Disclaimer: You know the drill by now, and please don't remind me of the painful fact that I don't have the right to draft a new contract for Cote.

Spoilers: None—well, there'd be one if you were already spoilt and none if you haven't been spoilt, so make of that what you will!

Setting: Tony's apartment. This falls in line with their S10 relationship dynamic, but doesn't really fit with what happened concerning the Ilan arc on the show, and thus is AU in a way.

This is just a short little ficlet to satisfy the fluff quota (which is woefully low) in my head. It's also dedicated to Anne and everyone else who likes bears. Enjoy!

-Soph

Getaway

"This is really not what I had in mind when you said we were going camping."

"I know," Tony answered regretfully. "I didn't think Gibbs was going to call us in this morning."

Ziva flipped onto her side, resting her head on top of her arm so that she could look at him. In the darkness underneath the strung bed sheets, she could really only see the outline of his face—his prominent nose, and the curves of his cheek and jaw. "Would you really have taken me camping for a whole weekend, had he not called us in?"

His face turned towards hers. "'Course."

"What would we have done?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, surely we would not have stayed in the tent for the whole weekend. What would we have been doing right now? What would we have been doing tomorrow?"

"That's a good question." He was quiet for a moment. "I guess I didn't really think too far; I had thought we would decide together. The place we would've gone to has a great lake, though."

"So … fishing?"

"Do you really know how to fish, Agent David?" he asked with amusement.

"Only for criminals," she conceded. "But I suppose I could have learnt."

"I could've taught you."

His voice was so terribly sad that, for a moment, her breath caught in her throat. She searched the cushions they had strewn haphazardly across the floor of their blanket fort; not too far from where her own hand had lain, she found his, and she caught it and squeezed lightly in comfort. "What else would we have done?"

"Mmm … campfire. We would've had a campfire, and I would've made s'mores for you. Have you ever eaten s'mores before? Marshmallow and chocolate sandwiched in between two pieces of cracker. It's heaven."

"It does sound delicious."

"And then … we could've sung campfire songs. They're totally lame and you would've probably beat me up for singing Top of the World at the top of my lungs, and we're only two people so the atmosphere really wouldn't have been there anyway, but I would've brought my guitar and it would've been perfect."

"You could still play the guitar right now."

He sighed. "Yeah, but it's different. In the woods, it would've just been the trees and the insects and us singing, not my bloodhound neighbour pounding on the door at midnight demanding to know why we're singing old songs and whether she can join us."

She giggled despite the unexpectedly intimate nature of his tone and his words—the implication that he was thinking about them as an entity, as if they were a couple who had planned a romantic getaway.

"I'm sorry the camping experience is spoilt for you, Ziva," he murmured, his voice low and miserable. She shushed him.

"I have never been in a blanket fort either, and this is just as interesting."

"Yeah, but I wanted to take you … somewhere, I guess. Somewhere you have never been before," he said, the sudden crisp business-like tone alerting her as to his realization of how he must have sounded to her.

She tangled her fingers with his. "Well, I am grateful to you for the blanket fort."

He laughed shakily. "This is really not how I planned it."

"Is it really that bad?" she queried softly.

The long silence told her he had understood the subtleties of her question. She wasn't just asking about the blanket fort; she was asking about their situation in general, the proximity of their bodies and the joining of their hands and their soft breaths upon each other's faces. She was asking him if it was a bad thing to be that close to her.

"No," he answered eventually, "not if you're happy to be here."

She smiled even though she knew he couldn't see her in the dark. "I am very happy."

He paused. "Well, then, I guess this isn't so bad."

She chuckled. "Just 'not so bad,' huh?" she teased lightly.

"No, it's good," he amended, the sincerity in his tone catching her off-guard once more. "It's really good."

"Mmm," she hummed contently. She hesitated before shifting marginally closer to him and disentangling her hand from his. The broad muscles of his chest twitched under the warmth of the palm she rested against it. "I want to thank you, Tony."

"For what?" he asked, sounding utterly clueless.

"For giving me something new to experience," she explained.

It took a long time, but his hand eventually came up to cradle her cheek. His thumb brushed across her bottom lip as he offered her a warm, "It's my pleasure," and she knew he could feel her smile.

And in the morning, when she would wake up to find her head tucked comfortably into the crook of his neck and his hand draped protectively atop the flare of her hip, she would come to the realization that she had never been happier.