Of Jews and Gentiles: Chapter 36
A/N: Okay, you guys have been bugging me about this chapter for a couple of days now, so I'm giving it to you... kinda :)
The sound of the piano stopped abruptly at the ringing of the doorbell of the Georgetown condo, much to Tony DiNozzo's regret. He had been standing in the hallway for almost five minutes listening to the music and wondering what he was going to say when the door opened.
Ziva had already turned and headed back toward the living room when the door finished swinging open. "Hello to you, too," DiNozzo said jokingly.
"I have had a long day, Tony. If this is not related to the case, I am not interested in hearing about it right now."
He paused for a moment before sliding the long thin box he was carrying onto the kitchen counter. "I brought pizza," he finally offered. "I would have gotten flowers, but then I realized I didn't know what I would be apologizing for, so I figured this would be a better approach. Tastier, too. Besides, after spending literally the entire afternoon at a jewelry store, I didn't have the energy to handle the florist as well."
Ziva sighed as she turned back to face her partner. "I am sorry, Tony. I have been rather bitchy the last few days." She opened the pizza box and was faced with a cheese pizza. Entirely cheese, no pepperoni. She glanced up at Tony, an expression of confusion on her face. "You are not eating?"
"Why, are you so hungry you're eating that whole thing by yourself?"
"No, it is just..." She tilted the pizza toward him. "You do not like cheese pizza."
He shrugged. "I figured after giving you a hard time on Saturday that maybe I should make more of an effort to eat something kosher."
"You do not have to do that," she replied, but he caught the ghost of a smile behind her words. She was halfway through her first slice of pizza before she spoke again. "You went to see Saul Steiner, then?"
"Yeah," he replied after swallowing another mouthful of the bland pizza. If ever he forgot why he liked pepperoni, he could use that moment as a reminder. "Be careful around him. He may be old, but he's feisty. And I think he has a thing for girls with dark curly hair." He took another bite of his pizza. "Actually, judging by half of the things he was saying, he has a thing for girls period."
"Ah, so you have something in common."
He grinned. "Only if you're referring to the dark curly hair comment."
She rolled her eyes and looked away. "Idiot," she muttered, but he could see her smile. "Did you learn anything other than his preference for female company?"
"He gave me a rather long lecture about diamond grading."
Another eye roll. "About the case, Tony."
"He seemed interested when I brought up the fact that I wasn't Jewish, but not overtly disapproving. In fact, after I mentioned the Grossman's class at the synagogue, he brought up Lena Rosen and Scott Daltron, and seemed pretty sad about that. Of course, he could have just been sad about not being able to complete the ring he and Daltron designed. He talked about that in great length."
"Hmm," Ziva said, her mouthful full of pizza. She swallowed and continued, "You may have been right when you said that Steiner's comments, if he makes any comments at all, were not done maliciously. Maybe he is just a gossipy old man."
"He's definitely a gossipy old man. I can tell you stories about half of the pillars of the Jewish community of DC."
She smiled thinly. "Any luck with the phones or email?"
"McGee hasn't contacted me with anything, so I don't think so. If he's going to talk, it'll be Saturday at the synagogue after services. Whoever we get to tail him is going to have to stay close enough to hear what he says."
"Will that be McGee?"
He shook his head. "The daughter knows McGee from the court order, remember? What about Gibbs? Think you can get him in a kippah for a few hours of reconnaissance?" They both smiled at the mental image.
They switched to small talk for the duration of the dinner. Despite Tony's claims to not like cheese pizza, he ate seven slices to Ziva's three. It looked like he'd be getting up for the morning run the next day, regardless of where he was sleeping.
The thoughts of the sleeping arrangement caused the smile to drop from his face as he thought about sleeping alone the last few nights. "Are we going to talk about what's been bothering you for the last couple of days?" he asked. No use beating around the bush.
Her smile also fell instantly from her face. "It is not important," she said stiffly.
"Your lips say no, but your eyes won't shut up," he said, paraphrasing one of his first comments to her after their reunion from the summer apart. She shook her head, but he had already seen what he was looking for. Everyone else seemed to think that Ziva was the unfeeling, uncaring Mossad automaton that she often wanted them to think she was. Sometimes, Tony felt like he was the only person to see the real Ziva David, the one who regretted that she had grown up so fast, who mourned two dead siblings, who let her guard down when she played the piano or hummed while she cooked. There was a vulnerability there, an uncertainty, and sometimes, he wondered if she was able to see that in herself.
