A/N: You would not believe how hard it was to write this chapter.
I had an idea, but halfway through writing it, I realized I hated the way it flowed and the way it sounded. I also felt like it was too much like the other chapters. So I scrapped it. But then I was stuck trying to figure out something else because I wasn't sure how to bridge 28 and 30.
So I started writing 30 and realized the beginning portion of that was lame and proceeded to bang my head against the wall because I can't write worth a damn. It was just one of those days.
I half-assed my homework and reworked Chapter 30. Then, somehow, Chapter 29 revealed itself to me over the course of an evening (very, very slowly) and now it's done. & that's why the wait was so long. Clearly, my brain is ready to be done with this story and rest a while.
With that epic back-story in mind, then, go forth and (fingers crossed) enjoy.
xx
XXIX. Scarred
All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don't mean anything
When you've got no one to tell them to
It's true
I was made for you
- Brandi Carlile, "The Story"
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The alarm is unforgiving and shrill, jolting him out of the cushy comfort of sleep into the glare of reality with no gentleness to speak of.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Tony rolls over with an agonized mumble, curling the pillow over his ears and scrunching his face in – clearly letting Ziva set her obnoxious cell phone as their alarm today instead of his softer, politer alarm clock was a mistake.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
He kicks his leg to Ziva's side of the bed, desiring nothing more than for her to shut that accursed thing off and let him sleep a while longer – he could swear he's only been asleep a few minutes and it can't be morning yet – but his foot finds only air.
Surprise alone causes his eyes to open, alarmed and a little panicked, wondering where Ziva is if her cell phone is still beeping from the table. He tries to crane his neck to look for her, but it hurts him so he has to sit up in order to get a good view.
As it turns out, Ziva is in the bathroom, visible because she left the bedroom and bathroom doors open; she is wearing his shirt and brushing her hair, calm and cool as anything. Tony narrows his eyes, confused; but a yawn takes him over and he snatches her cell phone as he collapses back on the mattress, turning off the beeper and rubbing his eyes to get rid of the sleep.
Ziva notices and walks into the room, grinning.
"Well, it's about time," she notes grimly. "I have been letting that thing beep for ten minutes now."
"Why would you do that?" asks Tony, incredulous. "What have I done to deserve such cruel and unusual punishment?"
"You sleep like a hog," she informs him.
"Log, Ziva, log," Tony tells her through another yawn. "I sleep like a log."
"Yes, so instead of making noises in your ear or slapping you in the rear end, as I considered doing, I let you wake up by yourself," Ziva says serenely.
He throws her a look but she just smirks and goes on brushing her hair. Yawning yet again, Tony pads over to her and rests his chin on her shoulder, watching himself in the mirror as he brings her waist into his gut, enjoying having to find her curves under his over-sized, shapeless T-shirt.
"It's too early," he mumbles, inhaling her neck.
"It's nine o'clock," says Ziva with a snort. "We need to get ready."
"You're not ready," he points out.
"I have to finish my hair, then I will get dressed," she says, peering down at his head on hers like a Siamese mutation. "I'm ahead of you so far. You had better catch up."
"I want to go back to sleep," he says, bringing her in so close, so possessively, that she stumbles a little on the spot. In a flash, her heel is in his calf and he buckles, nearly dragging her down with him.
"What is wrong with you?" asks Ziva, wrinkling her nose at him.
"I'm a guy with a hot girlfriend," Tony says. "Going back to bed sounds pretty good right about now."
She chuckles and sets her hairbrush down, planting a kiss on the top ring of his outer ear. "Well, we have to go to work," she reminds him. "Otherwise, you will lose your job and bed will be all you are good for."
"Doesn't sound half bad right now," Tony remarks.
Ziva disentangles Tony's arms from her torso and attacks his hair with the brush, making him screw his face up in irritation.
"We need to get ready," she repeats. "Come on, jump to it."
"Hop," he corrects her at once as he grudgingly obliges her, trudging to his closet for something to wear.
He can hear her snort even when he's in the closet rustling hangers: she has never been one for subtlety when something colors her amused.
And he finds that he likes this about her, listening to her turn on the tap and brush her teeth in his bathroom. He doesn't like her alarm clock, but he likes how it made her laugh when he arrived in her presence like a grumpy toddler.
He dresses quickly right there in the closet and then comes back out to the main bedroom to get his socks and continue to the bathroom, where he can brush his teeth and tame his hair, which currently stands in five different directions in a manner reminiscent of a tornado-ravaged bird's nest. But in the main bedroom, he is slightly startled to find Ziva wearing her brown pants and attempting to get the hook in her bra done.
She sees him pause by the closet door and, far from being embarrassed, beckons him over with a tilt of her head, saying, "Can you help me with this? This one has three hooks instead of two…it's horrendous…"
"Um, sure." Sure he is blushing, though he has seen her topless many times before, Tony slips forward and hooks the bra for her, her skin surprisingly cool instead of flushed. But there's something there that makes him hesitate, a dark look passing over his autumn eyes: a small but substantial mark in the shape of a perfect circle, as deliberate as they come but easy to miss in a hurry – which Tony was always in when he scrambled to open her bra and experience what lay beneath it.
The look of it, like a watchful eye, disturbs him. But she, noticing nothing, adjusts the bra in the front and turns around, a good-natured smile on her lips.
