Disclaimer: NCIS characters and situations borrowed. No profits made.
A/N: You guys have been wonderful – many thanks for all the alerts, the reviews, the favorites and the PM s for this story. You made me want to hurry the updating! No TIVA yet, but Tony will appear after this chapter, and I promise Ziva will appear before things are through. We just need to see how the others on the team are seeing things first...
Again – sincere thanks for reading and for letting me know what you think. All comments appreciated...
"OKAY, TRIED - COULDN'T. LISTEN..."
September, 2009
Gibbs felt achingly tired as he let himself in the back door of his house, dropping his rucksack in the mudroom leading into the kitchen and pulling off his boots to stand beside them. Those simple actions would mean he'd have to give the floor a good sweeping to clean up the Somalian sand that had managed to make the entire trip with him, but at the moment he didn't care. He was bone tired, and not only from the long hours of travel and mission and return, but also from what he saw ahead.
Rule 12, he kept thinking. It had been borne of very different circumstances, and, he stubbornly argued with himself, it was still a good rule. A wise rule. For most people. For almost all co-workers.
But DiNozzo and David weren't just any co-workers; they were his, and they were on his team because they were extraordinarily sharp and good at what they did. And he could have bet money, even years ago, that they would end up together, sooner or later; whether just partners in bed or long committed spouses, who could tell, but a connection was there from the start that one way or the other would have had its due – except for Rule number 12, and if it was anything he was good at doing, it was manipulating and bending his team to his way of doing things, especially his rules, no matter what.
And look where it had gotten them.
He crossed the kitchen, dim in the late afternoon light, and pulled a beer from the refrigerator, craving something strong and wet and hoping the beer would help him avoid the lure of the half bottle of bourbon waiting for him downstairs. He went to the basement door, pulled it open and flicked the switch just inside, once again bouncing the light around the uncharacteristically empty room.
He jogged tiredly down the stairs, longing once more for a huge wooden form like the ones that usually filled this space, the long, curved planks of a boat's hull and the rhythmic, repetitive passes of sandpaper the best thing to sooth his thoughts when things were unsettled. It didn't pay to let his team see the times he replayed some of his decisions, wondering if they'd been for the best; it didn't fit the image they had of him and Gibbs had learned early and well in the Corps that the image his team had of him, like the image his men had of their gunnery sergeant, was vital to developing the level of leadership and command needed in dangerous situations. He held that belief as an inviolate truth and every day tried his damnedest to live up to the image. And a part of that image was 'face it, own it, deal with it.' Second or even third thoughts were important if things went haywire, but not where the team could see. They needed him to be strong.
Gibbs crossed the expanse of empty basement floor toward the project he'd just started, a pair of matched wooden rockers for his father's front porch – or maybe he'd put them in front of his store; he was there more hours than home and it was the sort of thing Jack would do, encouraging customers to stick around and share a story or two. As he did nearly every time he came downstairs now he let his hand run along the beautiful pieces of ash he'd found, some still in the rough-hewn planks in which he'd bought them, and several now cut down to size, two in the braces he used to bend the wooden pieces into the precise curve needed for the back spindles. The four long rockers, the largest pieces he had in this project, drew him more insistently than usual, and Gibbs knew he was searching for answers that might never exist for his battered teammates.
Rule 12...
From the moment Ziva told him she'd been sent to be on his team, a few years ago now, a little part of his gut told him that there would be something – something – between his liaison and his senior field agent. His head told him all the ways he was wrong, but there was something in the pairing that set off his early warning system. Until the fiasco with Jeanne Benoit, he thought maybe they had just not clicked – they were excellent partners, there for each other and the rest of the team, so maybe it wasn't Rule 12 at all but just them, and the fact they weren't very similar at all in background or tastes or temperament.
But then he'd seen a side of Ziva that had surprised him when she had first convinced herself that Tony was ill, stewing and fretting and obsessing that he'd developed a complication from the plague, or worse. After that, another side of her appeared, and then another, an alternating approving-jealous-skeptical sort of emotional roller coaster, albeit subdued, when she learned he was in a committed relationship with the young doctor. And when that imploded ... well, they'd gone back to being just teammates. Partners. And being that they were young and healthy and single, went on with their separate lives, no connection outside work as far as he could tell.
Would they have done more, if there was no Rule 12?
Gibbs paused for a moment, staring at the rich grain under his hands, before pushing the sandpaper back, with long strokes, along one of the thick rocker beams.
Tony and Ziva may have flirted and teased each other – rumor was that when Tony was team leader they had a weekly "movie night," although who knows what else was on the schedule – but he'd never had the sense that they were just waiting to get through the day so they could go spend some quality time together. He'd seen that before; hell, he'd lived it. More than once. But not when on a team as busy as the MCRT had been over the past few months.
We'd been busy enough, before everything went to hell, that they probably needed to just get home and get some sleep for the next day. Besides, with those two, no way would they show the usual signs – a pair like that would be as unconventional in finding time together as they are with the team...
