It's three am. I am squished in a hard, uncomfortable visitor's chair next to Ari's bedside. I have a headache, a lump the size of a hen's egg on the side of my head where I hit it on the roof as I fell and my chest feels like an elephant has been tap-dancing on it.
Harry Todd (Gibbs' idea, but I went along with it) has come through surgery and he's resting. Not comfortably, and definitely not sleeping. He's on enough pain/sedation medication to bring down a bull elephant in mid-charge, and he's wrapped like a mummy from the Smithsonian, so he's miserably uncomfortable but alive. But there's no way he's sleeping.
My shot made a dreadful mess of his shoulder. He's looking at a lot of surgery and months of physiotherapy to get his arm functional again. That's if he doesn't lose the arm first.
He's holding my hand. When he came round after the emergency surgery to fix the worst of it and get the bullet out, his good hand slid across the few inches of bed between me and him, and he took hold of my hand. Not me clinging to him, but Ari clinging to me.
The distinction is subtle, but it's there. He's not going to just let go. The insanity and pain of the last few hours is over. He's doped up to the eyeballs, but he knew exactly who else was in the room, even doped up and in mind-blanking pain, he was making a point.
I looked up at Gibbs, Gibbs looked back at me with a long hard stare. Then he grinned, that cock-eyed, rueful, Gibbs-grin that could mean just about anything (this is a man you never, ever, play poker with!).
"You've made up your mind?" That clear, hard eyed stare again.
I nodded. I tried not to look pleadingly at him. Gibbs was immune to puppy-dog eyes anyway.
He must have liked or believed what he read from my face, he nodded, "I'll try and make it right."
A Gibbs try is worth ten of someone else's, that is what makes him so good. And, in the broad spectrum, politics is a matter of total indifference to him. In the Gibbs idiom, life is worth far more than the machinations of greedy men.
The young woman, Ziva, is Ari's sister. Wherever her orders may have come from, her mission was to kill Ari. Is it wrong to be amused at such a time? I look at Ziva, her body language, she's independent and feisty, but she's already looking to Gibbs for reassurance.
I am amused, because we all do. Even Tony.
He appeared. To check on me. Earning himself a head-slap from Gibbs. For letting me run off into danger with no back up.
As if Tony had a choice in the matter. I gave him no choice.
We are alone now, Ari and I. He's still holding my hand. He's very heavily bandaged, his right arm folded up across his chest, securely wrapped to his body, thick padding over his wounded shoulder. Even the tiniest movement makes him wince and bite his lower lip.
He's cried a couple of times. He's in so much pain he can't control it. I see it, but I doubt anyone else would. He had never let anyone else be that close.
When we were at the farm, and he told me that he had never had any trouble getting women, I might have snapped back something about him paying them to be with him, but I knew he was telling me the literal truth.
There's something intoxicating about authoritative, foreign guys. Ari was handsome, confident, well groomed and charming. He wouldn't have the slightest difficulty getting a woman.
Even as my soul rejoiced that he had picked me, a tiny corner of my heart viewed other pretty women with suspicion.
But Ari only had eyes for me.
I had been permitted to see him cry. I had a packet of tissues in my pocket, and I had wiped away his tears. This time I didn't just see kindness in his eyes. I saw love. All the love he had to give. For me. He had deep-frozen his heart for so long, love was as much a revelation to him as it was to me.
I had known why I was saving him, he belonged to me.