Another one-shot sequel to 'Her Return'. As always, if you have not already, go and read that one first and maybe 'Pillars of Sand' because although that one is not necessary it will help for the background. Again, this one is more depressing than I had set out to make it.
Sleepless nights
Tony rubbed his eyes and sighed as he swung his legs out of bed. The clock read two am. He looked at the rumpled duvet and the space that Ziva should have been sleeping in. He shook his head and stood up, moving towards the door. The new apartment still smelt strongly of paint and he noticed it more when he padded across the hall to the living room. His eyes flickered to Caitlin's door before he turned back to his original path, wandering how many more times he would be woken after a nightmare in the few remaining hours of the night. The door creaked open slightly and he smiled at Ziva's form, her back to him, silhouetted in the light from the glow of the street lamp outside of the window. She had lost weight, he noticed. That would be the not eating his brain muttered sarcastically. He walked over and wrapped his arms around her, nuzzling his face into her hair. "Bad dream?"
"Two." She swallowed as she leaned back into Tony's body, allowing his warmth to seep through the thin long-sleeved top she was wearing. He flicked his eye to the grey afghan draped over the sofa.
"You can wake me whenever you need. I would rather you did than just bottle it up."
"I know. But you do not need to have to have my nightmares on your mind as well as Caitlin's."
"I don't care. I want to help." He kissed the top of her head.
"It has taken its toll on you, though. You do not talk about work anymore." She looked up at him.
"I didn't think you'd want to hear about it." He said softly.
"I liked hearing about your cases."
"Alright. We had a dead petty officer the other day, stabbed to death behind a bar." He watched a car drive past the window.
"Who killed him?"
"Well, you have three options." He turned it into a guessing game. "The wife, who stood to inherit a small fortune, the bartender, who had a thing for the petty officer's wife, or the petty officer's neighbour who didn't like the untidiness of the petty officer's backyard. Who's it gonna be?" He did his best game show host voice; loud enough so Ziva could hear but not so loud that it would wake the child sleeping across the hall.
"Well, by your logic it is always the wife." Ziva stated and smiled, her mind momentarily distracted from the dreadful thoughts that had occupied it since the night in Autopsy the three months before hand. "She had motive. Alibi?"
"Three witnesses placing her at the local school fundraiser."
"Not the wife then." Ziva walked away from the window and Tony's arms. He felt himself relax as he found the trick that seemed to help keep her mind off all the bad things. "The neighbour had a pretty poor motive. What about alibi?"
"None. Home alone with his gardenias."
"Bartender. Depending on what sort of a thing he had for the petty officers wife, he may or may not have a motive." She raised her eyebrows, knowing that Tony was aware of her next question.
"Shaky alibi given by a drunken man. Shaky being the operative word."
"The wife hired a hit-man." Ziva said after deliberating.
"No, logical conclusion, but no. The barkeeper. He'd never even met the wife, only ever seen a photo of her."
"And he killed him? Out of jealously over a woman he had never even met?" Ziva asked, walking into Tony's embrace.
"Yeah." He hugged her tighter and leaned his chin on top of her head. "Marry me, Ziva."
"Okay." She smiled sleepily with her head resting on his chest. He beamed at how simply she said it, and yet made it clear that she meant it.
"Thank you." He stroked her cheek as he stared into her eyes. He leant down to kiss her tenderly, keeping one hand on her hip and the other on the side of her face. "Come to bed." He whispered in her ear.
"Okay." She leant up and kissed him softly.
"Coffee." Gibbs placed the cup in front of Tony, who was gazing off in the distance.
"Thanks." He nodded and sipped at the hot liquid.
"How many times last night?"
"Was I woken? Five." He exhaled sadly.
"It's getting better." Gibbs said, patting Tony's shoulder. "Last month it was eight."
"Yeah, it's getting better." Tony smiled. "It seems to help talking about the cases that we have with Ziva. I think it gives her something to think about."
"She thought about going back to work at the restaurant? Might help."