But Rule 12 ... his damned Rule 12 ... was out there and he was well aware of how much influence his rules and requirements affected them, especially DiNozzo. If he'd ever doubted it he had all the reminder he needed when he tried to tell Tony to let things go, invoking Rule 11 to do so. The agent immediately responded defensively, insisting he would never date a co-worker. It was the first time in a long time that DiNozzo had screwed up which rule was which.
If Rule 12 never been mentioned, Gibbs wondered, would the two of them have gotten involved outside of the office? And if they had – would that have meant no Jeanne Benoit? No Rivkin? No battle in Ziva's apartment or trip to Israel or confrontation by Ziva for a place on the team, and no leaving her behind with Mossad...
No suicide trip to Somalia, for either of his people.
No false report of Ziva's death. No months of imprisonment and torture and God knows what else for the daughter of Eli David...
The cascade of "what ifs" caused Gibbs to slow his sanding and take a deep breath, blowing out the discomfort it caused him. He didn't often speculate on what might have been; it didn't change reality – but if his damned rule had led, one thing to the next, to the battered, benumbed Mossad officer he'd just left in Ducky's care or the shattered spirit of his senior field agent over the past months, then he owed it to them to make it right – if he only had a clue what, in this situation, "right" was.
For Ziva – he had no idea what horrors she must have faced in her captivity – or the extent of the damage done to her. For all her Mossad training and experience there were some things for which no one could adequately prepare, and many not easily overcome, and he had no idea yet how – or who – she would be after such an ordeal.
And DiNozzo. He was even more of a puzzle in this. His first wounds came early, when he saw Ziva slipping away from him, first to Rivkin, then after Rivkin's death, to her accusations and anger for Rivkin's death. Ziva's spiraling rage at DiNozzo, fueled by the evidence that both her father and Rivkin had simply used her, betrayed her, cut Tony deeply as she seemed to blame him for it all, rather than the men who were actually at fault. More than once, Gibbs wondered if when the dust settled she would see that of all the men in her life, Tony was far more deserving of her appreciation and loyalty than her father or Rivkin ever were, and would see just what he had risked just to protect her. But before any of that had been settled, the team was back from Israel without her. And no matter how well Dinozzo pulled out his usual mask of nonchalance, this one had rattled him – and he hadn't been the same without her here.
But because Tony was Tony, he coped, not missing a beat, until there was first the news of Mossad activity and her possible capture, which wound him up to try and find her. When he'd had to tell the team she had "died," Gibbs saw a DiNozzo he'd never before seen in the nearly ten years they'd worked together. While Tony hadn't been himself since their return from Israel, after hearing of the Damocles' destruction he first was numb and distant – then, suddenly, manic and obsessed. His plan to avenge Ziva's death had been calculated and ostensibly for the greater good, saving further acts of terrorism and who could know how many lives. And as he pitched it to Vance, Gibbs wondered how in the hell the Director couldn't see that Tony was ready give up his own life, just to be sure that Saleem lost his.
Once given the green light, DiNozzo didn't think once about the future – he was bent only on revenge. There had been times, more than a few, that Gibbs actually thought about pulling the plug on the mission, given the toll it was taking on his agent. He'd finally convinced himself that Tony needed it to grieve, to get out all that he had stored up in anger and regret and loss – but even as they put boots on the ground, he worried that Tony intended it to be a suicide mission, too. And as much as Gibbs hated putting both agents in such close range of harm, he relied on the knowledge that by sending McGee in, too, DiNozzo would move heaven and hell to bring McGee back in one piece. He just couldn't be sure he'd see Tony again if he'd sent him in alone.
And now?
Gibbs sighed, pausing for a moment in his sanding. He had three agents who would eventually recover from the physical injuries their captivity had caused – even Ziva. Two agents whose chronic emotional scars had been newly torn open were left changed. Damaged. For how long? Would they ever really recover? Were these the wounds that would scar them permanently?
Would it make a damn bit of difference if he somehow found a way to remove Rule 12 from their list of rules? Or would his doing so make things even worse?
He shook his head in his weariness, realizing he was getting ahead of himself. Ziva's position was in limbo, at best; apart from not knowing what she wanted to do at this point, the best he'd been able to do with Vance was to "table" her position at NCIS, in his hope that she would return. They didn't know if Mossad would ever reassign her as its liaison, but Vance, knowing Eli better than anyone there did, wasn't hopeful. At NCIS, she was one of them – one of his – and there would somehow always be a place for her with them, he'd make sure of it. And beyond that – Gibbs knew that both Ziva and Tony had some serious healing to do, both in themselves and all their baggage, and with each other. Given his own track record he figured he was about the last one to offer any help or advice about that, other than they needed to heal, and that they needed to do all they could to do so. Whatever he could do to help them with that, too, he had their six.
He just didn't know how, quite yet. And all that, he supposed, needed to be sorted out before Rule 12 was an issue...
... to be continued.
