around him is angry, or quiet, or brooding, while he's privately hopeful.
And that's how he gets through. Whether it's because he believes it or just needs something to cling to, he doesn't know.
After a month, the silence begins to irk him. He doesn't want to push her, no, but endless days of shaking static down the line and sleepless nights with one eye on the telephone are wearing him down, and hope is dissipating with each morning he isn't greeted by a flash of brown hair by his side.
"D'you think she'll come back?" asks McGee, one late evening, when the office is quiet and the lights are dim.
He doesn't answer; just sits and stares and wonders why his friend's tone was so casual.
As New Year passes, any remaining confidence is gone.
He takes walks at the weekends and trudges through ice and snow and somehow ends up outside her apartment one day, fingers numb. He wonders what happened to her things, her clothes, the picture frame he gave her one birthday. All the mementos; all the memories.
His thoughts burst when someone bumps into him as they pass by, and he carries on.
When he calls her cell that evening, he gets the message he's been expecting for a while. Her number's disconnected and he has no other way of reaching her.
He's followed her to the end of the world twice now, but that night, finding her again is the last thing on his mind.
He just sits on his couch, and cries.
"You heard anything from her?"
His boss' voice is rough like the sandpaper in his hand. Tony only chuckles bitterly and says nothing else, and they go back to work.
The anger boils within him with each swipe and cut and stream of breath upon sawdust, though, and when he gets back to his apartment he drags his hand through a shelf and watches as the DVDs tumble to the floor like packaged leaves.
He hasn't heard her voice in seven months and he wonders if one day, he'll forget what she sounded like altogether.
"I would've given you anything."
His voice echoes out in the messy silence of his bedroom, because no matter how many times he tries to block her from his mind she always comes racing right in again, no more so than in this room.
That night, he cries again, as he so often does.
"Anything."
But then, he realises, he did.
He can never quite concede, he finds. Sat alone in a bar on a cool October night, he's all too aware that it's been exactly a year, and he hasn't been able to stop yet.
"You should find someone, Tony." Abby had said to him the other day. He'd curled his hands into fists and clenched his jaw and continued as if she'd said nothing at all.
He could've said something else to change her mind, and they all know it.
A pretty witness tells him to call her, and he takes the card she hands him with a smile like always.
But her hair is brown and her skin tan and when she speaks, words curl round her tongue to fit her accent like velvet.
She's perfect, and beautiful, and she doesn't make him feel a thing.
McGee asks if he plans to call her. He drops her card in the trash as he walks away, and he's not sure whose voice he can hear anymore.
It happens on a Saturday afternoon, some time in May.
Sun streams in through his blinds and the leather of his couch is heating up in the warmth and he's reading a crappy book when there's a knock on his door. He stands with a groan and stretches aching limbs and stumbles round, pulling it open with a sigh.
He can hear her gasp and see her jaw fall as if to speak, but she merely stands, unmoving, a large bag held in her trembling fingers. Her eyes flit over him rapidly and he sees her chest rise and fall with speed. A choked noise falls from her throat, and she lunges toward him.
Her lips find his, messily, hands scrambling to reach his hair. His arms wrap round her waist and pull her in and they kiss in a hurried haze before she tears her mouth back, breath fanning over his face and eyes tight shut.
"Ziva…"
He sees her gulp at his voice; her eyes squeeze tighter still. All that surrounds them is weighted silence between their heavy breaths.
Say something.
"Tony-"