Chapter Four: Dawn
Gibbs: He raised you to be a ruthless, soulless killer.
Ziva: I did not mean to live through it.
- From NCIS: Good Cop, Bad Cop
x x x x x
The far ends of Gibbs' porch were blocked in with wide, rough gray stones. Ziva hoisted herself up to sit on them. She tucked herself into the shadowy corner where the stones met the house and let her body lean on the wood siding.
Gibbs let her escape his line of sight, for the moment. He stayed where he was, leaning on the front of the porch, eyes resting on his neighbor's yard. When she'd settled and he glanced her way the house looked to be the only thing holding her up. Ziva's shoulders were curled in. They seemed narrow, thinner than he was used to. Not a posture she normally let anyone see.
He wondered if she had ever revealed frailty like this to her captors. Probably not. He'd seen her through the scope, tied to a chair with Saleem's knife at her throat. Her back had been straight.
There was silence between them for a long time. But Ziva regrouped.
"I once set a bomb that killed two boys."
Gibbs lowered his head and stared hard at the smooth white trim under his hands. It looked blue in the night.
Was she really going to . . . ?
Of course she was. He sighed and braced himself. He should have known they would end up here. Ziva, he smiled grimly, was a fighter. Always.
"The cell we were tracking used young children as couriers. The couriers did not usually enter the building. But that day . . ." she drifted away, and then back again. "Their bodies were blown to pieces. Our technicians managed to retrieve most of them from the debris, to identify them. They were brothers. Five and seven."
Gibbs let the words go, dark into the dark. There was nothing to say to that.
A long time passed before she spoke again. She was just warming up.
"One time we tracked a wanted man and his body guards to an abandoned building. They were hiding on the top floor. And they were good, Gibbs. They spotted our surveillance on the second day. Sixteen men with an arsenal, but we did not hesitate . . . even when they began to move through the lower floors, trying to escape. It was supposed to be abandoned."
He didn't want to picture it. The problem was he'd been in too many situations just like it. His mind thrust the images at him faster than he could push them away.
"The fight lasted," she paused. "Perhaps an hour. When we entered the building we found a little boy on the second floor. He was . . . fine. Hiding in a corner."
She broke off long enough for him to turn his head and look at her. She was staring at him, right into his eyes.
"We told the boy he did not have to hide, that he was safe. He said he was not afraid of us and pointed to the far corner of the room. That is where we found his friend. A girl."
Gibbs pressed his hands down into the the railing. The wood pressed back, warm and steady.
"Her legs were torn away. Below the knee. Our medical examiner said later they were shot off. It must have been slow, to bleed to death like that."
The picture bloomed in his head, red blood on a dirty floor. Gibbs breathed evenly and shoved that away hard.
"Something similar happened on an op I ran in – "
"Ziva." He tried for neutral. His voice carried menace all the same. "You going to tell me the story of every dead little girl you ever found, now?"
She waited for him to go on, as if she expected him to elaborate on that somehow, and then continued as if she hadn't heard him.
"Ballistics," she said flatly. "We catch so many killers that way. I did not just find that little girl."
Gibbs turned his head away from that. He swallowed, working past the images pressing at him. Choking him.
A minute passed before he responded. She couldn't see his face now, but all the menace had gone from his voice, leaving it hollow. "You said yourself. You didn't know she was there."
"Apparently they played there often, in the abandoned rooms on the lower floors. They entered through an adjacent basement, never went to the upper floors. That is how they slipped Mossad's surveillance."
A heavy silence.
"I told myself that I did not know she was there, Gibbs. And do you know what?" It was strange to hear a question in such a lifeless voice. "It worked. I was sad for a time and then I hardly felt a thing. I got over it."
Is that so?
"Do you think her parents ever got over it, Gibbs?" she asked lightly. "Tell me."
He closed his eyes.
"There is guilt. Do not tell me I don't have it. I deserve it. That and more."
Gibbs didn't move, but the dam in his mind had broken, finally. Old memories pushed at him, forcing him under. Things he'd put away a long time ago.
An entire family in a building they'd destroyed, grandparents and parents and children, bodies as broken as the walls. A dusty car with targets sitting in the front seats. The children in the back had been too small to see . . . They hadn't known to avoid them.
