Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
A.N.: Thank you to Pixie-Galaxy-Dust, Nicoya456, Hiphuggers2, AthosionWarrior, Huddly, MissOrlane, HesMines, Mrs. Elizabeth Gibbs and MissJayne for reviewing!
Ziva took a deep, steadying breath as the loss she had felt a year ago and every day since then caught up with her and the tears she had kept at bay spilled from her eyes. She shuddered under the force of trying to stop them, but the pain of her injuries conspired against her, making the tears come thick and fast. A low moan of agony escaped her lips and she curled up, hugging her aching chest, while trying to make sure Jenny wouldn't disappear while she was crying.
Ziva let out all of the tightly reigned in emotions she had kept locked up for years and cried for more than just Jenny, or the predicament she was in now, she cried for Tony, whom she had never told how much she cared for him. Who was she kidding, she loved him, more than she had ever loved another person, but Jenny was here now. Jenny was dead, so that meant that it was nearly Ziva's time to go. She had hoped it would be Jenny that would come for her when it was her time, Jenny or Tali. Even Ari would have been a comfort, though he probably hated her too much for killing him.
She would never see Tony again, she would never hold him; speak to him, trade barbs with him. Love him. She cried for Gibbs, who had lost another team member so soon after losing Jenny, for McGee who looked up to Ziva because she seemed so indestructible and yet so human and for Abby, who would take the loss of her friend hard.
Jenny reached down to her and wrapped her arms around her, pulling her up from the floor and on to her lap. Ziva noted that the position was much warmer and she realised she had been lying on a thick bundle of blankets, rather than the cold floor, which was where she had been before waking up in here. A quick glance at the other women showed her they all had blankets to lie on and they were huddled, with those blankets wrapped around them. Why did Jenny have blankets too? She was dead wasn't she? She wouldn't need them, right? The warmth she could feel radiating from her must just be her own body's response to this powerful hallucination.
Ziva shook her head, unable to understand what was going on. Of course first seeing Jenny had made her think she was alive, but she knew she was dead, she had been there with her body, she had seen the blood coating the floor. Now she wasn't sure anymore. That had been a year ago though, how was she still alive? If indeed she was.
"Jenny… you are dead…" she whispered brokenly, her sobs not ceasing enough for her to speak properly. Jenny shook her head sadly.
"No, I'm not dead, Ziva. I just wish I was." She whispered softly back. Jenny sighed at her friend's wary expression and pulled one of Ziva's hands to her neck. When Ziva's hand met the warm skin of Jenny's neck, where she could feel a strong pulse pushing the blood through her body. She couldn't believe it, Jenny was here, she was alive. She sobbed harder; now that the floodgates had been opened she was finding it difficult to stop, which annoyed her. She wasn't supposed to be this weak, she was supposed to be strong and stoic, with all of her emotions carefully suppressed so they couldn't betray her, but the weeks of torture had loosened her resolve.
Had her father known? Or was this a coincidence? Normally she would have recited that Gibbs didn't believe in coincidences, but the behaviour and attitude of her father suggested that that was all it could be. He would never do anything so selfless. So maybe she wasn't alive. Ziva felt a headache coming on and realised for the first time that she was hungry, starving even, though she knew better than to ask for food. All of the women in this chamber were starving, and some of those had babies to feed. It didn't stop her stomach from growling though. Jenny chuckled a little when Ziva's stomach made noises so loud her crying couldn't drown it out.
"You're in luck Ziva; they said they would feed us today." She said to her softly, holding her tighter, and then relaxing her hold when Ziva drew in a sharp breath of pain. "Sorry, they really did a number on you, didn't they?"
"They became frustrated with my silence." She gave Jenny a small watery smile of victory, then swallowed hard and wiped her eyes. "What do they feed you?"
"Sometimes its ration bars that they've stolen, others it's just some mush that taste's foul, but don't spit it out, and try not to puke or you could die before they remember to feed us next." She shifted Ziva on her lap, moving her so they were in more contact, trying to share the heat they generated. Jenny reached around Ziva and drew the blankets over them both, tucking them in securely. "Obviously the pregnant and nursing women get the most, but we always try to share it out fairly."
