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Sometimes Tony wondered if he was really, truly going crazy.
He watched his life continue and change as it always did. But it was different now, because hers didn't. Her life was stalled indefinitely. She hung on the precipice between life and death, and though his body healed, he often felt like he hung there with her.
He was discharged from the hospital within a week, and he was shocked to find he was reluctant to go. He had always hated hospitals, but so had Ziva. He hated to think she would be there alone.
There was very little he understood when the doctor's spoke about Ziva's condition, so he often had Ducky dumb things down for him.
"Just tell me how bad it is, Ducky. I don't understand half of what those doctors spout at me. I just want to know her chances."
Ducky pursed his lips, looked up at the hospital ceiling, and sighed. "Well, she hasn't opened her eyes or given any sort of verbal response, but she does seem to be giving some motor responses. That puts her at about a 5 on the Glasgow coma scale."
Tony stared at him dumbly. "Okay? And that means?"
Ducky once again turned his eyes heavenwards. Tony wondered what he was searching for, or if he was just avoiding Tony's desperate gaze.
"It means she has about a 34% chance of making a good recovery with a chance of disability."
A thirty-four percent chance of life. Which meant a sixty-six percent chance of death. Tony had never been a glass half full kind of person.
He took a month's leave, and he spent that time going back and forth from physical therapy, to the hospital, to the crappy diner down the street from the hospital. He seldom went home, and when he did, it was just to shower and sometimes sleep. Most of his nights he spent with her. He couldn't seem to pull himself away.
He spent many nights having long, one-sided conversations with her, willing her to listen. Sometimes he had hope that she could hear him, but mostly he was overcome by despair. There were days he believed his longing was strong enough to reach her, wherever she was, but it never did.
The month passed. To Tony's chagrin, he still wasn't cleared for field duty, but he was to report to work the next day anyway. He didn't know how to do this. He didn't want to see her empty desk. He didn't want to believe she was gone.
He guessed there was only one place he could go.
He hadn't been down these dusty stairs in quite some time, but they were so familiar to him that it felt like yesterday. The smell was the same as it always was; sawdust and bourbon, not necessarily in that order. The room was the same, the boat was the same, the man building the boat was the same. It made him feel just a little bit more sane. If he wasn't still on crutches, and if it wasn't so terribly difficult to get down the stairs, he thought that perhaps he could believe that nothing really had changed.
When Gibbs heard him banging loudly down the staircase, he sighed heavily, and walked over to stare at a very awkward looking Tony DiNozzo.
He had managed to get a couple steps down, but now he appeared to be stuck. One of his crutches had slipped down one step farther than the other, and he hung there precariously, trying to catch his balance.
"DiNozzo, I'd hate to see you survive a massive car accident just to die tryin' to get down my staircase."
Tony panted, smiling wearily at him. "A little help?"
Gibbs huffed in contempt, but he trudged up the stairs anyway, grabbing Tony by the shoulders and very nearly dragging him down the old, rickety looking stairs. They went slowly and unsteadily, with Tony placing each individual crutch on the step below the one he was on and following with the other crutch, but they managed to make it all the way down. Tony was out of breath and red-faced, but Gibbs just looked moderately irritated. But then again, Tony thought, when did Gibbs not look moderately irritated?
Tony took a few final steps to the stool in the corner of the room and plopped down with a loud, relieved sigh. Gibbs gazed at him for a second, then turned to his boat, sanding it with an intensity that was strange but normal to Tony.
They remained in silence for an immeasurable period of time. It was only broken when Tony struggled to reach the bourbon on the top shelf, and Gibbs ceased his work to get it for him.
"My last bottle," Gibbs mumbled under his breath while he poured some in a mason jar.
"Sorry, Boss," Tony replied with a jaded smirk, not looking sorry in the slightest.
Tony drank for a while, and then a little while longer, until the air seemed to become heavy with the weight of his thoughts. There was a small moment where some sort of silent communication passed between the two of them, and then Tony seemed to implode.
"Boss, I can't do this. I can't do any of this. I can't hobble around on these crutches for another two months. I can't listen to Abby worry. I can't go home. I can't go back to NCIS and do desk work. I can't go back to that hospital and watch… and watch her, just… die. I can't watch her die. I can't be with her when she's not there. She's not there. She's so lifeless… I can't… I can't…"
Tony's words became incoherent, and with his outpouring of words came those dreaded, long suppressed tears that had been brewing for quite some time.
Leroy Jethro Gibbs was rarely unsure of the right course of action, but this seemed to be one of those times. Despite this, he listened his gut, just like always. He went to Tony and wrapped his arms around his shoulders, almost like an embrace, but instead he pulled up with force, nearly shocking Tony out of his stupor. He dragged him to the stairs until Tony caught on, calming down enough to work himself back up the steps with Gibbs' shoulder to lean on. When they made it, Gibbs led him to a hallway Tony had never been down before to a bed Tony had never seen, and when Gibbs practically dropped him onto the mattress, Tony had nothing left inside of him to protest. The lights went off, and Tony sat straight up on the bed, not having enough strength to move any farther.
"Tony, you can. What other option do you have? You can."
And he was gone.
When the pain subsided enough for Tony to think, he lied down on the bed and closed his eyes. And when he dreamt, he dreamt of her smile, and her hair, and her skin, and when he woke again, her face was the first thing on his mind. That wasn't unusual, but for the first time in a long time, it wasn't her bloody, mutilated face that he saw. Instead, he saw her face from their time in Paris. He had never before seen her so at peace. And for a moment, with that image in his mind, all of it was bearable. It was bearable because she was still here, no matter in what form.
So he would bear it.