Thank you all for your wonderfully sweet comments. Every little consonant cluster from you means extremely much. I am cloud high pleased that you enjoy the weirdness of the story. Please review.



It was November in every corner now. Cold was seeping in under tightly wrapped scarves and thick skin and morning settled over the earth like a foggy blanket of light. The team was out somewhere, drowning in puddles of mud, tragedy and after-summer life, only rain witnessing them. The naked trees with their sprawling, skinny fingers gave no cover for the two dead lovers they found, embracing and folding into each other like old, forgotten lawn chairs with red paint peeling off. All over the place there were shattered limbs bending wrong and - ah - right ways. It looked as if they had been making love until Death brutally spilled his soft breath all over them, twisting their bodies different ways but with the same destination. There were fallen, paper-wrinkled leaves stuck to their dirt-snow colored skin, wet with their lover's pleasure-sweat, melting in each other in more ways than one.

Tony was in charge of taking photos and with each flash he captured that moment of beauty blending with destruction. He photographed their entwined fingers; tightly holding onto each other, as if they were afraid one would grow wings and take flight without the other. The male lover's face was turned towards the girl and his chest was sunken as if he had given his last breath to his lover as a gift. He was only wearing a pair of bloody tennis shoes over limp, curled toes that turned counterclockwise. Between two of his jutting ribs was a hole as big as Tony's left thumb, vomiting blood all over the man's pouting belly. The female lover only wore colorless, stiff lips and a hole in the side of her skull. The other side was not pretty, for either of them.

'Think it's suicide?'

Ziva had snuck up behind Tony, as usual covering grounds fast and easy, the quietness too loud, making his ears itch. She stared in somewhat fiery wonder at the two dead lovers; her fingertips lightly resting on her jawbone and her lips filled with ice-splinters from the cold that grazed the earth. She was sucking on the sticky ends of her rain-matted hair, a bad habit he had begun noticing lately in the corners of his eyes and mind.

McGee came up to them. He took photos, too, but the flash froze in the ice smoke and his fingers resembled red, dried-up grapes with the cold licking the skin raw.

'I don't think so. It looks like they were tortured before they were shot.'

Ziva nodded and turned to Tony.

'Maybe they wanted to feel pain before they took their lives.'

His words clung tightly to the before-winter air, a non-refundable sentence captured in a sharp puff of carbon dioxide. Tony could feel McGee and Ziva exchanging gazes under questioning brows. They had started doing that a lot, lately.

'Funny, Tony. I think you have watched one too many horror movies.'

McGee was laughing then, soft and bubbly. He snapped a picture of the red spider web on the man's blue-white chest. His nipples were like cold, deserted islands parting the Red Sea.

Ziva was still staring, though. Tony turned to her, his eyebrows in the skies and his words in fighting position.

She turned her gaze to the couple again, her forehead working in wondering folds.

'Think they committed suicide?'

'I already told you what I think' he snapped, accidentally taking a picture of nothing at all, really. The flash blinded him for a halting second.

Gibbs and Ducky came up to them then to work on the dead lovers and Tony and Ziva turned around and walked back to the car, dead dirtwater spilling all over their shoes. It started to rain. It was filtered through the bare treetops and came down lightly, speckling his hard, irritated shoulders and landing in dew droplets in Ziva's hair. Air struggled to hold him upright and thunder and anger numbed his ears.

Back in the office he left muddy prints after him. He made the right phone calls to the right people, exchanged easy-forgotten words with McGee, said 'Yes, boss', acted like all was well and went down to Abby's. She had been acting so normal since he came back and it almost hurt in all the right places. The black strokes on her lips, the mountain-high shoes, the buttery voice, her excitement and caffeine flowing through her blood stream; giving birth to words all tangled up in each other's syllables. Her green eyes were like sea grass, soft and kind and going all around him. She dimpled and placed the bows of her fingernails on his forearm, pressing normality in and under his skin.

'Gibbs sent me down here to see if you'd found out anything.'

'Oh yeah. Check this out; I found only his fingerprints on the gun. Which basically means he shot her and then shot himself.'

'They committed suicide.'

'Yeah. Like a suicide pact. Pretty freaky, huh?'

He didn't answer.

'Also, apparently she was dying.'

'Dying?'

'Yeah, she had lung cancer.'

He thought about the cigarettes they found in the brown, dead grass next to the all the same dead couple and imagined the girl trapping her lover with smoke rings.

'What about his broken toes and her arm?'

