A/N: WARNING. DEATH!FIC
This is what I get for reading Slyvia Plath on Christmas Eve. (That's why it's a little poetic at times, and there are a lot of weird plays on words). This is also heavily based on a Thai life insurance commercial. (don't watch them unless you're in the mood to cry) Is melodrama a genre on ? It should be.
I guess this can take place sometime after tonight's episode (Housekeeping) … wow that was a game changer. This is all assuming they were in a relationship at some point (because honestly, how could they not have been?)
I wrote most of this beforehand dammit! Bad timing.
Lady Lazarus
"How are you doing?" Someone whispers to him with unconvincing sympathy. He is attempting to block everything out, the bouquets redolent of loss, the pitying murmurs.
"I'm fine." The reply echoes as soon as it escapes his lips. They're not his words.
The best way to tell an effective lie is to convince yourself it's true before you actually tell it. Ziva was always a little too good at convincing herself. She said it so many times; she genuinely started to believe it.
She told them it was an extended case of the flu, and Ducky couldn't confirm otherwise. That excuse at least explained the fever and the constant sniffles, both of which she easily treated with noticeably unashamed self-medication.
No one said anything about the weight loss, it wasn't exactly polite. (Tony had given McGee plenty of grief when he became a Whole Foods whore, but he wasn't sure how to approach her.) Ziva took to wearing loose fitting turtlenecks to make up for the difference.
She would have looked healthy, except for the fact that she was visibly the opposite. No one said anything. (They all blamed it on an unexpectedly busy month with a few too many terrorist threats and difficult murder cases that were already confounding without all the red tape they entailed.)
They finally insisted she seek medical attention after she fell asleep in the passenger seat during a high speed chase. She awoke easily enough, jarred into consciousness by the scream of tires and a cacophony of car horns.
It disturbed Tony a lot more than it disturbed her, and that was when he made an executive decision (with the full support of everyone else in the office) to forcibly drag her to the hospital.
"The only reason I'm still here is to appease you." She mumbled, rubbing her sunken eyes with the heel of her palm. She emphasized the conjunction, as if reminding him how much she already sacrificed for him and his neuroses daily. "Will you stop pestering me after?"
"Absolutely." He nodded, trying to fill in the basic information sheet she didn't have the motivation to complete. (He dragged her there, it was the least he could do.) "What's your apartment number?" He asked, gnawing on the end of a borrowed pen.
"18A." She sighed, slouching in the generic waiting room chair. "There is nothing wrong with me you know." She assured him. "I am doing this entirely for your benefit."
"Of course." He quirked a smile in her direction.
"It has been a crazy month. I am worn out, that is all."
"You're more worn out than the rest of us. You should develop a healthy caffeine addiction and stop the herbal tea bullshit."
She responded with an apathetic hum and the customary: "I am fine, Tony."
He passed the clipboard to the unremarkable desk secretary and they passed the time watching bizarre medical cases wander through the lobby. It was a lot more boring when she left to see a doctor. Tony waited for nearly an hour before a nurse addressed him.
"Ms. David wants you to go home, we'll be running a few more tests, and it may take a while."
"Tell her I can wait."
"I'm sorry sir but she was quite adamant."
He reluctantly left 15 minutes later after sending her several texts to ensure she would tell him what happened.
Ziva never replied but she came into work the next day. She looked normal but seemed unnaturally quiet.
No one asked her directly, it seemed too personal.
Abby brought her some tea.
McGee gazed at her over his massive computer monitor with obvious concern.
"You should get some rest, Zee." Gibbs said quietly. They all tensed, waiting for her reply. She sat up straight in her chair, her hair pulled back into a practical pony tail.
"I need to finish this report." She told him stubbornly, furiously pecking at the keys.
He didn't say anything, he simply stood in front of her desk, gripping his coffee and waiting for a more appealing response.
"I'll go home as soon as I'm finished, okay? I promise." She glared up at him for a moment and swiftly returned to her work.
At least somewhat satisfied, Gibbs returned to his desk.
Tony watched her all day; he had written about 5 lines by noon and was fervently praying for a marine to get murdered, he didn't care how morbid or immoral it was. McGee was called up to MTAC to assist the director with some technical issue on one of his increasingly frequent trips to Los Angeles (they all not-so-secretly hoped he would move out there permanently).