"Thank you," she says.
"No problem," he remarks, though he has a dazed, glazed sort of air to him, something she can't quite put her finger on.
"What is it?" she asks, her smile faltering, her eyebrows knitting together in a quizzical way.
"You have a…scar there," he says, obviously disturbed, eyes on where he had just hooked her bra. "How did that happen?"
"I don't know," she says, significantly defensive. "It was probably an accident."
"But this one is a circle," he says, tone steady but body language shrinking somewhat, troubled by the mark and the story that probably lies behind it. "It wasn't an accident."
Face suddenly serious, like an animal waiting to hear danger in the air in the jungle, Ziva puts her hand to her back under her bra and feels around until her fingers reach the spot with the scar. And something changes in her face then, her relaxed happiness morphing into a little anguished before she catches herself and becomes stoic again.
"It is nothing, Tony," she tells him in a tone that warns him to leave this right here. "Just a scar. I have many."
This statement disturbs him almost as much as the scar – the nature of it coupled with her determined calm, but also the fact that after all the times they have had sex, he was so lost in the present that he never bothered looking for the indications of her past that she wore all over her body.
If it hadn't been for Ziva picking up a bra with three hooks when she packed her bag, he would never have known about this scar at all – a chilling thought.
He is silent as she slips on her shirt and smoothes out her hair, wondering about this, about the other stories she hasn't told him, the other scars she hasn't exposed to him in the light of day. She finishes sprucing and banishes him to the bathroom to get dressed, apparently having let go of the incident with the scar, playfully slapping his rear end and telling him she'll spare him some breakfast if he hurries up. She leaves the room with a whiff of her perfume and he is alone again, but he has not recovered from the sight of her scar the way she has.
Because it reminds him with the force of an anvil on his head in the midst of their morning recreation that the woman he is with is scarred. She has lived most of her life without him and he knows relatively little about her, because that life was ambiguous and while it looms like a storm cloud over her present, he has only gotten ripples of the weather patterns thus far. Never has he gone into the storm with her. Never has she let him.
That scar was not made by accident. Someone burned her and she carries the evidence with her to this day. There is a story associated with it – some mission gone wrong, some unfortunate side-effect of her job with Mossad – but he doubts he will ever hear it.
That story and the stories that are like it linger in the shadows, always present between them but never concrete, never clarified. He still doesn't know exactly what happened to her in Somalia. But he knows things did happen and the story comes out in the recoil she has sometimes when she's touched, how she clouded over when he asked about the circular scar.
In a way, the stories come out through these gestures, the cracks in her exterior when these things are brought up – and it reminds him that she is not whole, that he is dealing here with damaged goods.
The fact that he even knows the existence of horror stories is more than most in her acquaintance can boast – because she trusts him in a way that is implicit and goes much deeper than she would ever let on.
And, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, Tony apprehends more clearly than he ever has, standing alone in his room, that if for whatever reason something happens between them, Ziva will probably never trust anyone this way anymore. She can't take another betrayal, another disappointment – so he has to stay.
He has to, or behind the composure, she will fall apart.
Tony spends much of his life hiding from responsibility and cruising through the rough spots with a joke or a bottle of beer, feeling more like a high school boy playing pretend than an accountable grown-up, but he feels older now, slowly padding off to the bathroom to brush his teeth and his hair before Ziva yelled at him to hurry up.
He is a self-confessed commitment-phobe – the high-school-boy mindset lends itself pretty easily to that – and it's moments like these when he feels daunted by the weight of a relationship with someone like Ziva, who needs his dependability so desperately. This isn't easy for him either – he doesn't know what he's doing any more than she does – and he does have to wonder if he's cut out for this, if he's really so good for her in the long run.
He's under a lot of pressure and he might as well admit it – he is intimidated. She bears so many scars.
The Colgate is cool and minty and bracing in his mouth as he brushes his teeth. He is just finishing with his hair, carefully applying the gel so that it stays, when he hears Ziva call as he knew she would, saying, "You are late. I'm leaving now; waiting around for you is not worth my job, Tony."
"I'll see you at work," Tony calls back. "Did you leave me anything?"
"There is toast by the oven," is Ziva's reply before the front door opens and closes and the apartment is silent again.
With a sigh, knowing that Ziva is quite right and he has to get to work now, Tony puts the final touches on his hair and races out to find his shoes. He finds that indeed, Ziva has left him some toast – two slices, one with butter and one with jelly, the way he likes them during breakfast. He grins as he takes them and heads out the door, and he takes a large bite of the jelly-covered one in the elevator on the way downstairs.
Ziva is just leaving the building when Tony arrives on the main floor. He gets a view of her back as she walks out – her hair cascading down in brown waves, her tiny rear end especially flattered by the brown pants she is wearing. And along with the warmth she inspires, there is a twinge of uneasiness.
She has never been so human, so unstable and truly risky, until this morning – and, he grasps with a jolt, neither has he.
A/N: Phew. Finally. This chapter has been such a bitch to me all day. Only now, so many hours later, has it finally played nice with me.
I have Chapter 30 almost written, but it needs a little more work before I'm satisfied with it, so you will need to wait another day or two before I post that. And then we are DONE with Kaleidoscope Heart! Gah!
I'd love you forever if you reviewed before exiting out of the browser, so please do that and I'll see you next chapter!
Cheers.
X
