A/N: So this has been kicking around in my head for a couple of months now, and whether or not I'm pleased with it is still pretty up in the air. I hope you'll like regardless, and please feel free to comment on what you think works or doesn't work, flame, throw stones, whatever! Thanks for taking a look :)
Where to Draw the Line
The bourbon swilled around the glass one, two, three times before she set it down and closed her fingers around her cell phone. The front screen was dark. Not that she expected it to be lighting up like the proverbial Roman candle; no one knew she was here. As soon as the day was done, and the day had been a late one, Ziva had strolled to the elevator with Tony the same way she did every day. They'd joked about trivial things for the minute or so it took to reach the ground level, but as soon as they'd gone their separate ways in the garage she'd bee-lined for the car.
And here she was, three hours later, sitting on a barstool and breathing in cigarette-thickened air that after tonight would feel far too familiar for her liking.
She'd never needed to tell him when she needed space, but "needing" and "wanting" were two very separate things and somehow of late she'd gotten the two confused. What she'd wanted two hours ago had become something altogether different in the interim, but the effort it would take to swallow her pride and just call Tony outweighed her better judgment.
She wasn't drunk. Far from it, in fact; it took more than three glasses of bourbon to put her out of commission. But regardless, she couldn't drive like this, and Ziva doubted she'd brought enough money with her to cover the taxi ride home.
She should just call him. He lived less than ten minutes away, and it was too far to walk back to her new apartment. Her old place had been much closer.
Ziva wouldn't walk past her old place. Not for lack of fortitude; she'd lived through enough explosions and re-visited enough blackened crime scenes to be morbidly used to them. Years of desensitization had prepared her for whatever fiery end a place could meet. Her own home was no exception. It wasn't the first place she'd lost. Anyway, she was sure the building had been spruced up by now, but…she hadn't even seen it since getting back to the States. The brick walls had held enough violence, steeped to bursting in the old life she wanted to put as far behind her as she could. It had been through enough without her forcing it to relive things she'd tried to bury.
But things shoved out of sight had a nasty habit of exhuming themselves at undesirable moments. She slid the lowball glass back and forth between her hands.
If only.
She knew she should call him. It wouldn't be the first time she'd done so from this same spot. But then again, she'd never had the best track record with reaching him from here, either.
The first time was what, almost three years ago now? Three years ago, she'd sat here knocking back tequila shooters, while he was undercover and seeing Jeanne Benoit. Undercover and in love, while she was on this same barstool long after most of the team had left, staring into her glass just like this and trying to convince herself she wasn't jealous. She'd called him five times in the same hour, until Ducky had likened her behavior to a jealous woman with a wayward lover. Ha. Lover, no. But jealous?
Jealousy had been the right term, no matter how else she tried to paint it. Jealous that he'd been in love. Jealous that she'd foolishly fallen for a man already knocking on death's door, while his Jeanne was still warm and solid and alive. Jealous that Tony had someone to hold at night.
Ziva had spent her fair share of nights in other men's beds, make no mistake, and by no means did she ever feel the need to have someone in hers to feel desired. No man had ever made it to the point where she'd trusted him to spend the night in hers. If Navy Lieutenant Roy Sanders might have been that man? Ziva had thought about it once, at his funeral, and then she'd pushed it away. He wasn't coming back. Fighting death didn't deserve her efforts. She picked up her drink again and watched the liquor swill around the bottom, how the light played off the facets of the glass.
Love hadn't been something she had ever even foreseen herself wanting, least of all simply because it was something Tony had. And still she'd drunk herself stupid that night because of it.
But Tony's relationship had messily ended. She didn't often belittle others' pain, but by the end of the whole la Grenouille ordeal, a sizable chunk of her felt that Tony had had it coming to him from the start. It was one thing to get involved with a coworker and have the relationship fail, but it was completely another to get involved undercover. The danger level should've been deterrent enough. The riskier the operation, the greater the need for delicacy became, and the greater the need to keep one's emotions from clouding one's judgment. Simple common sense. No Mossad training necessary.
To be fair, Ziva hadn't been without her fair share of poor choices at the time. Tony had been a fool, but so had she. Something in her mind had switched off; how else would she have allowed herself to feel so much for a dying man? On a case, no less. A case specifically to find out who had as good as killed Lieutenant Roy Sanders in the first place.
Rules Ten and Eleven, completely out the window.
But Roy had crawled easily under her skin. She'd never met someone who could get to her like that, with just a smile and an innocence and genuine desire to know her, the nondescript woman he'd jogged past every morning but never spoke to, in the short time he had left. And now, years removed from him and inebriated, she could admit that Roy had been everything she'd needed in a man.
He was someone she could get close to with no consequences. There were no worries that she'd reveal one too many secrets, or that they'd fight and he'd use them against her. He was the connection she'd wanted, but one she could cut ties with without any of the repercussions of a real relationship. No bad-breakup fallout. No loose ends, no what-ifs. He was dying, and that had allowed her to be herself with him for the moment or two she'd needed. Or wanted. Or something. He would take her weakness to the grave with him. She'd never anticipated how his death would rip her apart.
God, she'd fallen into him so easily. To the point where in another life, she could have gladly gotten used to being with Roy for...for a while. Ziva wouldn't say forever; nothing in life held that kind of permanence. But she wouldn't have been opposed to giving him whatever length of time together he'd wanted.
She really had loved him, in her own way. It was just easier to rationalize after the fact.
Ziva swallowed the last of her bourbon. It burned on the way down.