A little girl survived it though, somehow. Not a scratch on her, but she'd been covered in her sisters' blood. She'd clung to their bodies and screamed like murder when they'd finally pulled her away. Gibbs remembered looking at those bodies. Forcing himself to look at them.
The girl told them her name was Mariam. When he used to dream about that car the faces would change to his own girl's. But that was before Kelly died. He hadn't dreamed about Mariam in a long time.
Ziva was looking at him. Curious.
"Not going to say 'no,' Gibbs? Tell me I am just a victim in all of this?" She smiled gently, to show her teeth.
The memories shoved at him relentlessly, no matter how he pushed back. They were stronger. Smothering.
Finally he let it flood through him, like bourbon in his blood. Just for a moment he was enraged.
Of course he was. Ziva wanted to wallow in guilt. If he wouldn't let her do that then she wanted to fight, apparently with a man who was absolutely off his head. Fighting back with a fury strong enough to beat this back. She'd played him perfectly.
To feel the guilt of it was unbearable, like burning alive in a mental fire. Anger was a relief, however brief. He couldn't imagine wanting to dwell in that guilt, couldn't imagine what she was running from, in her own mind, that retreating into this was better.
But then, Ducky had told him it would be unimaginable, hadn't he? Things you and I can't even imagine.
He breathed and gripped the wood in his hands until it felt like it would dent under his fingers. After a bit he smirked, despite the anger still boiling low in his gut. Gibbs pushed off from the railing to lean against it instead, his arms folded across his chest as he turned to face her. Fortunately for both of them he'd been doing this - all of it - a lot longer than Ziva. He wasn't so easily provoked. He knew a better path than anger. And he'd be damned if one of his own agents was going to manipulate him.
Gibbs calmed himself deliberately, occupying his mind for a minute by wondering if Ducky had seen this coming. Had he known Ziva would seek him out? It was Ducky who got Gibbs in the right frame of mind all those weeks ago, when he'd touched on Ziva's past during the Wooten case. Well, at the time Ducky seemed to be talking about the Wooten case. Or was the domestic abuse of Georgia Wooten a convenient pretext to talk about Ziva? Was it both?
Gibbs wouldn't put it past him. People didn't often appreciate how wily Duck was. But the doctor was observant, and he'd been doing this even longer than Gibbs.
"Guess Duck was right."
"What?" Her voice was as sharp as her knives.
He ignored that, went to the source. "Accidents are a part of the job. You've done your best to protect innocent lives. You've saved far more than you've taken. So what exactly are you doing, Ziva? Trying to get me to come at you? Think you'll feel better if I punch you in the face?" He let his anger bleed into the words.
She stiffened at that and leaned forward, eyes glittering.
Gibbs watched her, incredulous. She really would prefer he attack her.
"Maybe I would feel better after –" she snarled, but faltered, her eyes darting away from him.
"After what?"
She didn't seem to hear him. To go by the look on her face she was locked in a fight with some enemy he couldn't see. He waited, letting her mind wander to wherever it was headed so relentlessly. She would come back eventually.
Soon, if the droop of exhaustion pulling at her body had anything to do with it.
"I did not come here to fight, Gibbs," she said at last. "I came for a little peace, actually." She laughed shortly, struggling to keep her despair under control. "I just – I do not know any other way."
"Other way?"
"Any other way to fight." Fatigue laced her words. "Talking will not help with this. Don't tell me it will, Gibbs. I will not believe you."
He let his arms drop to his sides and walked closer, slowly, until he was leaning on the far end of the wall she sat on. "No, I don't think it will do anything for your . . . regrets. Only way to fix a mistake is to do better next time."
"Ah," she laughed again, the slight noise coming out like a cough. "I forgot. You do not think guilt is the problem."
"Nope." And in his voice . . . his own regret.
She glanced up at that. "Am I a mistake you are fixing, Gibbs?"
"You're not the first person I've met with PTSD, Ziva."
She felt like she should be annoyed at that. Such easy categorization. On some shelf in Gibbs' mind she had been neatly labeled and placed, she supposed, along with all the other fuck-ups he'd had under his command. But she couldn't bring herself to argue with that. It seemed she didn't care anymore what he thought of her. She just wanted to accept his greater experience. Just trust him. She was tired of fighting, of crashing into the same wall over and over again. Exhausted as she had never really been before.