'I think he tripped on the way, carrying her from their car. She was too weak to walk herself. It was pretty slippery out, right?'

Yes, yes it was.

'I think they wanted to die together, Tony.'

He thought it was stupid.

They uploaded Tony's photos of the moments he'd sealed. They were taken from all kind of frozen-stiff angles but it was the last one that captured both of their attention. It was the picture of Tony. The frame carried all of his gray face and the flash exposed his red-rimmed eyes. He looked horrible.

Abby traced the air around the contours of his frozen, emotionless face on the screen for a second before turning to him and all wide-eyed and warm-bodied she hugged him. It just made him feel worse.

When he was back behind his desk he got his eyes glued on his watch. He observed the arms twisting about each other, the minutes overlapping the hours, the seconds dislocating sluggishly. He massaged his temples, pressing thumbs hard into the soft, fragile bone, hoping to dig out the stress that had gnawed itself somewhere inside his mind. He just wanted to go home and forget everything about lovers dying for each other.

Ziva came up then. She was wearing different clothes than she had out in the love/death field. He silently wondered why he noticed that.

'Hey.'

He almost laughed, then. Cotton-edged memories with a sweet, salty sweet aftertaste of their relationship four months ago was making his head spin around his heart. All was easy then. He did not turn in circles that made him feel so, so sick that he pressed his palms and claws into his belly, trying to tear that sickness out. He wished they could retrace their paw prints in the rocky mud-road. He caught himself wondering if perhaps maybe possibly they would've grown closer if he hadn't taken the very wrong turn and falling face-(and fate)first into the sticky gutter. He shrugged that off, though. The ice window that had frozen between the two was hard to melt through.

'Hi.'

'So it was suicide?'

'Yeah.'

She smiled lopsided then, the happy lines around her left eye flashing.

'You were right. Here I almost thought you'd lost your touch after your forever-lasting vacation.'

Happy lines turned to deep curves of semi-teasing and her teeth bared in laughter. He knew she wanted him to give her soft words back, answer with a typical Tony-comment so the shivering chessboard would come to a standstill. He could tell she wanted to quit playing whatever game he was playing because he was moving his players all around, color black always replacing color white. She didn't recognize the colors. She didn't recognize him.

Suddenly he felt powerful. The butterflies of nervousness and uneasiness he always felt when she was in his breathing space suddenly stopped mating deep down in his stomach. So he sneered.

'Whatever, Ziva. It's not like it was very hard to figure it out. Any idiot could've done it.'

He laughed curtly before pulling the cord, knocking her out of his way, ambushing her king.

'Even you.'

Shāh Māt.

Her smile cracked the wrong way then, falling away in chewed-off bits. She turned away from him, far-off gaze pasted on a spot reflecting in the window he failed to see.

'Oh.'

Her voice was as thin as wood smoke and just as hard to capture between his cold palms.

'Good night, then. Tony.'

When she walked to the elevator she looked like a bird with broken wings being dragged in the dirt. He didn't like that. He didn't like the tiny shard of guilt that she placed in his insides.

It was her fault, too.

It was. It was her fault, too.

She deserves this because Jenny died on her watch, too.

He didn't notice how hard he was biting down on his lip until he tasted blood swirling with saliva and the hurt she left behind.

We he came home he blew wine bubbles. He sat on his balcony, feet pointing up towards the sky filled with flakes and pieces of blurred stars. He drowned in pulsing alcohol in hopes of removing whatever feeling Ziva had left under his ribs. He closed his eyes and felt his pulse running marathons through the nooks and crannies of his body.

Damn it all.

Under him, traffic was going a millions miles per lifetime, street lamps gracing his skin with a sickening glow. It all went too much fast but still nowhere near fast enough. He imagined falling down there, landing on soft asphalt among a sea of colors, blinking lights and heated metal.

Damn it all.

It stayed captured in is imagination like fireflies in a glass jar, trying to break the glass. He wasn't ready to fly just yet. He stumbled from the balcony through his darkening apartment, the moon spilling milk-light all over the floor, over all the movies he used to watch, drowning his old, rust-covered life.

Damn it all.

Later, he fell in the curve of his mattress and into broken sleep. He dreamt about carrying heavy weights on his broken shoulders and slipping in droplets of dew.


Thank you all for reading. I might be repeating tongue twisting words again and again until you sigh heavily; but please review my strange little piece of drawn-out sentences. Gibbs will breathe a part of these sentences soon, too. I miss his non-words, don't you? Even if things are dark, stars are still in Tony's sky, see? He will get better.