Ziva swore loudly sometime around that point and hastily fled from the bullpen. Tony didn't move for five entire minutes. Gibbs finally motioned for him to follow her, glaring at him intently. Tony pointed to himself as if to inquire "me?" and Gibbs jerked his chin in the direction she had run off to. "Glad we could have this talk." Tony grumbled, ignoring the stern blue-eyed glare that followed him all the way to his destination.
He threw the door to the women's bathroom open and froze.
Ziva was standing in front of the mirror, staring at herself blankly. She carelessly smeared blood from a vicious nosebleed across her cheek and looked at the redness on her fingers in suspended disbelief.
She finally met his eyes in the mirror, making no move to staunch the flow. "What if I told you I lied?" She whispered.
It was one of those incredible moments when he saw Ziva David look scared.
"About what?" He remembers saying vaguely, even though he knew the answer. Tony let the door fall shut behind him as she stripped off her chartreuse turtleneck, revealing a collection of purple and blue patches covering her ashen skin. He bit his lip.
"What if I told you I would never be fine again?"
She waited for 6 hours after Tony left, alone and anxious in her hospital gown. It was agony waiting for her test results; thin legs sticking to the sanitary paper, the monotonous beep of monitors invaded her headspace. Ziva decided she could never be a doctor. Or a nurse, for that matter. She felt like she would eventually fade into nothingness within those pale blue hospital walls. It was the kind of place that drives you insane, not just because of the lack of color and movement, but because of the sheer emptiness. She counted the seconds and tried to fall asleep, but she tensed in anticipation every time she heard someone approaching.
The doctors finally told her to tie up her loose ends as quickly as possible and return to the hospital by the end of the week.
It felt like she had been sentenced and given a date to show up at prison.
"Cancer." She managed to choke out. More specifically, acute erythroid leukemia. (Ducky paled when Tony informed him.)
"Acute… acute as in… like…" Tony stuttered.
"Terminal." She nodded, pulling her shirt back over her head. They had given her a generous six months.
"So what happens now?" He asked cagily. What do we do?
"If I want a chance I have to start treatment immediately." She pulled a stream of paper towels from the dispenser to wash the blood off her face. She sounded precise and solely informative. "I plan to ask for leave soon, if they won't grant me the time I suppose I will have to quit." She closed her eyes and exhaled gently. "Can you tell Abby?" Ziva croaked. "I know she'll cry and I don't… I don't want her to."
"Sure." She said, gripping her arm (he meant to be reassuring, but he doubted he was successful). He couldn't bring himself to say she was being unreasonable, of course Vance would grant her leave. Not everything they did had to be purely professional. "You should go home now."
She agreed solemnly and he led her out to her car in silence.
"I'll talk to you later." He promised her, she had suddenly assumed an intangible quality and he needed to confirm that she would still exist if she left his sight.
"It would be better if you didn't." She said bitterly, slamming her car door shut.
He googled it. There was information for what to do when your spouse, your sister, your coworker, or your friend was dying. There was no pamphlet that mentioned what to do when the situation involved someone you cared about much more than they realized.
For three months they trudged on. It occurred to Tony that maybe this was what Jenny had been trying to spare them from, and for an instant he understood what she had done. He thought Ziva would have done the same, had circumstances been different.
But most of Ziva's loose ends had already been tied up when she officially left Israel and became a bona fide NCIS agent. Except for one outstanding attachment.
"Come on Cyclops, you owe me favors for life." Tony spat into his cell, locked in the paralyzed elevator. "You'd better spill before I decide a martini with an eyes-cube is my new signature drink." (DiNozzo mentally patted himself on the back for that one.)
"I am sorry DiNozzo but I really don't know." Kort droned in his familiar accent. "Agent Ray is completely off the books at the moment, it could be months before he resurfaces again."
He shut his phone and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. If only they had that kind of time. Ziva accepted the news with a sigh of cheerless relief. He would never truly know what she went through.
Ziva had the same melancholy laugh, the same wry smile. But everything was changing and suddenly they found themselves driving her to the hospital and picking up prescriptions and camping out in her living room for days. But her condition wasn't improving and the doctors gave her a final prognosis a mere three months later.
60 days.
They sent her home.
"How has it come to this?" He spoke aloud standing before her front door. Of all the pretty asters in the window boxes, not one replied.
Abby was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and the tea kettle screaming uncontrollably. He scrambled to take it off the burner, sat across from Abby and held her hands.