Perhaps that was why she came here in the first place, all those months ago. It seemed some part of her mind had known before the rest of her that she wouldn't be able to do this on her own.
"Gibbs," she was so tired. Ziva stared at the floor, wondering where her energy had gone. In the face of this fatigue nothing in the world seemed to matter anymore. "I would do anything you told me to do, if I thought it would help. I have done anything. Even – there, in Somalia. After you found me . . . you said to let them help me. And I did."
He nodded sharply. She'd trusted him with the physical stuff right away.
But that was the easy part. To think of it like that made his stomach burn, but it was no less true. The harder part was this. She'd only tonight . . .
"You told me to call you and now I have. You said that talking is the way to fight it. But I do not have anything to say."
"You're saying it now, Ziva."
She shook her head. "No. You were right. I do not think about it. I will think about anything else, if I must. Do anything else."
She looked at him bleakly. "I am sorry, Gibbs."
He raised an eyebrow. An apology wasn't weakness if it was between friends. Or family. But she'd about reached her quota of 'sorry's for years in the past hour.
Ziva nodded. She was so tired.
"I do not . . . feel it. Not usually. I supposed that is strange."
It sounded like a question, but he made no move to answer her. She looked away from him. "I would rather eat glass than drag words to match that time up my throat, do you understand that?"
Yeah. Gibbs did.
"When I remember –" He studied her, trying to read her, but she was totally motionless and gave nothing away. "I know what the words are supposed to be. But why bother, Gibbs? Words are meaningless. When I think about it there are no words. There is only pain."
There was nothing to say to that, either. He tipped his head back to rest against the pillar at his back, staring at the shadowy ceiling of the porch.
The silence went on and on. She knew how it was supposed to go, but . . .
"I'm sorry, Gibbs." She laughed shakily, nervously.
He'd never heard that laugh before. And two sorrys in the space of a minute. Seemed she was going for the record.
"I want to – do what you said. If you think it will help, with . . . this, then I believe you. But I do not know what to say."
There it was.
An invitation, if he'd ever heard one.
Gibbs took a deep breath and looked her over carefully. As an agent he'd interviewed many women who'd been attacked, to get the facts. This wasn't quite the same.
"What happened to your neck, Ziva?"
"What?"
There hadn't been anything wrong with her neck when they took her out of that camp, at least as far as Gibbs could tell.
After that first night, when he'd found her on his steps, he'd even gone back and looked at the medical report. There'd been some bruising and abrasions, but she'd had those everywhere. There was nothing serious enough on the neck to draw any attention in the doctor's exam. But.
"You keep touching it."
As he watched, Ziva touched it again.
"Oh."
He waited.
"It was worse, when they came from behind," she said simply. And then, "Did you see the feral cats, when you were in Tel Aviv?"
Gibbs frowned. The hell?
"No."
Ziva nodded and paused as a car came down the street, its headlights sliding over the dark gray view and then fading away again, back into the world. She felt like she was in a dream.
"Well, you were not there long. But wild cats are common in the city. There was a pack of them outside my childhood home. My mother loved them – they ate all the rats."
Gibbs watched her pull at the chain of her necklace. "I used to watch them hunt when I was a little girl. Cats stalk first, you know. When they're close to their prey they leap and grab it," her fingers skimmed over her throat. "By the neck."
Ziva's eyes fled from his, but her voice was even. "Sometimes they bite down and kill right away. Sometimes they release, so that the prey will run, and then they grab it again. I tried to get them to kill me."
She looked at him, as if gauging his reaction.
She couldn't possibly think he'd judge her for that? He kept his eyes on her. Kept himself steady. "Tried that myself with Paloma Reynosa. Didn't work."
Her mouth dropped open. Apparently that came as a surprise.
"I provoked Paloma the same way I provoked you." He rubbed his ribs with a faint grin. "She gave me candy."
And Mike Franks' finger, better left unsaid.
"I am glad," Ziva managed.
His eyes bore into hers. "Me too."