Ziva nodded in understanding, but found herself drifting off. It had been a long time since she had felt so safe, but with Jenny here, she felt as if she could sleep and not worry about anything bad happening. She closed her eyes and snuggled closer to Jenny's slight frame, glad that even though she faced the end, she faced it with a friend who had been there already.
Tony stared blankly at the screen in front of him, flicking through the pictures they had taken at their current crime scene, but not taking in any details other than one. The victim was a woman, a dark haired Israeli woman. She had been strangled, there was plenty of evidence for Abby to sift through and the case looked almost open and shut. Dead bodies usually didn't bother him that much, but this one… the face looking blankly back at him in those pictures closely resembled Ziva, so closely that he couldn't tear his eyes away from her dark orbs, still open in shock and the mouth open out of desperation for oxygen.
It gave him chills to look at her, and it sent a cold feeling from his gut to his heart, a feeling that told him that it wasn't Ziva, but she was in danger. He ignored it though, really a dead body that looked like a loved one would do that and there was no real reason to believe Ziva was in danger, or to care. He winced slightly, thinking of the things they had said to each other when they had last seen each other, when she had been waiting to get on her father's plane. If he could take it all back, he would, but he knew he didn't deserve her forgiveness. The fact she hadn't kept in contact with anyone at the Agency said she held them all in contempt. She hadn't even traded emails with Abby.
Tony sighed heavily and stood up from his desk, irritated that he couldn't concentrate on his work. Ziva was everywhere, he saw her in everything he did, and everywhere he went. She was in the driver's seat of the truck when he took a corner too sharp, or overshot his parking space, she was at the desk opposite him when he made a discovery and decided to brag about it, and she was in the conversations he had with his co-workers whenever a saying came up that he thought he would need to explain to her. She was never there physically though, just in memory. It was like she had died.
He couldn't do this anymore; the not knowing was driving him crazy. He strode over to McGee's desk and leaned over it towards the computer technician, who looked up briefly, shook his head and carried on typing on his computer.
"McGee." He said, and Tim looked up at him, his fingers stilling on the keyboard.
"Tony." He said back expectantly, a small tinge of annoyance in his voice.
"I'm going crazy." Tony said, his voice low so he couldn't be overheard by other Agents.
"Well I wasn't going to say anything, but…" McGee began sarcastically, but Tony cut him off.
"I need to know where Ziva is." He said urgently and this time McGee's face softened. They had all noted the resemblance between the victim and Ziva and, truth be told, they had been waiting for Tony to overreact.
"Tony…" he began softly, in an attempt to placate him in a way that wouldn't get him head-slapped by Gibbs, whose fuse was even shorter than Tony's. No one spoke of why though, it was too painful for everyone and nobody wanted to be the one talking about her when Gibbs materialised out of thin air.
"McGee." Tony said tersely and Tim sighed and nodded.
"Alright, I'll try to find out for you, but not right now. This case is important and Gibbs is on edge. I'll find out what I can after." He said, not willing to budge from his compromise. Tony frowned and shook his head.
"Now McGee." He said forcefully, causing the geek to roll his eyes in annoyance.
"Tony..." the older agent continued to stare at him so he sighed. "I'll see what I can do."
Ziva was shaken awake, but not roughly. The smell of some sort of food filled her nostrils, and she tried harder to wake up. The hardness in her stomach was getting worse and her chest was even more tender, but despite that, she felt warm and safe. She was shaken again, and this time her quest to open her eyes was successful. Jenny was still holding her tightly, one hand holding something in front of her mouth, a rectangular piece of brown half wrapped in silver; a ration bar. Ziva sat up a little, sucking in a breath between her teeth when the movement caused the muscles of her chest to stretch painfully.
"Ziva, you're in luck, we got ration bars today. We already shared them out, this is all yours." Jenny said to her happily, helping her up into a sitting position. Ziva eagerly took the bar from Jenny and began to eat it, looking around at the other women. They were still eating theirs, though there was one left, lying on a blanket. She pointed to it, her mouth too full to talk. Jenny's face froze a little and she held Ziva a little tighter.
