Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS or any of the quotes I use to open a chapter. :D
"O she is a child of war
Up to her knees in blood and gore
In her heart her lover dies
Blown to bits 'neath black skies."
-Child of War
Four
(fourteen hours)
Ziva David is dreaming.
She doesn't know where she is, but it's nice. She's most definitely outside, in the open; she can feel the wind on her face and hear the leaves crackling underfoot. She's walking and it's fall, the world around her a brilliant swirl of red-orange fire. She can't make anything out. It's all blurry, fuzzy, like waking from a long sleep or walking with a film over her eyes. She can see the sky, though, and it's black but bright, light coming from the earth instead of the sky. There aren't any stars, just wide blackness. There's the fire of the trees and the ash of the sky, and in an odd way it's beautiful.
She's walking with someone. They're talking, but her ears are full of cotton balls and she can't hear what is said, but she doesn't really need to because it's comforting, the voice. It's warm and familiar and inexplicably comforting.
She can't turn her head to look at whoever is talking—her eyes are locked straight forward. She can see, out of the corners of her eyes, what might be a hand, swinging cheerfully, a suited shoulder, a patch of neck. The person next to her keeps talking, words a muted but steady hum, and she basks in his voice and in the starless black sky and the brilliant leaves.
It's calm, it's soothing, and it rings with normalcy. Ziva, for the first time since Mikael, since the events in the desert, is at peace.
Her companion laughs, the sound transformed into deep, soulful rumbles, and then—
A noise, like lighting and thunder cracking open the sky.
There is a muted groan and something warm and wet splashes her face, and at last, she can turn her head.
Ziva looks down, ears ringing, eyes swimming, and meets a pair of bright green eyes. Tony is in perfect focus, his eyes wide and shocked, his face whitening, blood splashing from a horrible wound in his chest—
Sound snaps into existence. Tony gasping, wet horrible broken, herself screaming, high, frightened, pleading, and laughter, terrible, dark, menacing laughter ringing from the black sky and the burning trees, and there's blood on her fingers as she tries desperately, vainly, to staunch the bleeding—
"Zee-vah?" The words are a gasp, shot all to hell, gurgling and leaking out into the air. Confusion sparks in his green eyes, and then there's anger. You didn't save me. His eyes say, and then under her hands he dies, eyes misting over, and she keens in grief, the sky and the trees dissolving, the laughter resonating in her ears, and oh God, there's so much blood—
Ziva woke shuddering, her eyes wet, and she shivered with the force of her sobs. She couldn't breath, couldn't make her heart stop kicking or aching, couldn't slow her agony or staunch her pain. The metal doors of the Autopsy cabinets filled her with ice—her face was cold and her hands shook (fingers steady) on the silvery door.
She had to look at her hands to make sure they weren't soaked in blood (so, so much blood) and she watched as her mind filled in the blanks and sticky crimson colored her vision for a flash.
The only sound in Autopsy was her gasping, shuddering breath and the soft hum of the freezers, the only light the dim lamps above. Shade and silence made the dream real—laughter and gunshots and the dripdripdrip of blood bounced and rattled and left her shaking.
It was a dream. She told herself, looking down at her hands (cleanbloodyclean) and clenching her fingers, almost in reflex. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to breath, to swallow the guilt and the loss and the sorrow.
I cannot do this again! The thought surfaced against her will, bucking against all of her shields and protections. She felt in tear at her heart with Ari's hands, scream with Mikael's voice, glare with Tony's eyes. It was too much, much too much, crushing her with guilt and loss.
First Ari, by her own hand, then Mikael, by Tony's, and then Tony himself, by a masked man, and it was all over so quickly, bam and then nothing (at all) but ashes and dead men with glassy eyes and grinning mouths and bullet holes where hearts once were.
She was tired of losing the people she cared about, loved far more than she should.
Her hands (shaking, shaking, always shaking) curled around the handle of the cabinet, and in one swift movement, Tony's body was out in the open and the blueish light shone off the black cover.