They held each other's gaze for a long time. Finally she turned so that she was facing the street, and him as well. Ziva drew her knees up onto the stones and clasped her hands over them, her back resting against his house. When she looked beyond him the night had passed away. It was already dawn. Just past Gibbs' shoulder a pink ray of sun was spreading across green, green grass. She kept her eyes on that.
"I felt like a child in a board game. You know, one with extra lives. I did not die." She sounded puzzled. "They kept grabbing me, and I would try to run, but . . . and then I would fight. I lost, of course." She swallowed. Lifted a hand to her neck and only realized what she was doing when cold fingers touched her skin. She needed to just say it.
He could see her tense. Gibbs watched her calmly.
"When they . . ."
There was utter silence. Where were the birds, she thought absently. What had she been saying?
Ziva took a shaky breath. "I fought. Some would hold my arms. Legs. But that does not bother me so much," she squinted into the watery sunlight. Another breath. "The one who held my neck, my head . . ."
She wasn't breathing right. Her thoughts were strange, disjointed. How could she be out of breath when she was sitting in one place? She was lightheaded now.
Was she going to faint?
Ziva would never forgive herself if she passed out like a corsetted woman in an old-fashioned novel. Though Gibbs was well cast to play the gentleman who was always on hand to catch the swooning lady.
An hysterical giggle tried to break through her throat.
If she laughed now Gibbs would think she was insane. He was holding himself absolutely still, but it was an effort, she could tell. How he must loathe this.
Laughing would be better than fainting . . . Ziva breathed deeply, slowly. Getting it out without fainting or laughing was the goal she would shoot for. Best to hurry.
"The - " she gagged on calling it a person, or a man. So much bigger than one man could possibly be, in her mind . . . She was seeing spots. Ziva decided hastily to skip it. "Holding my neck was . . . always the one who -" She closed her eyes. Harah Ziva just end it, " - hurt the most."
There. Not very eloquent. Still, she'd said it. Ziva actually sighed in relief. The silence went on and on again, and he wasn't any different from before, but for some reason it felt better now.
She'd smoothed down her hair as she spoke. Gibbs tracked the motion with his eyes, sure she wasn't aware she was doing it.
Ziva recovered her equilibrium as mysteriously as she'd lost it just a moment ago. "They took turns. I always passed out before they finished," she said casually. She was insanely grateful that her breathing, at least, had come back under her control. "Every time I blacked out I thought it was the end. That I would finally die. But I never did."
He looked at her steadily, his clear eyes never wavering.
"I think they liked it, when I fought them. Eventually I tried to . . . not to run. But I could not stop."
She drifted away, right in front of his eyes.
"You were protecting yourself." Gibbs' voice was perfectly calm. Scraped clean of the churning in his gut. And of the dead feeling like a pressure in his chest. He could only hear her if he was calm.
Ziva shook her head. He didn't understand this. "No, I was not. I wanted to let it come to me. If I stopped fighting . . . But I was mindless. Like an animal. Struggling made it worse." She cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse.
He knew he should simply let her talk, now that she finally was, but that idea. Not fighting . . . he didn't like it.
He could banish the images from his mind as quickly as they came, but he couldn't stop the icy feeling that was spreading through him now. Gibbs jammed his hands in his pockets to keep them still.
He wasn't a goddamn professional and she wasn't just an agent and he couldn't let that go.
"Fighting wasn't mindless, Ziva. It was instinct. It was right." He said it slowly. He wanted the words to sink into her bones.
"What is the difference? It was just another thing out of my control that should not be. Another thing I can not stop. It was harder than anything else because it was me that I fought. And I always lose."
She'd slipped into the present tense without seeming to notice. Gibbs finally let himself look away.
He'd had trouble watching Laura Osgood in distress, for god's sake, and that woman sold her soul.
Ziva . . . she's one of us. Gibbs said that to her father the first time he'd met him. One of mine, he'd meant. He had known Ziva would come back to NCIS, even when he left her in Israel. Known that she would always be one of his to protect, as best he could.
"Your instincts helped you survive. You're alive. They're dead. Some would call that a win." He said it softly. It was hard to call this a win.
Ziva ignored that. She might have lived, but she hadn't exactly survived. Just like Gibbs said, so long ago now, a part of her died out there. Now she fought and fought, and stayed stuck, and only became more and more tired. She broke.