She looked up at him with swollen red eyes. "I didn't want to upset her, I can't- I have to stop…" A new round of tears sprung to her eyes and she desperately tried to sweep them away.
Tony swallowed stoically and made tea. He let it seep for much longer than necessary, gave one dainty cup to Abby and brought another to Ziva.
If he hadn't been paying attention he wouldn't have noticed her presence. Ziva was completely still and perfectly silent with her hands folded over her stomach. They stared at each other for a moment, emotionless and motionless.
He placed a bouquet of red tulips on her bedside table along side a stack of untouched books. She cringed. The windows were wide open. Even though it was the middle of spring she was still buried under a pile of blankets.
"Jasmine." He explained, passing her the saucer. One word communication seemed to be their forte. "Do you want me to close…?"
She shook her head; a tendril of dark hair unraveled itself and contrasted with her pale skin. She licked the bleeding cracks on her lips. It wasn't fair.
"Why are you here?" She demanded, a hint of steel in her tone.
"Uh…what do you mean?" He was temporarily paralyzed by her familiar words.
"Oh please Tony, this is obviously very painful for you. What are you still doing here?" She massaged her temples in exasperation.
"Well I do love you, you know. We all do. I'm not going to suddenly abandon you just because you're sick. You're still you and I'm still me." He clenched and unclenched his fists; he couldn't quite look her in the eye.
"This is going to take more than a couple of days," Ziva snarled. "Do you know what it's like to be in love with someone on the rink of death? To suffer?" She glowered at the teacup clenched between her fingers. "Do you really know what it's like?"
(For an instant he considered correcting her English, but now was not the time. He remembered Lieutenant Roy Sanders and how he had slipped through her fingers before she had a chance to grasp him. His obsession and ensuing disappointment with Dana Hutton couldn't compare.)
Then he realized what was strange about what Ziva had said. "I didn't say I was in love with you."
Ziva launched the teacup at the opposite wall, narrowly missing him. It shattered against a frayed picture of three children. It was reassuring to know her reflexes hadn't deteriorated yet. "Fuck off!" She shouted suddenly. "Leave me alone!" She hissed, hiding her eyes from him
Tony paused for a moment before turning around and walking out, shutting the door behind him silently.
Abby looked utterly terrified. Tony felt oddly detached.
He led her outside and drove them away. They parked somewhere, but didn't move.
"This isn't really what she wants." Abby whispered. "She needs family and we're… we're all she has." She gulped audibly.
Tony rested his head against the steering wheel and he remembered. He remembered L.A. and Tel Aviv and Somalia and Paris and sitting so close to her on the freezing plane to Mexico that he could feel her breathing. That first glance across the bullpen, fleeting moments while Gibbs was briefly retired, Ziva telling him that nothing was inevitable over a stolen glass of liquor in the autopsy lab.
"Do you love her, Tony?" Abby wondered softly, tugging on a strand of jet black hair.
Silence spoke for him.
"You have to tell her. She needs to hear it before it's too late. And she needs you."
Tony glanced at her. The faintest smile had appeared on her red lips.
"Nothing else matters anymore. This is it."
Tony started the car.
He turned in his letter of resignation the next day.
"I'm sorry boss."
Gibbs gave him a particularly brutal head slap. "Don't be stupid DiNozzo. I'm not filing this."
"I have a feeling you won't feel that way for very long." Tony winced, as though he already sensed thousands of malicious head slaps in his future.
"Why DiNozzo? What did you do?" Tony gave the Boss one last meaningful look before turning away. He had to go before he changed his mind. "Tony what did you do?" Gibbs called to him, but Tony didn't answer, he wasn't going to apologize.
The thing about Gibbs' rules is that they're consistently contradictory when applied to different situations. Tony decidedly employed #8 and #18 in this case.
"It's better to seek forgiveness than ask permission" he had always adhered to.
Never take anything for granted went without saying.
Her apartment was silent, no one else was there. His eyes passed over the unfinished paintings resting against the wall and the empty cabinets in the kitchen.
He didn't think it was possible for a person's face to light up, to go from tired and shadowed to bright like mood whiplash.
"Tony I'm sorry that was uncalled for…" She was apologizing before he fully entered the room.
"Hey, don't worry about it." He cut her off. "Just don't hit me with this one." He said, indicating the tea cup he was holding. "Even though I know you missed on purpose the other day."
"How did you know I did it on purpose?" Ziva smiled.