And as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. "No, Tony, I do not want to talk about it."
"Well, I do," he replied. He knew bullying a trained assassin with four—five? he wasn't sure if she had rearranged the weaponry in the last couple of days—loaded guns seconds away wasn't the brightest idea, but he was fairly certain she wouldn't hurt him. At least, that's what he was hoping. "You've been avoiding me since Gibbs assigned me to check out engagement rings," he pointed out before putting on a falsely chipper smile. "It's just for the mission, Ziva. You don't really have to marry me."
"You are relieved by that, no?" she asked bitingly, and his smile dropped.
"What are you saying, Ziva? Marriage? We both know that we'd both need years of intensive therapy to bring either of us to that point," he said, trying to make a joke of it. When that fell through, he changed tactics. "What do you think this is for me, just another mission? I wouldn't be here eating cheese pizza and trying to remember if I have clean running socks in your apartment if that were true."
"So why are you here?"
"Because I want to be here," he said emphatically. She shook her head slightly, but he wasn't sure if it was in denial of his statement or for some other reason. She rose from the barstool she had been sitting on and began pacing the area between the kitchen and dining room.
"I had not been in Mossad long when Tali was killed," she finally said. "I was still in my training period, but I came home anyway. We were supposed to be mourning, but my father and I still completed my training exercises while I was home, when my mother was not around to see what we were doing. After my month of mourning was complete, I left and began to seek vengeance."
"An eye for an eye," he commented. She shook her head.
"I did not go after their teenagers, as they went after ours," she said bitterly. "I spent a year infiltrating Hamas and removing those with direct links to Tali's murder. I would have continued, to strike their very center, but my father pulled me out. He said I was done, that it was over, that I had killed those who killed my sister, and to stay in longer would only lead to my own death. He said I was no longer objective and it was time to go home." Her father's words, spoken to her a decade ago, seemed to echo with the words spoken by Tony in her dream much more recently.
"I was not supposed to be Metsada," she continued, her eyes focused on a memory far away. "When I was recruited for Mossad, it was to be in Intelligence, as my father had been, but an instructor took an interest in my talents and transferred me to Operations. Had he not done that, I never would have gone after Hamas after Tali's death."
"You wouldn't be the person you are now."
"No, I would not," she agreed. "But I sometimes wonder if I would have been a better person than I am now."
"There's nothing wrong with you, Ziva."
She smiled thinly to acknowledge the comment before continuing. "When I had left home after Tali's death, my parents were still in mourning. A sibling is expected to mourn for a month; a parent, for a year. When my father had called me home after my year with Hamas, I discovered that my mother had left Israel and returned to Russia, where she was born and still had family. She claimed otherwise, but I knew that Tali had always been her favorite—her 'little Natalia' was what she always called her—and after Tali's death, she found that she could not bring herself to stay. Of our family, Tali was the best of us, and when she was gone, there was nothing left. My mother needed someone to blame for that, and as she could not put a face to the man that killed Tali, she began to blame my father. She blamed him for not doing enough to prevent that attack, she blamed him for almost three decades of putting his career before his family." She took a deep breath and added, "She blamed him for taking her one remaining child and making me like him. She left because she could no longer deal with being married to a Mossad officer and could not face the fact that she helped to raise another." She didn't add what she was thinking, that in the ten years since her parents divorced and her mother moved to Russia, that she had only seen her twice, and once was during an anti-terrorism operation in Eastern Europe. She had taken a week-long break from the mission without a word as to her destination to Jen Shepard and caught the first train to Moscow. After only two days, the guilt that they both felt about the past was almost too oppressive for either to handle. "At first, I was angry with her for leaving, but gradually, I began to understand why she did it. It is not easy to live with a Mossad officer."
And Tony knew that that was what this was about. He rose from the barstool where he had been silently listening and stopped his partner in her pacing, wrapping his arms around her tightly. She didn't return the gesture, but neither did she pull away. They continued to stand there for an unknown length of time. "If you're trying to scare me away, you're going to have to do better than that," he finally said, his words somewhere between joking and serious, "because I'm not going anywhere."