Ah, a few words longer than the last one(s)! I can't say when this is set... really it could be anytime. No ship for once - just Ziva.
You know that overused cliche about how if I'm posting this as fanfiction then it ain't mine? Cliches can often be true.
She shoots. Each white, faceless head that reels back from a bullet hole is painted to look like a person of her past, a face that she is surprised, somewhere deep in her subconscious, to remember considering how easily she'd killed them. It was a requirement, that ease, something you were supposed to feel once you'd gotten over your youthful revolt and hurt.
It makes her discover that repressing emotion didn't take away the pain. Only caused her to pretend it did not imprison her slowly. Completely.
Another shot makes the gun twitch upward, only slightly in her steady hand. This face was white-skinned and dark, curly-haired. Ukrainian. Mother of two, pregnant with one. Husband Russian, a traitor, selling secrets to the wrong people. She, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ziva swallows heavily though it never disrupts her stream of bullets. Not every hit was justified. But it was ordered.
This one was Greek. That one American. Another about the age of Tali. And Ziva still doesn't know why she's doing this, just knows she must summon the image and the guilt and the disgust and the pain with every shot fired, no matter how against her nature it is to do so. Just like one would place a hand over a sleeping mouth to ensure a steady flow of exhales; like she would feel around in her neck or chest or wrist after having taken a particularly bad beating to see if her heart was still thudding, however weakly in her ribcage. Because after so long of nothing, of suppressing, of ignoring, of moving on, she has the distinct impression of fading away, of closing off so much she can't even recognize herself. So she panics, worrying that this time, she's passed the point of no return and thus tries to slap herself out of a trance. She's afraid of feeling too much yet terrified of not feeling at all so she straddles the breaking point, viciously jerking out the shame then breathing it back in. Like biting back an attack of nausea, she pushes it down before forcing it up again, caught in a rocking tug of war between the place where it is manageable and the point that it consumes her and becomes her insanity.
She returns to the first cardboard figure with a new visage, having run out of intact ones; she doesn't see the bullet hole already there, only the one about to rupture its whiteness.
It might hurt to deal with the damage caused, but she is fully aware that the day it stops hurting is the day she doesn't deserve to even be alive. If not for the souls she'll kill in the future, then for those she'd killed before.
They deserved that power over her since she had the final one over them.