"You could have hit me if you wanted to, that's how I knew you just wanted to scare me away." Tony cleared his throat and said: "Now promise me you won't throw this one at me." He passed her the cup. "Although I think you'll be sorely tempted to." He added in an undertone.
Ziva fell silent and the smile fell from her face. "Tony I…" She croaked.
"Don't say maybe." He pleaded.
They had wasted so much time trying to forget, trying to convince themselves that they had never meant anything to each other. They had gotten so good at avoiding each other that even during the occasional moment of earth-shattering tension they were able to turn away and go back to forgetting. The avoidance they performed was an art they had both perfected. Both were so desperate for acknowledgement that when either one regarded the other as a friend it was met with a pleasantly surprised reaction. They had told themselves lies until they were true.
Ziva gently removed the ring from the bottom of the cup.
This time the truth was unavoidable and staring her in the face.
"Please don't make me choose." Her voice cracked. She had stopped hiding her emotions from him ages ago.
"I think you already have." He told her quietly. Tony was nothing if not perceptive. "Things are complicated, but you know they always will be. I would rather take a leap of faith than become an old man filled with regret-"
"Waiting to die alone." Ziva filled in; a melancholy smile was working its way into her expression. "God, what movie is that from?"
"It doesn't matter. Marry me, Ziva?"
"Yes." She replied somberly.
He held her as she cried tears of blood.
He had almost forgotten she was sick.
Abby was the happiest she had been since this disaster had started. She was insufferable, jumping in circles around them and tossing handfuls of confetti. Ziva smiled weakly at her from where she was tucked under Tony's arm.
"Technically, I didn't date her boss." Tony said through gritted teeth.
"Shut up, DiNozzo."
Gibbs simply offered Tony his hand. He grasped it tentatively and Gibbs drew him into an unexpected hug. McGee sheepishly followed his example.
Ducky gleefully informed them that he had always known before launching into a lecture about the last insane Scottish wedding he had attended.
Leon acknowledged them from afar, nodding in their general direction before disappearing into his office once more.
Ziva laughed at something McGee had told her, she held onto him for support.
Abby sipped some more Caf-Pow and sprinkled more glitter over Tony's head.
They got married the next day. A civil ceremony, they signed papers with witnesses and left to pay a visit to the hospital immediately afterward.
Ziva rested her head on Tony's shoulder in the waiting room, popping painkillers and smiling contentedly.
"Tell me anywhere you want to go and I'll take you." He said. "We can leave today."
"I've already been everywhere I want to go, and I've been there with you." She mumbled into his collar.
The next weeks were vivid. They slipped into something that wasn't quite domestic because people were always walking in and out of the house to keep Ziva busy.
Ignorance is bliss. Sometimes they let themselves forget. Nevertheless, they all breathed a sigh of relief when she laughed. And every once in a while she scared them and reminded them why they were there.
They watched movies and Tony's dad hooked them up with one of his Arab friend's Bugatti Veyron. (He let Ziva drive on a particularly good day; it was an experience to say the least, the illuminated monuments look different when you're moving past them at warp speed.)
It's spring and the cherry blossoms are blooming. "Spring is the best time of year," Ziva muses.
Leon managed to have Eli smuggled out of Israel. It was a high risk, top secret operation, but as long as no one discovered he was in the states they were in the clear. They exchanged pleasantries and civilized conversation. (Eli smiled when he saw she was still wearing her Magen David.)
None of them could stop her from fading as quickly as she did.
Dying people often want to control their environment, but lack the ability to do so.
So Ziva waits.
She waits until everyone leaves one night because she has been sleeping all day. The medication makes her feel painless; she is numb for other reasons.
(Her treatments failed, the hospital turned her away.)
She waits until Tony comes in with yet another cup of tea, but she doesn't take it. She encircles his wrist with skeletal fingers and tells him to sit.
"We are only half alive, you know." She says. It's the most she's said in a week and there are too many Xs on the calendar marking the days.
"You and I, we were only half alive, dancing around each other like fools. We wasted so much time." Tony looks at the tea splattered photograph and the unfinished paintings and oh god this is happening.
He kisses her because he already knows and he doesn't want her to waste her breath.
But she was already gone, and the red tulip he left her was withering on the bedside table. The ring slipped off her skeletal and fell to the floor.
Well. That was melodramatic.
(The movie quote was from Inception, if you were wondering)
I started writing this before we found out what was going to happen next week… I will be writing an angsty story based on that development as well.
All feedback is appreciated!