"That is for one of the women, she was taken just before they put the food in." she whispered, her voice wavered for a moment in sympathy for the other woman.
"Why?" Ziva asked, almost afraid to hear the answer, but needing to know what she faced. Jenny stayed silent for a few moments and then spoke.
"For fun. They split us in to two groups; the women they rape, and the women they torture. That woman is one of the unlucky group that doesn't have information to keep from them."
"That is monstrous!" Ziva exclaimed, and some of the women looked over at her curiously. She averted her eyes and looked at Jenny, desperately hoping that she had misheard. Jenny shrugged unhappily and shifted Ziva on her lap.
"It's effective. They know that raping the women they want to get information from will just make us close up or lose the will to live. We won't tell them anything. To stop it from happening, they split us up in to those two groups, but keep us together to make us all live in fear of being part of the other group. The women that they use as their playthings are the less fortunate ones, the ones that cracked under torture, or who were captured just for fun." She shifted uneasily. "I am part of the group that are taken out one at a time and tortured, and so are you now. I've been here for so long that I'm starting to wonder when I'll be in the other group. All of the information I had is out of date now. Even if I spilled everything I know to them, there would be nothing useful for them there." She whispered desolately.
"Do not think like that, Jenny." Ziva protested softly.
"Sometimes I wish they would take me, rather than the young women whose lives they destroy in their gang rapes, but at the same time a part of me is glad that I'm just being tortured. It's hard to live with those two parts every day, guilt eats away at me constantly, but there's nothing I can do. There's nothing any of us can do." She whispered.
They sat in silence for a while, until they heard footsteps coming towards their room. The door was pulled open and a woman was thrown in. She had tear tracks down her cheeks, but her face was impassive, like it had frozen in the expression of disinterest. She crawled over to her blankets and the women closest to her helped her to lie down and fed her, rubbing her throat to make her swallow, which she seemed disinclined to do on her own. The men at the door chuckled to themselves, making the other women throw murderous glances in their direction, but that didn't worry them. What did they have to fear from a bunch of starved and beaten women?
"Bring her." One of them said, pointing at Ziva, and Jenny's arms tightened around her. The men advanced towards them and Jenny tried to shuffle backwards, trying to keep Ziva from their clutches, but there was only so far she could go, and only so much strength she had in her body to fight them. They pulled her arms apart easily, their grip too much for her wasted frame and then they dragged Ziva away.
Ziva looked back at Jenny as she was dragged around the door frame, and gave her a subtle nod that said 'don't worry about me, I've endured worse'. She set her face, much like the woman they had just brought back, and used the time it took for them to deposit her back in that solitary cell to calm her mind, so she could stay strong throughout whatever they would throw at her.
McGee typed quickly, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he attempted to hack in to the Mossad database. Tony was keeping himself in check by writing up his report on the now concluded investigation. It really had been as easy as it had looked; the murderer hadn't worn gloves so his fingerprints and DNA had been all over the victim. The murderer was in jail now and the family had closure, which meant the case needed to have all of its paperwork finished. McGee had done his, Tony was throwing himself into his and Gibbs was down with Abby, taking her a Caf-Pow for a job well done.
His computer dinged and he smirked slightly, the firewalls and anti-malware software were unable to keep him out. He was in. he briefly considered telling Tony he was through, but decided instead to find out what he needed to know and then get out as quickly as possible. He didn't want those bots to latch on to his IP, he would be in a world of trouble if that happened and this time, Gibbs wouldn't get him out of it with a get-out-of-jail-free card. He needed to find out where Ziva was, so he searched for her file in the database, thinking it would have her currant mission in it, and then he could search the mission and know where she was and what she was doing.
He found her file, but it was a little harder than he thought it should be, but he dismissed it. Mossad probably had different priorities for information protection. He pulled up her information and smiled at the pictures that came attached to it. One was of her as a young woman, presumably when she had first joined, and the other was of her currently. The smile dropped off his face and he stared at the screen in shock, his hands falling from the keyboard. Tony noticed his silence and stood, quickly approaching and rounding his desk to stare at the same thing that had shocked McGee.
Ziva David was listed as deceased.