Ziva had no idea where she was, only that she was cold and she hurt all over. The last time she'd woken feeling like this she'd found herself in a tiny prison cell somewhere in Croatia. No. That was two times ago. The last time had been Paris and she'd had a hangover.
Now she was wishing for a hangover for perhaps the first time in her life. A hangover explained only the pain in her head though. And the nausea. And the fact that she was holding on even though she was lying on the floor. Which was moving. Had she gotten drunk and fallen down the stairs? She had neither stairs nor alcohol in her apartment.
She concentrated as hard as she could. There were steps she had to follow in a situation like this hardwired into her brain. Evaluate yourself. Evaluate the situation. Concoct a plan to deal with both. Modify as necessary. Do not question why until all threats have been neutralized. Good. First day at Moussad kind of stuff. Unless your surname was David, in which case you'd learned the rules before you could spell 'David.' Gibbs had a lot of rules too. Usually she avoided the mental comparisons of Gibbs and her father, but now…now she needed to focus so she could do a self-inventory and find out what was wrong with her.
Wherever she was, it didn't smell very nice. She opened her eyes slowly. The light was far too bright. She moaned to pass the time while her eyes adjusted. The smell was coming from a puddle on the floor in front of her face. She couldn't remember what she'd eaten last, or when, but she was fairly certain the pinkish red swirls in the vomit were not remnants of a meal.
Stomach pain and nausea. Check.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her peripheral vision took in what details there were to be observed in the room. Knobs jutted out from the faces of many small cabinets. She was on the floor, but there was a bed built into the wall. A blanket trailed from it. Had she fallen out of the bed? She hadn't fallen out of bed since she'd been four. She'd landed on a metal toy tank and scraped her leg. While she'd sat on the floor, holding her leg and wiping away the few tears she couldn't stop from leaking out, her father had stood over her, lecturing her on the importance of always cleaning up her toys before she went to bed. Then he'd tended her small injury, kissed her forehead and tucked her safely into bed again.
Where had her mother been? She wouldn't have gotten the lecture if…Tali hadn't been born less than two days before. Ziva remembered staring at the squirming bundle in her mother's arms and being unable to equate it with the beach ball her mother had been inexplicably hiding in her stomach for the previous few months. Stomach pain and nausea could mean she was pregnant. She gasped. How was she going to tell Tony? Tony! Where was he? Heh. When Abby had jokingly asked if they were using protection, Tony had confidently announced that she had an IED and she had said she'd detonate it if she got pregnant. She couldn't be pregnant. She had an IUD.
Wait. She already had a reason for her stomach pain. She was throwing up blood, so she was most likely bleeding internally. Great. What had she moved on to? Her leg. She ran her hand down and her fingertips encountered the soft edge of a bandage. Something was wrong with her left thigh that had required a bandage. She had fallen out of bed and landed on a toy. When she was four. What had happened recently? Gunshots? The last time she'd heard a gunshot she'd gotten a chance to pet a panda. He was soft, like the bandage wrapped around the stab wound Dmitri had given her.
Dmitri. He wasn't dead and she was in the middle of being kidnapped by him. Leg pain. Check.
She squeezed her eyes closed as the room moved. Rooms didn't move. Rooms on planes moved. Tony had been tied to the chair across from her on the plane, but they'd gotten in a car after that. Had they boarded a boat? Their boat had exploded in Sanremo. She'd trained herself to think in terms of plurals during her last mission; it was really just Dmitri's boat. She had been so sure the explosion had killed McGee and Tony. Where was Tony?
Unable to fight off the nausea, she turned her head and retched. More red this time. Her hair was about to land in it. She remembered holding back Adi's hair while she threw up after having a few too many margaritas on their trip to…Corsica? She'd never been to Corsica with Adi. Right. Kidnapped. She touched her forehead as she collapsed back onto her back and found another bandage wrapped there.
Massive headache. Check.
She didn't have the energy to do any further self-inventory. She wasn't going anywhere if she couldn't get off the floor. She couldn't even pick up her head to see who it was that had opened the door. A familiar voice immediately comforted her, "Ziva, how did you get…she's throwing up again." Tony's face shimmered into view. "Ziva, can you hear me?"
"Hey. I'm glad you're here." She didn't have to keep thinking if Tony was here to handle things.
"Yeah, well, that'll teach me a lesson about going to the bathroom." He looked away. "Help me get her back on the bed."
A man with a dark complexion lifted her and set her carefully down on a softer surface than the floor. The door closed with a thud a moment later. "That wasn't Dmitri."
"No, that was his new Ivan." Tony had his head in a cabinet and his voice was muffled.
She thought back. "Johnny Argentina?"
"That's what I've been calling him, but his name is Juan." He used some paper towels from the roll he had grabbed to clean up the floor. "I'd ask how you feel, but this is…"
"Vomit. McGee calls it puke."
"Yeah, it's that." He finished what he was doing and disappeared from her line of vision for a moment. She heard running water. She'd missed the sink in her once-over of the room? She realized she wasn't sure where the door was either. When she tried to sit up and look, Tony delicately pushed her back down. He sat next to her and gently washed her face with a warm, damp cloth. "Just tell me when you need the bucket."
"We have a bucket?" He held it up in his left hand and she saw that his right arm was in a sling.
"How did you…oh, right. Panda."
"Uh-huh. I think the more important thing for you to remember right now is how you hurt your head."
"Did someone hit me with a…tank?"
"Not quite. We were riding in the back of an SUV after we got out of the plane…"
"And we crashed. We skidded off the road and…and what?"
"You got hurt when we rolled over. Well, hurt more. Dmitri stabbed your leg on the plane. You remember that we're with Dmitri?"
She shook her head, yawning. "I'm with you."
"Yeah."
"You'll stay?"
"Of course. You rest and I'll be here."
"Hold me?"
She felt his body along her side and his arm low across her hips. "Am I hurting you?"
"No." She was most certainly in pain, but she doubted anything he did would affect that. "So gentle…"
"I'm doing my best."
"Love you."
"I love you, too, Ziva. Can you just do me one favor?"
"I'll try."
"Let me know if you're gonna be sick again."
"Right. Bucket." She drifted off, experiencing a moment when she felt no pain just before she lost consciousness.
Dmitri peered into the darkness, frustrated that he had no set of twinkling lights to steer toward. He trusted the navigational instruments, but he always felt better if he could see where he was going. If Tal had survived, he could be the one piloting the ship through the fog right now. "Idiot should have kept his mouth shut," he mumbled to himself, making a minor course correction.
He looked over his shoulder as Juan joined him on the small bridge. "She bleeds, señor."
"She has been bleeding all day." He felt a pang of regret that he wished would go away. "Is she getting worse?"
"She bleeds from inside." Juan mimed vomiting. "There is much blood."
"We are less than half an hour from Elba. She will have a doctor there."
"Sí, señor, un doctor." He crossed his arms and stared through the window.
"She will be fine," Dmitri confirmed. "Fine."