Ziva threw it back and stared down at the white face, the closed eyes, the blood pooled in the hollows of his cheeks. Tony's face was cold, his noise silenced, his laughter and fierceness and joy and loyalty and pain shut off and down. Her fingers slid down his icy skin, marveling at how after only fourteen hours (has it only been fourteen? It feels like a lifetime, like three lifetimes.) in the freezer life's warmth has completely left Tony DiNozzo.
Her fingers wandered down to his throat, his shoulders, his chest. The Wound was black and gaping and horrible, the skin too jagged at the bones too shattered. The bullet slammed into his heart and tore it apart—she could see bits of pinkish red tissue. (It looks like a bomb went off.)
"I am so sorry." She murmurs, her eyes stinging and the Ari-Mikael-Tony monster in her chest roared and snarled.
I know.
But Tony's voice in her head was already fading, twisting—words bouncing through a tunnel, echoing and falling and coming apart until there voice was distorted and forgotten.
"I am so sorry."
And then Tony's there, standing across from her, his skin pale in the blue light but his green eyes so fierce, so bright. He was wearing the suit he had worn when he killed Mikael, and it's not stained with blood. His face was half-shadow and his mouth twisted into a grimace.
"You didn't shoot him." Tony groaned, his words echoing and bouncing and running into each other (you are in a tunnel, Ziva, but can you see the light?) until she can barely understand, or doesn't want to, because Tony is dead beneath her fingers and he can't be talking to her, standing there, solid and alive.
"Why, Zee-vah? Why?"
She choked, her eyes flickering from the dead man to the living one.
"I didn't—" (see him hear him react in time, I'm so so sorry)
Thunder split the air and Tony (dead or alive?) fell back, his green eyes going wide and accusing and sad and he toppled, falling back, almost graceful, his arms and hands arching through the air in slow motion, tiny little droplets of blood splashing from his suit.
He vanished before he hit the ground, leaving only echoes and drops of crimson on the floor.
Ziva shook.
The dead man beneath her hands was real and solid—but so was the living man who had fallen into nothing, and she hurt—
(it's all your fault it's all your fault it's all your fucking fault—!)
Her hands wandered down Tony's scarred chest of their own accord, heedless of their owner's shuddering grief. Her hands found his own and she tangled their fingers, hers soft and warm and alive and his hard and stiff and cold and dead.
I should have seen the shooter.
She should have—she had been looking at the end of the hallway but she had only seen the dead man and her body had loosened, relieved, tricked into believing the other attacker had fled and that they all were safe.
And she was wrong.
Some deeply rational part of her, the part that had been trained by Mossad from the tender age of five, said that she could not have foreseen the danger.
But that part of her was as dead as the man beneath Ziva's hands (so cold, so still) and fuck, she just couldn't do this—
(In the life before NCIS and Gibbs and Tony and love, she had been able to count on one hand how many times she had cried.
Her mother.
Tali.
A young boy, Yusef, who had been her neighbor in Tel Aviv.
But now—
Too many deaths.
And tears.
And—)
And then NCIS and Ari died and Gibbs couldn't remember and Mikael stopped breathing and Tony, Tony. She had had dreams again, splendid ones, dreams of love and laughter, compainionship, sex, maybe even a family, a little girl with her father's eyes and her mother's hair, running loose in the bullpen, demanding a piggyback from her Uncle McGee. And now—
(all dead, all gone, all shattered, and it'sallyourfuckingfault!)
It was too much and not enough and again the black-suited Tony watched her from the shadows, his shirt stained with blood, and she closed her eyes.
In a forest painted fiery with a starless sky, black, hanging above, she holds him as he gasps, as he shakes and his eyes roll back and he dies—
Ziva David clung to Anthony DiNozzo's hand and cried like a child, the tears hot on cold flesh.
The dead-Mossad part of her clinically ticked off the eighth finger.