"I suggested it, but she didn't want to." Tony looked around the temporary squad room.
"How's the hunt for a new school going?" Tim asked, walking in.
"It's not. Caitlin doesn't like the atmosphere of any of the possibilities. Either there's a science lab that reminds her too much of Autopsy, or one of the teachers has a laugh that resembles her mental recreation of Miri's."
"You'll find somewhere for her. You found an apartment where they both felt comfortable." Gibbs said sympathetically.
"Yeah. I don't know how long Abby and Ducky are going to be able to split their time between teaching Caitlin and actually working though."
"She couldn't get better science and history teachers." Tim smiled. "And with Ziva teaching her languages, she's half the way to having a decent education as it is."
"And with you teaching her maths and IT, she'd be doing a lot better." Tony smiled hopefully.
"Tony, I've told you. Teaching your daughter to hack into computers will just get her into trouble. Why don't you ask John the accountant from upstairs to teach her maths. It would probably be much more useful that what I would teach her."
"Because she doesn't know John the accountant, Probie. Come on, use your head." He looked at Gibbs and McGee's unimpressed expressions. "Sorry."
"It's fine." Tim looked at him sympathetically. "I'll come round tonight?"
"Thank you, McGeek." Tony let the first glint of hope to be seen by anyone else tint his eyes.
"What are friends for?" He shrugged. He did have a date, but he would cancel if Caitlin needed it. He'd realised he would do anything for his family. Tony and Ziva were like his siblings, they had teased him endlessly, but without them he's lost.
"We'll thank you with dinner." Tony grinned, leaning back to the point where his old chair felt just perfectly comfortable…and fell off.
"DiNozzo! That's the third time this week! These chairs don't recline!" Gibbs voice cut through the laughs of the people passing who had somehow managed to miss seeing Tony fall off his chair the first nine times.
She reached out and grasped the handle, thinking for a moment it might resist when she tried to push open the door and then remembering whom the owner of the house was. Her eyes scanned the room, checking for imminent danger. The lights were all off above ground, but there was a sliver of yellow light emanating from under the door that led to the basement. She smiled to herself slightly and closed the front door behind her, heading toward the light. She stepped lightly, silently, down the steps and turned to the man sanding a block of wood. "Your door was unlocked."
"Usually is." He shrugged without looking up and she was reminded of the conversation they had shared when they came back from Somalia.
"What are you making?"
"A box." He held up the wood in his hand for her to look at it. "For you to put those photos in instead of an old shoebox."
"Thank you." She reached out and touched the smooth wood.
"Can't sleep?"
"No." She shook her head and sat on a stool that he pulled over for her. They sat in silence, the man letting her open up in her own time. She wanted to talk else she wouldn't have been there, and if he pushed it would just send her further into her shell. "I was not supposed to live this long, Gibbs." Her voice was quiet. Gibbs pulled his head up at her words and stared at her face. It had aged since he had first met her, and even though the determination that had always been there was still hidden in her eyes it was buried deep, had been since the day in Autopsy. He had been waiting for this. This statement. "I was old for a control officer when I arrived here all those years ago." Her voice was resigned. "My father never planned for me to live past 23."
"Ziva…" Gibbs sighed and poured two glasses of bourbon.
"Gibbs, I know what you are going to say. But this is just how I feel. When I was living in Israel I realised that the only person I knew there from my childhood was Shmeil. Every other friend and enemy was dead and I should have been with them. Ari and Michael, Tali. All dead."
"Ziva, you are a mother. You have Caitlin and Tony. A family. Safe, in America. I don't deny that you weren't supposed to get this far in life but against all odds you managed it. You survived." He placed the box on the workbench and looked at her. "And you blossomed and thrived." He winced at his choice of words as she remembered the scars across the top of her chest and reached up to trace the flowers that Miri had carved into her. "Sorry."
"Sign of weakness." She whispered and he smiled.