"I just want to be who I was before. I could handle anything, Gibbs. Now . . . I do not know who I am now. This is not me."
She was backing away from it again. From Somalia.
He let his eyes run over her. She was beyond tired. He wasn't too sharp himself, though what she'd said about her time in that camp left him restless, not tired. Gibbs forced himself to relax against the pillar at his back.
"What isn't you? Someone who needs help?"
"Accepting help is not the issue. I do that every day."
"In the field, yeah," he agreed. "This is a different kind of fight. Different kind of help." He rolled his head to look at her. "And I for one am glad you're not the same person you were."
"What, a ruthless, soulless killer?" She reminded him of his words of more than a year ago.
He didn't respond.
"Do you think that who we are is something we can really change, Gibbs? I am not sure it is possible." Ziva ran a hand over the rough stone she was sitting on. "Malachi said that we are like snakes. Try to shed the old skin and it only grows back."
Gibbs rolled his shoulders and turned to look out at the street again, focusing on not saying something unforgivably stupid. But he really had developed an amazing dislike for everything Mossad. Usually he could kill or imprison anyone who came after one of his people. Neither of those options had been practical in the case of Eli David, unfortunately, and it was damn irritating.
He put some effort into keeping his voice mild. "Yeah, well, maybe you started out with a soul, and a conscience, but shed them to be what your father wanted you to be. Maybe they've grown back."
She turned that over in her mind. Said absently, "I did not realize they would be this much trouble."
He laughed a little bitterly then – and winced. His ribs hurt.
"Yeah." His voice tipped from regret into sadness.
She studied his profile. He'd turned to place his hands on the wall, looking down at them in that distracted manner that meant he was disturbed. She wondered what his conscience bothered him about.
Gibbs had reminded her earlier that she hadn't committed any crimes, not technically, anyway, as if that would comfort her. She knew he could not say the same about himself.
She'd said she did not care about the technicality of breaking the law. Ziva wondered now if that was really true. She'd never thought about what it would be like to know she had committed a serious crime. An intentional murder.
It may not be an easy thing to live with. But he shouldn't feel guilt for what he had done. It was justified, crime or not . . .
Ziva leaned toward him and reached a hand out. Slowly, tentatively, she placed it on his shoulder. She was surprised when he didn't move. Gibbs stood there quietly and submitted to it, the old t-shirt under her fingers soft and very warm.
"I made sure they all died, Gibbs," she said. "Everyone in the cell that planted the bomb. That killed Tali. I hunted them all. And then I hunted their friends. I would do it again."
Gibbs nodded. It was good that she was reaching out on a night like this. He didn't look up at her though, didn't really bother following what she was trying to say.
Ziva couldn't have known how far off the mark she was.
Gibbs wasn't thinking about his family. He was thinking about Jenny. He'd met her only a few years after Shannon and Kelly died. Not long after he'd lost himself.
After Jen's death Mike Franks asked Gibbs what had happened to her and Gibbs had answered honestly. "Me." He had happened to her.
Ari said once that Gibbs reminded him of his father. Gibbs didn't think he was like Eli David, not anymore at least. But there had been a time . . . He raised you to be ruthless, soulless . . . Jenny hadn't been ruthless when Gibbs met her. She certainly hadn't been a killer. It was Gibbs who taught her how to be those things.
He'd thought he was protecting her, teaching her how to survive.
Gibbs was willing to bet that Eli had been thinking the same thing when he raised Ziva to follow in his footsteps. If anyone had shown Jenny how to shed the best of herself like a snake shed its skin, it was Gibbs. After they drifted apart he had slowly come back to himself, but Jenny . . . Jenny never had. In her, he knew, he had raised a flower of fire. Just as Eli David hammered Ziva into a spear.
Gibbs accepted his own crimes, would never feel real guilt for them. But he did feel it for Jenny's.
She pulled her hand away.
He was uncomfortable, she could feel it radiating off him. Ziva firmly turned her mind to other things, trying to give him the privacy he clearly wanted, even in her own head. She wasn't quite sure what he was thinking about, but she did not want her curiosity to intrude on anything he wished to hold to himself.
