A/N: Thank you for the reviews & story alerts, everyone! Very much appreciated. :) This story is already finished, so I'll just keep uploading chapters until they're all posted. And there's a sequel planned, too. ;)

Chapter One

Ziva raised her head, slowly. It felt heavy, like her skull was full of rocks, and everything looked blurry, like she was staring out a dirty window. She blinked a few times to clear her vision, but even that didn't help. Frustrated, she pushed herself into a sitting position, raising a hand to her head as she did so. After a few more moments, her vision started to clear up, but once it did, she wished it hadn't.

She found herself surrounded by piles of twisted metal, broken concrete, dirt and dust. When she looked down at herself, she saw she was half-buried and quickly pushed the rubble aside as she attempted to process what happened. What happened. . .

Her head snapped up and a gasp escaped her mouth as she remembered. "McGee."

She felt around her, as if she'd find his hand, a leg, something to signal he was nearby. But the thought of him being there and being dead terrified her more than the thought of not finding him at all.

She shook her head and forced herself to focus. It would do neither of them any good for her to imagine the worst. She braced her hands on the spot she'd managed to clear on the floor and attempted to push herself to her feet, slowly standing and readjusting to the new position.

Once she was sure she could stand without falling, she scanned the space, her horror growing at the sheer magnitude of the explosion. The entire building as they knew it was gone, replaced with mountains of debris, and somewhere in that debris was her partner.

"McGee!" Her first call of his name came out hoarse, but she waited for a response anyway. When there was none, she tried again. "McGee!"

"Ziva?"

Ziva's breath caught in her throat at his voice, and she felt her heartbeat pick up, as she repeated his name, unsure of what else to do. "McGee, are you okay? Can you move?"

She saw a hand rise from where a large girder had landed, and her stomach churned with nausea, but she started toward him, soon realizing it would be easier to crawl over the ruins than to navigate them by foot. She dropped to her knees and began to crawl, the hard edges of the metal and concrete biting into the palms of her hands and ripping holes in her pants, but that didn't matter to her. Those were minor cosmetic details, things that would heal easily or could be replaced.

McGee couldn't be replaced.

She made it to his side in a few minutes, though it felt like hours to her. When he came into full view, she swore under her breath in Hebrew, but then pulled herself together and repeated, "Can you move?"

His eyes flicked to hers and she saw the panic in them as he struggled and finally said, "My legs are stuck. I can't. . ." He tried to extract himself from under the girder and Ziva crawled closer, resting a hand on his arm and causing him to look up at her.

"Don't, McGee," she said, her voice calm, though she could feel herself shaking. "You could just make it worse."

He shook his head, ignoring her words and trying again, making noises of disgust in not being able to dislodge himself. Ziva watched him, almost as though she were frozen in place, then snapped out of it and reached over to take his face in her hands and force him to look at her. "Stop!" The command came out harsher than she intended and she watched as McGee's expression turned to anger and he reached up to remove her hands from his face.

"I can take care of myself, Ziva," he said, struggling against the weight on his legs again. "You go get help."

Ziva just stared at him, horrified at the suggestion. "I'm not leaving you!"

He stopped struggling long enough to give her an incredulous look. "How else are we going to get out of here? There's no way anyone is going to know we need help. We can't just wait around for someone to show up. That could be hours from now, maybe days."

"It would not take days for Gibbs to figure out that we were in trouble," Ziva hissed.

"Besides, you made it pretty clear earlier you didn't want to be here, and I'm sure that hasn't changed anytime recently," McGee continued as though Ziva hadn't spoken. He paused for a moment, his breathing heavy, then said, "Get out of here. If one of us has to die. . ."

"Would you listen to yourself?" Ziva exploded, unable to contain her frustration any longer. "Nobody is going to die. And I am most certainly not leaving. I am sorry that you are stuck with me, but you do not have much of a choice in the matter, so I suggest you accept the fact that you are!"

"Why do you think I'm mad at you?" He grimaced and closed his eyes, his breathing growing more labored. "You're the one who was upset about something. I'll just . . . I'll just make it easier on you."

He stopped talking then and Ziva's expression turned from anger to concern, and from concern to panic as she watched his head loll to the side as he lost consciousness. She took his face in her hands and tried to shake life back into him, but he didn't respond.

"Dammit, McGee, why do you do this?" She softened her tone as she tried to get him to come back to her. "You take everything on your shoulders when it is a burden that should be shared, so we can work together to make it right." She crawled over so she could lay his head on her lap, fanning him with her hand and waiting for him to regain consciousness.

When she glanced down at him and caught sight of his slack expression, Ziva found herself needing to swallow the heavy emotion she suddenly felt. The reality of the situation began to settle itself in the pit of her stomach.

If they didn't get help soon, he could die.

Tony used his shoulder to hold his desk phone in place as he sent a text on his cell phone, swearing to himself as the call on the landline went to voicemail. He pressed send on the text and slammed the other phone back into its cradle, glancing up as Gibbs walked past his desk.

"Neither one of them is answering, Boss. I think we should go check on them."

Gibbs circled back and stood in front of Tony's desk. "Your gut?"

Tony gave him a serious look. "You're not worried? They should at least be on their way back by now."

"Never said I wasn't worried, DiNozzo," Gibbs responded, his voice softer than normal. He glanced up then, his gaze landing on the live ZNN feed on the television behind Tony, and he started to look away when something made him look back. His face fell as he focused in on the news story and bulletin scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

Tony looked up at him. "Boss?"

Gibbs simply nodded at the screen before heading back to his desk, grabbing his gun and saying, "Explosion outside of Norfolk. Warehouse district."

Tony stood, his movements slow as he processed what Gibbs wasn't saying. "Probie and Ziva were checking out a warehouse outside of Norfolk."

"Gas the car. I gotta go tell Vance."

Tony nodded and snapped out of it, snatching his backpack from the floor behind his desk and running for the elevator, not wasting any more time. His team was in danger, the people who meant the most to him in the world, and he wasn't about to let anything stand in his way.

Gibbs ran up the stairs to the Director's office two at a time, not even stopping at his secretary's desk and just barreling his way through into Vance's office, causing both Vance's secretary and the Director himself to stand from their desks.

"The door is there for a reason, Agent Gibbs," Vance said, his face stern. He shifted his gaze to his secretary, who took the hint and closed the door before returning to her desk. He looked back to Gibbs once they were alone. "What's so urgent, Gibbs?"

"I need a rescue squad just outside of Norfolk, as soon as possible, and we need to be discreet about it." Vance's brow furrowed in concern, and Gibbs kept on. "You been watching ZNN?"

"There was an explosion, abandoned warehouse," he said, and at the look on Gibbs' face, amended his statement. "Not abandoned?"

"Rogers case," Gibbs confirmed, pausing for just a moment before continuing. "I sent McGee and David to investigate. I'm guessing the bomb was already in place before they got there."

Vance nodded slowly, starting to see what Gibbs was getting at. "And if that was his meeting place, he could come back to make sure everything was destroyed. If he finds your agents there. . ." Gibbs echoed his nod and Vance sat back down at his desk, picking up his phone. "Go, Gibbs. I'll make sure help gets there."

Gibbs turned and rushed from the office, pulling out his phone to call Tony as he went. The only thing that mattered now was getting to McGee and Ziva . . . and hoping they weren't too late.