Her footfalls echoed on the sidewalk outside of Mossad headquarters and she forced herself to pull up years of Mossad training to firmly put her 'stoic' mask in place.
Abby had once referred to it as her "Xena face," which led to the girls listing the many similarities between the Mossad operative and the ficitonal TV character. They had finally stopped when McGee had come across them in a fierce fit of giggles after Abby had finally referred to her friend as "Ziva: Warrior Princess."
She remembered her Goth friend with a faint twitch of her lips as she felt herself consider smiling for the first time in days.
She longed for Abby's bubbly personality and realized that what she wanted at the moment was one of the bone-crushing hugs that her friend handed out with abandon. The same hugs she initially had been offended by, she now found solace in.
The manila folder was weighty in her hand despite its meager contents. It held her life's next path and she was feeling a bitterness seep into her as she realized she may be forced to leave the life she had become so fond of.
Her dark eyes flicked up and rested on Gibbs' weary face and she dutifully handed over the file, seeing McGee reach into his pocket for his cell phone simultaneously.
"Well?" Gibbs asked her before opening the folder now in his hands.
"I did not look," she said simply.
The older man half-smiled at her; she was honest and had always been respectful of his authority and was incredibly dependable.
I won't let them take her,he found himself thinking before he flipped open the file and let his eyes skim the contents.
He sighed and felt his shoulders relax and he turned to McGee. "Let's go call it in; I'll need you to encrypt the files to send back."
"Gibbs," she called before he could turn. She arched an eyebrow in the universal sign for 'Well?'
"Don't unpack, Ziver. You're coming home," he said with a wink before spinning on his heel and heading towards the rental that held McGee's laptop.
She found herself letting out an involuntary sigh and she tucked an errant curl behind her ear.
His voice was soft but clear. And the hesitancy was obvious in his words. "I had no choice," was all he was able to say.
"That's a lie." There is always a choice, she thought.
"Why would I lie to you, Ziva?" he said, his voice raw with emotion.
She couldn't keep the fierceness from her voice. "You jeopardized your entire career, and for what?"
"For you. He was playing you, Ziva."
You think I didn't know that? She thought, her anger sparking into a blaze. "For some reason you felt it was your job? To protect me?"
She watched him struggle, his body torn between yelling and giving in.
"I did what I had to do!"
"You killed him!"
Ziva heard the bitter regret in his voice, even if he'd never admit it. "If I hadn't you'd be having this conversation with him. But maybe that's the way you'd prefer it."
"Perhaps I would." The minute the words were out of her mouth, she heard her grandmother's voice in her head reminding her to not say things she didn't mean nor things she couldn't take back.
She watched as that comment pushed his buttons in all the right ways. She watched as he squared his shoulders and stepped forward: "Why don't you just get this out. You wanna take a punch? Take a swing?" She forcibly kept herself from flinching as his voice rose to a yell." Get it outta your system!" He yelled.
She spoke over his words, feeling her body react to the threat on years of honed instinct. "Be careful, Tony."
She felt herself bristle and her weight shift to her fighting stance as he invaded her space, nose to nose.
"Go ahead!" he screamed in her face. "Do it."
There was nothing she could offer to make the storm that had been brewing between them not come crashing down. Yet years of friendship allowed her to utter a very clear and very precise warning: "Be careful, Tony. Because much like Michael, I only need one."
Had she not been in attack-mode, she would have seen the wave of hurt that flicked across his gaze.
"He attacked me! What was I supposed to do?"
She hadn't been able to stop herself. She had felt her body move as he screamed and she realized too late that she had flipped him to the ground and straddled his body, their chests heaving with anger, fear, and adrenaline.
"You saw a glass table, you pushed him back, you dropped him on it. He was impaled in the side by a shard of glass," she paused, willing herself to keep the bile in her throat at bay. The image of her apartment, Michael's blood everywhere, glass everywhere, it caused a wave of nausea to engulf her. "Bloody. Gasping for air.'
His eyes were void of humor when he spoke and, for once, she was glad. "I guess you read my report."
She flinched as emotion made her instinctively reach for her sig holstered at her side. "I MEMORIZED it!" she managed to yell around the emotion thick in her throat. She felt the weight of the gun's handle settle into its familiar spot on her hand.
She found the gun pulled and aimed at his knee and she honestly had no idea how it got there.
"Every word," she added, blinking quickly to keep the tear out of her eye. She felt herself push the barrel into his knee as she spoke. "Wouldn't you have?" she hissed between teeth.
His eyes flicked across her face and the remorse that he had plagued his features for the last few days now suddenly held a darker tone, one filled with regret and understanding.
"You loved him," he stated suddenly.
She felt herself flinch at the statement. "I guess I'll never know," was all she could reply.
She felt a warm presence at her side, one that offered no malice or threat. And she felt a calloused hand close over her own, slowly pulling the gun away from Tony's knee.
Ziva heard a soft voice crooning "hey" and "its ok" into her ear as the gun was taken from her shaking hands.
She vaguely recognized the sounds of McGee's voice as he hauled Tony off the ground and helped his battered friend brush the dust off his slacks.
She felt Gibbs wrap his arms around her body in a fatherly hug and a distant part of her brain recognized that her own father would be berating her for not taking the kill shot, instead of comforting her raw emotions.