She looked for something strong and . . . redeeming to say.
"The anger after Tali's death was useful, at least. It was how I learned much of what I know about intelligence work," she offered eventually. Ziva smiled a little. After all, there were good memories, too. "You know, I do not think my father has ever been more proud of me."
The tendons in Gibbs' arms jerked tight, turning to wire under the skin. Ziva winced. That hadn't been the right thing to say.
A minute passed in tense silence. Finally Gibbs straightened without looking at her.
"Be back in a second." He disappeared into the house.
Ziva watched him go and turned back to the street, somehow feeling both numb and miserable at the same time. She hadn't wanted him here when she first called. Now she wished she had not chased him away.
But Gibbs returned quickly. He stood before her and abruptly held out his hand. "I want you to have this."
Ziva looked into his outstretched hand and jerked back. Shocked.
"No," he studied her face and grinned. "It's not what you think. This was my mother's."
His usual confidence had returned full force. "She had a peaceful life. I want you to have it," he said again. I want you to have the same.
"C'mere." He reached out with his other hand, then, his eyes on hers as he gently grasped her wrist and brought it toward him. He placed the smooth silver ring into her hand and closed her fingers over it.
Her hand tightened around the metal, solid and warm in her palm.
"You're more than your father's daughter, Ziva."
She didn't say anything. Just looked down at their hands.
Gibbs considered the top of her head a little ruefully. He didn't usually give his people stuff, and something so personal - hell, it crossed a lot of lines that Gibbs never crossed.
But this seemed right . . . well, hopefully she would hear him.
He leaned in, slowly, and spoke low, into her ear.
"Listen to me, Ziva. You can't go back to being the person you were. What happened – it changed you. You think it's made you weaker. Because it's hard, now. I know it's hard." He smiled grimly into her hair, tightened his grip on her hand. "But you're wrong, Ziva. You don't see it now, but you're stronger than you were. I promise you that."
She stared at her hand, small in his own.
And finally got it together enough to whisper a response. A thank you.
He released her hand and pulled back out of her space to settle on the stone ledge, leaving a few feet between them. They sat together for awhile, sharing the quiet that came before the day began. Mornings in a family neighborhood started a little later in summer.
It was Gibbs who eventually spoke
"You talk to Eli since he was here?"
"No." She was distracted, still staring at her hand. Processing what he'd said. "But that is not unusual. Even before we were rarely in contact, unless I was based at Mossad's headquarters. My father is dedicated to his work," she said absently.
She happened to glance up at him as she trailed off. He threw her a look that was pure Gibbs. Furrowed, grumpy brow. Incredulous eyes. Sleep-mussed hair sticking up like a . . . porcupine.
Ziva locked onto his gaze for just a moment, before a shout of laughter erupted from her chest. Gales of it followed, echoing out into the neighborhood.
Finally she calmed, her lungs aching, stomach muscles sore, and looked at him through the water in her eyes. He was grinning at her like a boy. She brushed away the tears of mirth from her cheeks.
"I suppose you knew that."
"Knew the Director of Mossad is dedicated? To his job? Yeah," he said, somehow perfectly dry despite the grin. "Think I picked up on that."
They were quiet again and . . . it was easy, and ordinary. Real. What she had wanted from a family, she supposed, but hadn't expected to find here, and never on a night like the one she'd just come through. Ziva considered the man sitting in front of her and gave him a different kind of smile then, an assessing little quirk of the lips that he didn't quite understand.
She was thinking about something Abby said once. The man is magic.
Ziva wondered how he got so very good at caring for people. Wondered if it was something he was always good at, or if it was the sort of thing you could learn. She looked down at the ring still pressed into her hand.
"I was more like my father then," she mused. "When I was hunting them. I did not care about anything else. Eli encouraged me, but it was something I was happy to be anyway, at the time." She glanced at Gibbs. Ziva wouldn't normally ask him, but then, she wouldn't normally be on his porch at this hour, either. She was too tired to care much anymore about annoying Gibbs.
Besides, she'd already kicked him and then deliberately provoked him. In response he'd given her a gift she would cherish forever and made her laugh. He seemed to be immune to her attacks.
"Do you think that is what makes him what he is? Desire for revenge? I do not know much about his life before he married my mother."
