A/N: A huge bouquet of thanks to all who took the time to follow, favorite, and review! I was blown away by the comments. And to think, I held off on posting this story because I wasn't sure if anyone would agree with my vision for a post-NCIS Ziva. Guess I was wrong!

Part 2: Mission

It didn't take long to pack the necessary supplies for the journey. Water, food rations, and basic medical provisions went into their packs. Ziva would have traded it all for one loaded Beretta and an extra clip. Or would she? The line was blurring, the one that divided who she used to be and who she wanted to become, and she didn't know to which version of herself her thoughts belonged in this situation.

A familiar tingle erupted between her shoulder blades as they signed out a Jeep. It was a sensation she hadn't felt in months, but that had always served as a warning. It had never steered her wrong, not when it came to operations in the field. Call it experience, intuition. A gut feeling. She owed it her life on more than one occasion.

Whatever it was, she ignored it now by submitting herself into the desert of the enemy, unarmed and with unwanted company.

Gray had no idea what he was volunteering himself for, but he drove with purpose, speaking very little. Ziva glanced over and could not recall ever witnessing him so stoic, his profile a hard, jagged edge. She deftly secured her long hair back into a sloppy French braid, and matched his silence with her own.

If she had driven the vehicle, they would have made it to the Peshkhabour border point sooner than the hour it took with him at the wheel. A sliver of moon was all that illuminated the sky when they arrived and parked. Only their individual packs would join them for the remainder of the trip on foot.

They used their humanitarian credentials like corpsmen status to gain passage across the pontoon bridge. The river glinted darkly beneath the man-made structure, an unnatural joining of countries that were born to be rivals. On the other side awaited the untamed Syrian desert, and somewhere within the unforgiving terrain was a lost family.

She could almost hear the child's soft cries from where she stood at the foot of the bridge, but she told herself it was the wind.

Or else she was losing her mind.

(/)(/)(/)

"So." Gray struggled around prickly brush that a moment before his companion had maneuvered with ease. "Who were you? Before this."

What he was asking took longer than it should have to register in her mind. Few people understood the greatest contradiction of the desert, that of the arid days and comparatively frigid nights. She wore layers and gloves and boots, but the cold, coupled with the dwindling reserve of energy from her meager dinner, produced a heavy lethargy that she fought off with more effort than the natural elements in their path.

Without slowing her pace, she adjusted the straps of her pack on her thin shoulders and pretended not to have heard him. "According to the woman's directions, the location of the family is another two klicks northwest." She indicated over the next ridge to a two-story climb up the side of the steep, rocky crag.

The blond followed the point of her finger, letting his head fall back to survey the endeavor. "Oh, is that all?"

Ever since Ziva took the lead on the hike, the aid leader had resorted to the good-natured man who played games with the children in the camp on his breaks and gave nicknames that stuck.

"I suppose it's not for you. Isn't that right, Desert Rat? Which brings me back to that question you cleverly evaded." His labored breathing caused delays between words, like a broken signal in a radio transmission. "Hey, can we stop for a minute? Catch our breath?"

Without a verbal acquiesce, Ziva led them under an overhang in the mountain and dropped her bag at her feet. Gray collapsed onto the carcass of a fallen tree, rummaging in his own pack until he produced his already half-empty ration of water.

"Where'd you learn to do all this?" he asked after taking a hard drag on the bottle. "Following footprints. Hiking with no problem in the dark, without a compass. The same place you learned Arabic?"

Ziva leaned back against the serrated surface of the mountain wall and crossed her arms, a useless barrier to his inquisition. The situation drudged up her basic instincts of survival and tracking. There was no hiding her expertise.

His scoff tumbled into the air. "You know, you could just say the Israeli Army to shut me up."

"I did my duty," she confirmed, her throat itchy from the cold air.

"Come on," he goaded. "You've been at the camp for two months and I barely know anything about you, David, besides that you're a loner; you like being around the kids more than the adults; and you never turn down the opportunity to work a little harder than everybody else, like you've got something to prove, though what that is, I can't imagine."

Gray's pale features remained smooth and open as he revealed his heightened awareness of her. It was not altogether a surprise. She'd caught her boss staring, once or twice. Her eyes were more than acclimated to the darkness that suffocated like a noose around them, but she turned her face, purposefully avoiding his general area.

"Why do you even care?" Another trick of her trade: reversal.

Desert sounds filled the widening space that his reply was intended to fill. The water bottle crackled as he took another gulp.

"Everyone has a reason to be here," he said finally.

"Even you?"

She imagined his tall, lanky form filling business suits instead of the utilitarian desert-wear that all the volunteers lived in; she imagined him before this, and came up with nothing. It wasn't that she cared, but at least the focus was off of her.

Gray tucked a knee under him and leveraged his body to standing. "Yeah, even me."