She'd had it coming to her, just like Tony. But his Jeanne hadn't died. He could pine away for her all he wanted. He still had the option of doing something about it.
Where was the sense in hoping for a dead man?
The phone in her hand was still dark. Absently she worked it open and flipped it shut again. Open and shut. Open and shut. The clock on the little screen read 12:48. She really should've called him by now.
God, she could use another drink.
Ziva hadn't called Tony from a bar again until his transfer to the aircraft carrier, two years later. There were nights in between when she should have called him. But there had been too much pride in her then, and an uncomfortable new acquaintance with her own mortality that had only gotten darker in the years to come.
She'd called him often, that first month back in Israel after Tony had shipped out. Many of those calls had come after closing cases through muscle memory, with just a bullet to the brain and a whiff of gunsmoke. She'd felt like machinery. A lost cog, polished up and re-fit to a machine she wasn't sure she still belonged to. She'd wanted to talk. She'd wanted the give and take that might have convinced her she was still a little bit human. But he'd never answered. Not once.
Ziva remembered feeling betrayed. To be more specific, each time she slipped to voicemail it'd felt like a slap in the face. But she'd let it go.
She'd even let the whole thing die after he'd come back for good. "You could have called," and that had been that. Tony, though, all of a sudden had sensed something was up. He'd always been good at that. He tried to press the subject in that annoyingly Tony way of his, poking and prodding with well-placed questions that then more than ever had Ziva choosing her words carefully; searching for evidence on the USS Seahawk didn't seem nearly the right place to tell him he only ever seemed to have time for her when she was standing in front of his face, or that in the four months he'd been gone she'd quit trying to force him to make time for her.
Maybe she'd have told Tony about the bar in Morocco, if they'd kept in touch. Not the case itself, nor the explosion or the eight stitches she'd needed in her temple; that would've been a risk Ziva had not been willing to take under her present company. But maybe she'd have told him other things, like the song she'd sung there, or her dress. Of course he'd have wanted to hear about that dress; he was still Tony, when all was said and done, and she would always enjoy tormenting him with images of things she knew would haunt his thoughts for days. And it had been one of the nicer bars she'd visited since she'd gone back to Mossad, before its reduction to rubble.
Maybe she'd have even mentioned Michael, if Tony had ever answered her. It was highly doubtful at best, and if anything she would never have dropped Michael's name over the phone, but seeing an old friend again would have been something to talk about. And it had been nice to see Michael, at the time. Before she'd known he was supposed to be her keeper.
Michael had been someone she'd never felt the need to hide from, because he'd known her since the beginning. Being with him had felt…freeing, for lack of a better word, even as he'd confined her to hiding from her team, from her friends.
She really had called the whole lot of them friends by then, however irritating, or thickheaded, or strange they could be. Four years with the Major Case Response team was a lot of shared experiences, the good and the bad, and all of them had taken a backseat to the man who had dropped out of her life completely after she'd come to America.
Michael had dropped off the face of the earth, it'd seemed, after she'd left Israel five years ago.
She'd given her friends, her team, who'd loved her and had her six every single day since she'd first stepped into the bullpen, no reason to trust her anymore. She'd betrayed them for the lure of something familiar and dusty she'd put behind her long years ago, and still they'd come for her. Still they'd had her six, still they'd believed when the last of her family had left her for dead.
But that was a memory for another night, and another kind of alcohol. Something much stronger than bourbon.
She took a deep breath and let the air rush out all at once; not quite a sigh, but not quite an exhale either. Just because Tony hadn't answered from the ship over a year ago didn't mean he wouldn't answer now. She should call him. She should. She even flipped the phone open. But that was as far as she got.
By now it'd even been a while since she'd called him from her own home. She no longer needed someone with her at night to fight away the shadows in her head. She dreamed less and less. She needed the buffer of company less and less. But just because she didn't need company anymore didn't necessarily mean she didn't want it.
It wasn't something Ziva David would ever admit to. But nowadays, she hardly felt like Ziva David on a regular basis anymore. Would it be so hard to believe she might just want someone there? That line was still blurry in her mind; maybe it was the alcohol talking.
She'd gotten used to Tony's presence, that was for sure. So much that it still sometimes felt strange falling asleep without the sounds of this movie or that one eking into her room at night, or the quiet "g'night" he'd call from her couch. He'd be gone in the morning, but she never expected him to stay. She never expected him to pick up her call the first night, either, but he'd gotten there so quick she doubted he'd obeyed any sort of speed limit, and had stayed with her until she fell asleep beside him on the couch either very, very late or very, very early in the morning.
He was a completely different person than the Tony who teased and flirted over their desks every day. The Tony who came over and stayed til she was asleep never pushed too hard, and never imposed himself where he hadn't been invited. Right now she wasn't sure which Tony she wanted or needed or whatever the feeling was, but she should've called him an hour ago.
Why had things stopped? Ziva didn't recall coming right out and saying she didn't need the company, and to the best of her knowledge he'd never said anything of the like. Even if needing wasn't the word for it anymore, she didn't think she would've ever flatly told him to stay at home. One night she just…didn't call, and the Tony she'd gotten to know, the one who never pushed or imposed, had let her be. She couldn't say he had been the wrong Tony that night, because he had done what he'd always done since they'd started passing the evenings in her apartment. He let her dictate the circumstances. She always had the control. She held the reins and he'd been where she needed him to be, and absent when not.
And what she needed now was a ride home. Something small and dusty in her mind offered a reminder that she held the phone, after all, with no one but her own loose-lipped demons to stay her hand. All that effort over ten minutes beside him in a car.
Speed dial #5.