A/N: Now that I've gotten post-finale revenge fluff out of my system, I can focus on something with a plot. I don't know where this came from. It hit me this morning while I was eating toast and watching Weekend Sunrise (hi, Australia!). I expect it'll all be done and posted within the week.
Disclaimer: I can see how you may be confused. NCIS does seem to be awfully fond of torturing/punishing its female characters, which I admit I'm about to do. But no, I don't own any of it.
Ziva slowly awoke with a throbbing head and a strange feeling running through her body. She felt jittery all over, kind of like someone had poured packets of sugar through her veins. When she opened her eyes, the complete darkness she found made her heart sink, and her hopes didn't get any higher when she inhaled the thick, stuffy and earthy air.
She was lying down, but the position she was in, half twisted onto her right side, was sending a stabbing pain through the joint of her shoulder. When she tried to roll onto her back and pull her arms out from under her, a searing pain shot through her right side, making her cry out and bringing tears to her eyes. She stayed still long enough for the pain to dull a little, and then realised that her hands were tied together in the small of her back. She looked down at her body, but in the darkness she couldn't even see her chest.
She flexed her feet and worked out that her legs were out straight, but also tied together at the ankles. With all this information, Ziva was prepared to admit that the situation didn't look good.
"Fuck," she sighed to herself. She tried to wrestle herself into a sitting position, but two feet off the floor her forehead smacked into a piece of wood. "Ow!" she hissed, and lay back down. Okay, things were looking worse.
With her feet, Ziva felt her way around her surroundings – or lack thereof. She was in a box, roughly three feet wide, two feet tall and six feet long. She could feel the grain of wood under her hands, and she knew the description was distinctly coffin-like. A shiver ran through her, but she wouldn't consider panicking just yet.
She listened for any noise from outside the box, but all she could hear was her own fast breathing. She recapped the situation for herself: no light, no noise, stale and dirty air, bound wrists and ankles, surrounded by a wooden box. So, was it time to panic yet?
Putting it off for just a little longer, Ziva tried to think of what had happened. The last she remembered, she was taking a quick run through the park near her house after work. It had been a quiet night – the chill in the air had kept people inside and Ziva had barely had to pass anyone on the path that wound through the park. It had been a completely ordinary night, and Ziva couldn't remember anything that might have led to her being knocked out and dumped in a box.
She'd been buried below the ground before, once during her training in Israel and another time while on a mission in Belize. It was a situation that was somewhere near the bottom of Ziva's list of favourites. And Ziva was Mossad, well acquainted with the art of torture, so that was really saying something. She gave the lid of the coffin a hard kick with her feet. The action delivered a dull thud, more or less confirming to Ziva that she was indeed somewhere around six feet under.
Her heartbeat sped up momentarily, but Ziva controlled her panic again. If she panicked, she would surely die here. She had to focus on realities. For one, she was bound to be missed when she didn't show up for work. She didn't have a clue how much time had passed between her run and when she'd woken up, so it was hard to say how far away the beginning of the next working day was. But when it did come, she knew that Gibbs and Tony would be looking for her. Right? Ziva rolled her eyes at herself. For all she knew that would be 12 hours from now, and Ziva knew there was no way she had that much air.
She could think of only two other options: 1) wait until whoever had put her in here came back and then go assassin on their ass, or 2) kick and punch at the lid and hope for the best. She didn't like her chances with option one. That put her fate in someone else's hands. And besides, if they'd already buried her, why would they want to come back and dig her up again? So that left option two. Take control of the situation herself. She didn't like her chances much with that option either, but if she was going to die, at least she'd have some say in how it happened.
So Ziva started kicking. For two minutes, she kicked the shit out of the roof of her prison. When she hadn't made an impact after that time, she conceded that she probably wasn't going to get anywhere. The earth piled on top of her would keep the wood from splintering out, and even if she did get through, it would just bring a ton of dirt into the box.
Okay, now she started panicking. She was going to suffocate. It was a far less gruesome death than Ziva had always imagined for herself, but it was effective.
"Fuck, fuck FUCK!" she yelled. This was NOT how she wanted to go out. She was enjoying life again now that she was back in DC with her surrogate family. She'd hated returning to Israel and stepping back into her role as the sharp end of the spear, as her father put it. When she'd been injured during the bomb blast in Morocco last summer, she couldn't deny that the thought of letting death take her had crossed her mind. She'd been so tired, so afraid that the rest of her life would be spent under an assumed name as she took orders to kill or be killed. That life was not what she wanted anymore.
But she'd fought the impulse to give up and now she was glad that she had. She'd made it back to NCIS and had been welcomed with open arms by the small group of people who loved her. She had started dancing again like she had from early childhood until she was 20. She had started regularly joining Abby, Tony and McGee for after-work drinks and took the opportunity to let them further into her life. She had made it though countless nights on Tony's couch, talking through his guilt over Jenny's death and putting together the foundations for something more than a friendship and partnership. She'd moved into a bigger apartment, one with a small patch of grass out back, and had started investing in proper furnishings. She'd even quietly looked into obtaining permanent residency in the US.
All these things had worked together to make her feel like she belonged here, in DC, doing a job she loved and surrounded by people she cared for and who made her happy. Ziva didn't want to lose it all now and end up dead and already buried.
But the situation was going to be difficult to get out of without help. Dare she hope that Tony already knew she was missing? How long had she been down here? Probably not long, or she already would have suffocated. It wasn't that big a box. Then it hit her; she'd had her cell phone with her when she went running—Gibbs demanded that they had their cells on them at all times. Did she still have it?
She rolled onto her right side, ignoring the pain of probable broken ribs, and yanked her arms around until she could get her hand into the pocket of her sweat pants. She almost wrenched her arm out of its socket in the process, but it was worth it when her fingers touched the cool metal of the phone.
"Oh, thank God," she sighed in relief. So she had the phone, but her next challenge was using it. She couldn't see it, and she couldn't bring it around in front of her face. She'd have to do it all by touch and memory.
She flipped the phone open and held it the right way up. Then she paused. Who the hell should she call? 911 would be a waste of time, and if she succeeded in dialling one of the teams' numbers on the keypad successfully, what was she going to tell them? "I think I'm in a coffin buried underground…somewhere. Come get me"? She needed more useful information than that. But what else could she give them?
A vague description of the circumstances was better than nothing though, Ziva decided. At least word would get out that she needed help. And it didn't matter who she called, as long as she called someone and they got the message to the people who could do something about it.
She felt around her keypad until she hit the right keys: Go toContactsSelect contactUse number. Ziva didn't have a clue who was on the top of her list. She'd like to scroll down to Gibbs or Tony, but she didn't know how many people were on the list before them. She felt her way over the other side of the keypad and hit another button, turning the speaker on. She heard the line ringing, and muttered a prayer of thanks to whoever for having her put in a pocket of earth that got good cell phone reception.
Chapter 2 is already up. Hope to see you over the page.