It was in her voice, plain as day. Why didn't he come for me?
Gibbs shook his head, flashing back to Eli. Loyalty . . . I did not come here for her . . . You have a way of making my family disappear.
How could he be the one making them disappear? As far as Gibbs could tell Eli David didn't exactly hold them close to begin with.
The man had lost two children already. He'd once had the power to keep Ziva close to him, but he gave that away. "I don't understand him, Ziva." Gibbs rubbed a forefinger down a seam in the stones. I did not come here for her.
He would never understand a man like that. "He should've come for you. In Somalia. In DC. He should come for you now." You should be having this conversation with your father, he didn't say. And my daughter should be wearing that ring.
Things didn't always turn out like they should.
She turned the ring in her hand, examined it in the growing light. There was a celtic design etched delicately into the band. Ziva slipped it onto a finger and curled the hand into a fist. She had thanked him for leaving her in Israel, but . . .
"I never said thank you for rescuing me, Gibbs. For coming for me. Thank you."
Gibbs looked away from her, turning his head to watch the soft pink light fade to yellow as it spread across his lawn. It was going to be a beautiful day.
"What do you say you come over and make me dinner?"
Ziva actually blinked at him. "What?"
"As a token of your appreciation. I'd want to eat a little earlier than your usual visiting hours, though." He tapped his nonexistent watch again.
She smiled, bemused and tired but pretty content to roll with whatever Gibbs said. "I would love to, Gibbs. Here? Or at my apartment?"
"Here. If that's alright."
Ziva frowned. Gibbs was inviting her over for dinner? That was . . . beyond strange.
"Of course. I'm not usually . . ." she waved a hand at his house, and he nodded. She was comfortable in his home, most of the time. If she wasn't when she came they would just sit on the porch again.
"When would be a good night for you?"
"I'll leave that up to you," he said. "Just call. Not sure one dinner's gonna do it, though."
Oh.
She nodded and looked down at the ring, twisting it on her finger. "I understand."
"Good."
He was watching her. She looked up and watched him back.
"So I talked, Gibbs. When do you expect I will be cured?"
He cocked his head. "I look like a doctor to you?"
"Well . . ."
"You telling me you don't feel better?"
She stared at him.
He smiled. "Good."
"You said it would not work quickly!" she laughed, a little disbelieving and a little . . . just feeling good.
He rolled his eyes. She was teasing him, of all things. "You've been carrying this stuff around for a long time, Ziva. You're relieved. I don't think it's exactly 'worked' yet."
She grinned at him. "I still owe you dinner."
"Damn straight."
He glanced back at the sun and slid to his feet with the faintest of groans. "I'm going into the office. You're gonna take a nap. I'll expect to see you at noon." He looked her over. "Make that 1300."
He let his voice go quiet. "And Ziva. Don't let it go so long next time. You come to me."
Ziva gaped at him. "Gibbs, I –"
"Don't argue with me, David. Take a nap. You look like crap."
And Ducky didn't like it when Gibbs pushed the ducklings too hard.
He gave an abortive stretch, grunting and lowering his arms before he got halfway. His ribs hurt like hell. "And I really don't need Ducky on my case today," he muttered. Was she wearing steel-toed boots?
"Um," she said. "Would you like me to – "
The Talk was definitely over. He was giving her a spit it out glare.
" – tape your ribs?"
The glare turned into - nothing she would repeat.
"Or not! I will just go home to . . . take a nap." She spoke the last bit slowly and cast him a confused look, as if she was somehow unclear on the instructions.
He bent over to pick up his mug and gestured inside the house. "You can use my couch if you want. Save you the trip home."
This was a very weird vibe. Nice Gibbs and Regular Gibbs were all mixed-up. Ziva stood and picked up her own mug. "Um. Thank you for the tea, Gibbs."
"You're welcome," he assured her as he turned toward the door. "Really. Stuff tastes like grass."
He set his mug on the kitchen table and headed up the stairs, not looking back to see if she'd followed him in.
Twenty minutes later he came back down, moving quietly, and smiled. Nice Gibbs was on full display, though there was no one there to appreciate it. Ziva was sprawled out on his couch, hands tucked under her head. Snoring.