Ziva followed his lead and pushed off the wall. Without words, they grabbed their packs and picked up the trail, with the trained tracker leading the way.

(/)(/)(/)

Of course there was a reason.

Ziva was not about to share her secrets with Gray, though, or anyone else. It was almost too much for her to think back two months, back to the end of a summer spent in the land of her birth, retracing her origins in a desert not so different from the one she traversed now.

Back to when he found her.

She remembered green eyes blinking over the rim of the mug, alert and attentive, just as he had been with her since arriving the prior morning. Almost to the point of driving her mad. Almost.

"You should drink your tea, before it gets cold."

Ziva glanced up at him through waves of eyelashes. "I thought I was supposed to be writing."

"That, too." The cup covered his lips from her line of sight, but she heard the hint of a smile in his voice. "You can do both."

They sat on opposite sides of the wooden table in the kitchen where she first learned to make challah bread and farfel under her mother's firm but patient tutelage. Through the window over the sink, she could see into the green streaks of orange groves where she taught Tali to turn cartwheels. If she listened closely, perhaps she could detect the faint rumblings of her father's car pulling up after "work" kept him away for only two weeks this time.

The house was imbued with countless such memories from her youth, each one a reminder of all that she had lost since growing up there: her family, purpose, pieces of her soul…

"What if I can't?" The words exploded from her mouth as violently as her body from the seat. Her untouched tea cup upturned, spilling its contents over the edge of the table and onto the floor. Dragging a shaking hand through her hair, she demanded, "What if…there is no hope for me?"

Her frustration had been a sideways comment or a pitying remark away from cascading over her defenses for weeks. His presence, and the confrontation it forced with the choices she had to make, propelled her towards the edge. That he brought with him the "I Will" list that belonged to her childhood self, a token of innocent dreams, and prodded her to write an updated version was the final shove off the cliff of her self-control.

Calmly, the sandy-haired agent set down his mug and rose to his feet. "But you can and there is," he said, circling around to her side and stopping only when his proximity caused the upwards tilt of her chin. His lips, not the words they were speaking, were all she wanted to comfort her, as though their weight would secure her to the earth and prove she wasn't forsaken, untethered and adrift.

But what she longed for would come later, when she sent him home without her. It would be a kiss goodbye.

Instead, she looked into the watery gaze he angled down at her and felt his strong hands steady her by the waist and watched the lips she desired struggle to form a sideways smile for her benefit.

"I know it's not easy, but if anyone can do it…" With a subtle nod, he gestured behind them to the trail of pain and loss and sacrifice that led up to them standing together in her childhood home. "Wipe the slate clean, make things right, start over…it's you, Ziva."

He would hate to know that it was his balm to her fears which gave her the strength to make the hardest decision of her life. The decision to walk away. From her job and the woman she had become. To walk away from him.

And yet, in that small moment, it was because he was there—not leaving but coming closer when she was at her most vulnerable—that she sat back down at her family table, breathed in and out, and wrote the final goal on her new list.

I will…find peace.

(/)(/)(/)

"Shh!"

Wrenched out of her memories, Ziva came to such an abrupt stop on the trail that the hand she threw up behind her had no chance of preventing her companion, only a few steps in her wake, from colliding with the outstretched limb.

"What are—ow!"

A glance over her shoulder brought Gray into view as he stumbled backwards, arms flailing and the beam of the flashlight he clutched in one hand shining in her eyes. Once he'd caught his footing, he massaged the assaulted spot on his chest pitifully.

The former assassin rolled her eyes. She'd made less of gunshot wounds.

"I didn't see you—"

"Shh!" she hissed at him again and continued in a whisper. "Do you hear that?"

Since their brief break at the foot of the mountain, they'd hiked on for no more than a half hour. The higher they climbed, the colder the temperature of the air stealing into their lungs and down into their boots. The Aussie lagged behind her, his breath and his footsteps labored. Luckily they were close, Ziva estimated, to where the Syrian woman said she'd last seen the family that morning.

Indulging her, Gray turned an ear out and listened. "I guess you really do have great hearing," he declared after a pause. "I'm not picking up a thing."

Then a wail slithered over the rocks and wrapped around the desert brush. It was the same mournful sound that Ziva had detected thirty-seconds earlier.

Gray stepped up beside her. "Now that, I heard."

They didn't go cautiously. With Ziva still out in front, they moved faster than they had all night, crossing the next five yards that deposited them into a hidden clearing around the side of the cliff; further on was sudden, total darkness that promised an overhang and a steep fall beyond.

Another cry went up. It was more of a whimper at their shortened distance, and Ziva felt as if it reverberated in her chest. She motioned to their left. The stream of Gray's flashlight scanned the ground where she indicated.

The ray of light found a foot.

