In my stories, I always assume that US government employees get better family leave than most people do… so if it seems like they're getting a lot more time off than normal, they probably are. This ain't maternity/paternity leave research hour.
On the morning Tony's alarm goes off, not as a reminder to check on Isabella, but a prompt to get up for his first day back at work, he grips his pillow and wills it to go away. The droning goes on until Ziva swats him. "Turn that off."
He does. The mattress shifts as she snuggles back under her covers and he tosses his to the side. Her leave is three months; he only gets two weeks. She is not yet at one hundred percent, physically, so he's glad she has extra paid time to recover- though, as the baby will be with her all day, it's not exactly going to be relaxing. But he's jealous. He'd rather be overworked with her and Isabella than with Gibbs and McGee and some dead body.
He takes a shower, then returns to the room with a citrus scent clinging to his skin (he used Ziva's shampoo by accident). When he sees her awake, lying on her side and staring at her phone, he balks and instinctively puts his hand on the knot holding his towel around his waist. She flicks her eyes up to his before skimming them over the rest of his mostly bare body.
"Getting a good long look to hold you over?" he asks.
"I wish you were staying here."
Surprised, he pauses in the midst of getting a suit out of the closet. She avoids his gaze as she sets her phone back on the nightstand. Tony steps up to the side of the bed. "I can dip into my vacation, or take a sick day-"
"No." Ziva shakes her head firmly. "We need to save our time off. Once I go back, our schedules will be insane."
He knows she's right. Suddenly having two cups to fill instead of just one is not easy.
In fact, it kind of sucks.
The division of time… the compromising of time.
"Call me if you change your mind, and I'll be in the car so fast Gibbs won't even get a chance to slap me for it," he says. That draws a chuckle from her. "Seriously. You two are gonna be fine."
The glance she throws toward the baby monitor is full of apprehension and doubt. On a whim, Tony rubs his thumb along her jaw. Ziva sighs and leans into the touch. She looks so tired. He is, too.
"This is going to get easier," he assures her. And himself. "Soon."
Her eyelids droop as she nods. Taking that as his cue to let her rest, he pulls away and quietly gets dressed. He peeks into Isabella's room on his way out. Sound asleep with her fists flanking her head, she is a sight for sore eyes.
It is not yet seven in the morning, but he already can't wait to come home.
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They eat a lot of takeout.
It meets all of the criteria they are governed by right now: it's quick, easy, and requires minimal effort. Every few days, Ziva declares that they are done eating junk and fixes something way better, but, inevitably, greasy bags soon pile up in their trash again. Any stranger watching them eat together at the table and talk about their days and pass their baby back and forth would think that they are a married couple. Hell, sometimes Tony forgets the reality of the situation. Playing house has a way of feeling very, very real.
Ziva usually takes a much-needed baby break after dinner. When she has disappeared into her bedroom and the only sound in the apartment is the hum of the dishwasher, Tony makes a bottle and sits down to feed Isabella. Stress accumulated at work is lessened by this bonding time with his daughter; he cannot help but be grounded by the little ball of warmth in his arms. She goes at the bottle desperately, and once she has finished, she watches him expectantly as if to ask, what next? Often, she is lulled to sleep by a combination of the Nationals' TV broadcast and Tony's voice as he adds his input quietly in her ear: "His foot wasn't even on the bag. That was a really bad call, huh, Is?" It's a lullaby of his own making, and though it's not nearly as pretty as the Hebrew ones Ziva sings, he believes it will suffice.
Having declared himself the chief documenter of Isabella's early life, he already has upwards of seven hundred pictures of her on his phone. Ziva says it's ridiculous, that a child six weeks of age is not interesting enough to warrant so much photography, but he definitely doesn't hear any complaints when he sets a candid of her kissing Isabella as the wallpaper on her cell. She frequently asks to look at his album when they're lying in bed at night. He lets her, of course, and then he watches as she smiles and laughs at the screen. Many times, he nods off with that image floating behind his closed eyelids.
One night, he is on the cusp of consciousness when Ziva suddenly says, "Oh, wow."
"What?" he asks on a yawn.
"This picture." She turns the phone toward him. "Something about her facial expression… she looks exactly like you."
"Let me explain to you the theory of genetics," Tony teases, prompting a glare from her. She's right, though. Isabella generally doesn't resemble one of them more than the other, but this particular shot would be enough to prove his paternity in court. "At least now I know you haven't been lying to me. I was sort of suspic- ow!"
With a smirk, Ziva pats his gut where she just smacked it, then turns her attention back to the phone in her hand. "Can you believe how much she has grown already?"
"No," he says honestly. "And she looks like an actual person now."
She glances over at him. "What did she look like before?"
"I don't know. Like… kinda like a monkey."
"Tony!" she scolds, and for a moment, he thinks that he may just meet his end at the hands of Mama Bear. "You think our daughter looked like a monkey?"
"She was all wrinkly, remember? And her head looked too big for her body, her face was all…" He pushes his cheeks upwards until they enter his line of vision. "You know?"
"She needed some time to grow into her own skin, is all."
"Right, yeah. Exactly."
Ziva rolls her eyes, and although he knows she's not mad, per se, he gets the feeling that he shouldn't let the conversation end like this. On a whim, he extends one arm across the bed, allowing it to settle on top of her stomach. She startles slightly. Tony positions his chin right next to her shoulder. "Even when she reminded me of a little chimp, she was gorgeous, Ziva. She's us. She's our missing puzzle piece."
Their noses become startlingly close when Ziva turns toward him, and Tony shifts backward out of reflex. If their proximity bothers Ziva, she doesn't show it in her serious expression. "You think we fit together like that?" she asks quietly. "Like a puzzle?"
"You don't?"
His question lingers in the air. At long last, she shrugs. "I certainly hope we do."
She stretches to turn off her lamp, then, and Tony takes his arm back. They are not quite touching, but he stays where he is, on her side of the bed, for however long it is before Isabella's cries crackle through the baby monitor. Ziva wins the quick round of rock, paper, scissors, so he is the one to get up. That's the end of the almost cuddling thing, he guesses. At least for tonight.
But when he returns fifteen minutes later, he finds Ziva fast asleep in the middle of the mattress, her head on one half of his pillow. Tony crawls in beside her and claims the other half. Beneath the covers, their knees touch.
And as it turns out, he sleeps just fine that way.
