A/N: Hi guys, thankyou so much for all the reviews. I'm trying really hard here to keep a balance in the storyline, so if I get it a bit wrong I'd appreciate you telling me so it can be fixed. :)

I'm also not sure if this is true to character. When I read over this for the first time, I was like 'What have I done!!!' so I made some changes and I hope they're okay. I also added a teensy bit of Tivaness at the bottom to keep it interesting. ;)

As always, reviews are really helpful. I don't own NCIS or any of its characters, but my birthday is coming up...

xx Lola

The rest of the day is spent in stony silence. Ziva won't look at him, and Gibbs and McGee keep glaring at him for upsetting both evidence and Abby. Even Ducky, who wouldn't even know how to hold a grudge, tells him off for being distant. He feels a paradox of sorts in that his own anger has been turned against him, and for that purpose disappears after lunch without so much as an explanation for his boss.

He drives to the ice-cream parlour where Lila went missing, and questions the owners who claim to never have seen the little girl. The taller one, however, a man named Alastair Murphy, does have in his possession a small bloodstained cardigan which he discovered in the large bins at the side of the building two days ago. Tony thanks him, takes the CCTV footage, places the cardigan in a plastic zip-lock bag and drives back to HQ.

He's never been a coward, but he bribes a probie agent on another team to take the cardigan down to the lab. He feels a fresh surge of guilt and grief when he hands the cardigan over, but feels thoroughly incapable of dealing with an upset Abby on top of an angry Ziva, who he can see just out of the corner of his eye. He tells Gibbs about the jacket being tested and walks back to his desk, feeling more alone than ever.

That night, he wakes up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily. She has just died, for the 38th night in a row, and he wonders silently how long it will take for him to crack completely.

He gets out of bed slowly, runs his hands through his hair and pads into the kitchen for a glass of water, reliving Day Zero a thousand times over in the back of his mind. He turns each version over, as though they might reveal a comfort on the flip side, but each is painfully blank.

He reaches for the tap, and accidentally knocks over a Tupperware container and a basting dish he didn't even know he had off the bench, and they land with a thud on his toes. He swears, and reaches down to prise it off his aching foot. There is a yellow post-it note on the lid, the handwriting of which he recognises immediately.

Tony,

I've removed all the little bones, and the marinade is in the smaller container. Put the chicken in the oven at 370 degrees for 45 minutes, sitting in the enclosed basting dish.

Gibbs does not accept apologies, but I do.

x Ziva

He stares at the note, just for a moment. Then, he carefully and deliberately sticks the note to the fridge. He takes the chicken out of the container. He pours the marinade evenly over the meat. He sets the oven to 375, so it will brown evenly.

She was a master of the roast. His mother, on Thanksgiving each year, had cooked a turkey that was either totally burnt or still raw in the middle, so he had learnt not to expect anything more from roast meat.

Then she entered his life, and her lamb roast was amazing. She taught him about meat thermometers, and marinade, and how long meat should be thawed for before even attempting to roast it. In return, he'd taught her about pasta, the wines that went with each type and the sauces he'd invented himself. She'd been totally surprised by the fact that he could cook at all, having only witnessed him gouging away at boxes of take away.

He cooked well. Just not as well as another foreign girl he knew.

He snaps. Reaching over and grabbing the phone from its cradle, he dials furiously and cups the phone to his cheek like a lifeline.

'Mmmm… Officer David.' She sounds exhausted, and he hesitates, just for a second, because he doesn't know how deep her anger will run when she finds out it's him.

'Ziva?'

'Tony?' She sounds much more alert. He can hear bedclothes being drawn back and her hair being swept up one-handed as she hold the phone in the other. 'Do you want me to come down there?'

He squeezes his eyes shut, imagining her, and the 39 times she's died. He imagines her smile and her hair and her yellow toothbrush which he threw out a week ago.

He has cleaned up crime scenes. He has seen dismembered remains, he has comforted grieving widows, he has waded through human decomposed slush to take photos of partially digested eyeballs. But when he picked up that toothbrush, placed it in the bin, it came close to the hardest thing he's ever done.

He opens his mouth, to tell her this, but finds no sound that will willingly come out.

There is a disconnecting beep on the other end of the line. He holds the phone to his ear, listening to the dead air.

She already knows.

She arrives at his apartment eight minutes later, by which time he has managed to clamber into his NCIS tracksuit. She picks the lock as always and she lets herself in, her black river of hair cascading down one side of her face. She swishes past him, avoiding eye-contact, in the same tracksuit he's donned for the occasion only about a million sizes smaller, and he is oddly comforted to find she's barefoot, like him. She briskly slots the chicken into the oven, pours herself a glass of wine, and comes to stand facing him, as he watches her over the kitchen counter.

He really has no clue what to say to her. Normal people don't eat chicken at 3am so idle chatter is out. She watches him, cool and unblinking.

The tension, hanging thick between them, is almost unbearable. The seconds tick by, marked by the oven timer, each beat adding a certain dimension of mutual angst. He wants to apologise for the day's incidents, to explain his anger, his grief, his guilt, but somehow cannot find the words.

So he does the first thing that occurs to him. By some inexplicable compulsion that overtakes him, he steps around the counter, opens his arms and folds her into them. She squawks, taken by surprise at the uncharacteristic gesture, but relaxes a little into his chest when it transpires he has no intention of letting go. He tips his face into her hair and squeezes her, pouring everything he wanted to say into her body heat, and, after a moment, when he feels her wrap her arms around his waist, he knows she feels his apology.

He releases her, exhales and feels at least some of the weight lift from his shoulders.

And he wonders how she does it.