A foot attached to a limp leg and that to a limp body of a young Arab man slumped against a slab of rock on the outskirts of the clearing. Dead.

They were too late.

As the beam traveled up and up his torso, the source of the cries was revealed. Averting her gaze from the flashlight's sudden attack, a small child made herself even smaller by curling into the chest of the bloody corpse that was presumably her father. Her face came back into view, staring out at the strangers with unparalleled terror.

The scene was uncanny. So similar was it to the arrangement of Ziva's own father's death that it was though she was reliving the horror, this time watching herself from the inside out. The shivers that literally shook her body didn't stop her from getting closer. She held her hands up, showing no harm as she approached. Three long strides and she sank to the ground on her knees in front of the pair.

From somewhere behind her, Gray asked in a shaky voice, "Where's the mother?"

She didn't know. Her entire focus was on the frightened little Syrian girl who was whimpering again. Tear tracks stood defined in the thick layers of dirt on her cheeks. Tufts of stringy hair wired away from her flaked scalp. She was barefoot and scantily clothed, and shivering—whether more from chill or fear, it was hard to tell.

"As-salam alaykum," Ziva greeted. "Hal anta bikhair?"

The only response she received was the widening of round eyes and cold-bitten lips pursing tighter. The waif shrank back, curling tiny hands deeper into her father's shirt; her dirty knuckles pressed against the fabric soaked dark in blood. Contaminating evidence, she thought, the term springing up from another life. The blotches on his clothes were still wet and sticky. Certainly not from a previous injury. Looking closer, the former crime scene investigator noted the perfect circular tears down the front of his shirt. Bullet holes.

Warning bells sounded in her mind, but she was rustier than Gray would have believed. It took her a second too long to put the pieces of an ambush together. By then, the shouting had started.

"Wa-fik! Wa-fik! Khaleek fee makanak!"

Out of the darkness around them sprung mysterious figures, faceless and indistinguishable from the swarthy cloak all deserts wore at night. Militia fighters were her educated guess, for they were notorious for ensnaring travelers and using them as examples of what happened to those who went against the regime.

Gray's flashlight briefly illuminated the surprise company—fatigues, boots, gleaming rifles—before one of the men kicked the item out of his hand. The clearing dropped into shadows.

"Whoa there, mates, we're aid workers," he said calmly, raising his arms in surrender. "We're not here to—" The landing of a fist to his face cut off the well-intended but worthless peacekeeping strategies.

Ziva could not help him. Just as the commotion began, she reached for the child who refused to let go of her father.

"Baba!" she cried again and again.

Her shrill shrieks of protest were in direct proportion to the forcefulness of Ziva's tugs on her skinny waist. A body dropped with a thud beside her, and the jostle was enough to tear the thrashing girl free into her waiting arms.

"I guess they don't want to be mates," Gray muttered, and then spat blood onto the ground.

Stomping feet announced the arrival of a soldier above them. "Ekhrass! Ekhrass!" But his shouting demands of shut up only made the girl shriek louder. "Wakif willa batokh!" The unmistakable cock of an AK-47 barrel left no doubt as to the seriousness of his threat to shoot.

When her whispered pleads for quiet proved ineffective, Ziva resorted to muffling the offending cries with a hand over the child's mouth. She rubbed a soothing hand along her arm, trying to minimize her panic.

A wave of the rifle accompanied the lead rebel's next set of commands. "Imbatal ala butnak. Imbatal ala butnak, besora'a!"

"They want us to get on the ground." Ziva translated the instruction to Gray while maneuvering her charge, finally quiet, into his arms and pushing them onto their stomachs. She needed them to play along.

The Israeli remained on her knees, defiant. Natural adjustments were taking place all over her body, positioning her frame into an alignment as instinctive for her as breathing. Straightening her spine, she allowed her hands to fall loosely at her sides. She never took her eyes off the enemy.

His face was vague, melding with the night, but sparks in the darkness warmed his sharp, bearded jaw line, and a smoky stench soon followed. He would extinguish her life before his cigarette.

"Imbatal ala butnak," he barked again, growing anxious when confronted with her silent refusal.

Ziva searched for his eyes and found sideways slits, narrowed and wild. Only a few months earlier, she and this man would have been a mirrored reflection of souls. She knew of blind conviction. Its total consumption, its blackness. Hers was born of revenge; his, of ideology and opportunity. What set them apart was that she saw clearly now, and refused to blink.

Taking a menacing step forward, the soldier shoved the rifle up against her forehead. "Besora'a!"

"Da-veed," Gray hissed.

The little girl moaned a solitary sob.

The cool metal of the gun, indistinct from her frozen skin, only served to hasten the awakening within her, calling to the surface a strength that was a constant companion for over half her life. She'd sent it away in the summer. But it returned to her now as the rebel's finger wound around the trigger…and tightened.