"I know." He patted her knee comfortingly. "It's over now, Ziva. You can live. Teach your daughter to live." He smiled as he heard the creak of his front door.
Tony woke immediately when the small, cold hand was pressed on his bare shoulder. He looked at the face in front of him, glanced to the clock and then back at his daughter's eyes, the tears dribbling down her cheeks. "Come here, baby girl." He swung his legs out of bed and wrapped his arms around her tiny frame as she buried her face into his shoulder. "It was just a dream." He stroked the back of her head and pulled her fluffy blue dressing gown tighter before she could start to shiver from the cold.
"Daddy, where is Mother?" She looked up at him, her eyes full of fear, her nightmare coming true again. He swallowed before turning his head to look at the empty bed and bit his lip.
"Maybe she's in the living room, yeah? Shall we go see?" He picked her up as she nodded and they walked across the hall to the empty living room, into the empty kitchen-diner, they checked the main bathroom and en-suite and found no trace of her. "I'm sure she's fine." Tony tried to soothe the child as she started to whimper in fear. "Your mummy's a big girl, she can take care of herself." He refused to call Ziva 'Mother' when talking to Caitlin with the reasoning that is sounded to clinical.
"Daddy, I'm scared." Caitlin had, unlike her mother, picked up contractions, colloquialisms and idioms fairly quickly.
"I know you are, baby." He kissed the top of her head as they walked into her room, painted pale blue and lilac with clouds, courtesy of Abby and McGee. There was a note resting on the windowsill next to the rocking chair that faced Caitlin's bed. Tony knew she liked to go in there and watch their daughter sleep, to help calm her down – to prove that her nightmare was just a nightmare and not real. He picked up the small piece of paper and smiled at her scrawl.
I have gone out for a walk to clear my head.
I love you both. Do not worry about me.
Z.
"I know where we'll find mummy." He looked down at his daughter who had climbed into the wooden rocking chair that Gibbs had given them. "Come on."
"But I'm in my pyjamas." She pulled at the sleepwear.
"That won't matter where we're going."
"You're in your boxers." He glanced down and nodded.
"Yeah, that will matter." He held his hand out for her to grasp hold of and they walked back to his and Ziva's bedroom where he pulled on his jeans and shirt from the day before.
"Thought we'd find you here." Tony smiled as he carried Caitlin down the stairs.
"Where else do any of us go when we cannot sleep or we do not feel well or we have a problem?"
"Back home to dad." Tony chuckled.
"I said not to worry about me." Ziva wrapped her hand around his.
"We couldn't sleep." He shrugged and placed Caitlin down so she could curl up in her mother's arms. "And we wanted to see you."
"I had a nightmare, Mother." Caitlin said quietly, her voice muffled by her mother's shoulder.
"I am sorry, baby. I should have been there." She rocked the child back and forth in her arms slightly, an awkward movement when sat on a stool.
"Not your fault, mother." She pressed her small hand to Ziva's cheek and wiped the tear away.
"Shall I make some tea?" Gibbs stood up, not wanting to intrude on the family moment and deciding that bourbon wasn't entirely appropriate for the situation.
"We should be getting home, boss." Tony said as Ziva looked at him.
"Yes, it is getting late."
"Getting late? It had already gotten late when you arrived here." He laughed and placed his hand on her head. "Go on. Go get some sleep." He kissed her and Caitlin's foreheads then turned to DiNozzo and raised his eyebrows at his senior field agent's expectant expression. He slapped the back of Tony's head with much less force than usually and grinned. "Night."
"Lilah tov." Mother and daughter said in unison as they stood up and made their way to the stairs.
"Goodnight, boss." Tony nodded and followed his family. "Oh, and in case I haven't said so before: thank you, for everything you have done for us."
"Take them home, DiNozzo. I'll expect you bright and early later this morning."
"Of course. See you then." He flashed a tired grin and headed upstairs to his car, leaving Gibbs alone in his basement once more, just waiting for another of his children to come to him with a problem.
For my reference: 15th NCIS fic.