Disclaimer:

"A Hard Day's Night", written by John Lennon and performed by The Beatles, was released on July 10, 1964 and recorded with the Abbey Road Studios, which is currently owned by the EMI Group Ltd.

Thomas Moore was Irish poet who lived from 1779 to 1852. "The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls" was published in "The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore".

And guess what? I still don't own NCIS, and I'm still not making any money from writing fanfiction!

A/N: I'm incredibly sorry that it took me so long to update this story. I knew I'd take a while since I'm currently quite busy with University and about to move abroad in a few weeks, but I would never have thought that I would actually take that long. While I will try to update sooner from now on, I'm not talking of a new-chapters-once-a-week kind of rhythm. But it will be quicker, I'm relatively sure of that.

Secondly, I would like to thank everybody who wrote a review to the first chapter. This being only my second story on this site, I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of reviews I got and I loved every single one of them! I'm somewhat worried that this chapter is going to be a disappointment compared to the previous one though, so I compulsively re-wrote vast parts of it over and over again. Sorry it's such a short one again, even though I intended to make it longer and have more happen. However, I've already gotten started on chapter 3 and hope that it won't take as long to finish.

I hope you like it, though!

Chapter Two: Common Purpose

Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,

The only throb she gives,

Is when some heart indignant breaks,

To show that still she lives!

[Thomas Moore, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls]

His head snapped up the moment he spotted Gibbs approaching the bullpen. Nevertheless his fingers kept typing almost frantically, just so he wouldn't have to give up whatever this was, even though he had already forgotten what he was doing exactly. His thoughts were nothing but a mess and Gibbs had left to interrogate Ziva with the instruction to find something. He hadn't found anything though, especially since a part of him was still hoping that none of this actually happened but would turn out to be nothing but a disturbing dream.

The long chain of random letters and numbers continued on the screen as his eyes and attention were fully on his boss. "Got anything new from her?"

A paper cup of freshly brewed coffee, only half of which had been drunk, was angrily tossed into the trashcan and more than enough of an answer.

He almost didn't dare asking, but at the same time couldn't resist. "That bad?"

The reply turned out exactly as gruff as expected. "Where's DiNozzo?"

"Back at the scene to oversee the FBI. Like... like you told him to, boss."

"Right", Gibbs mumbled, and sat down behind his desk where he angrily hit the keyboard until the computer in front of him woke up from the standbye mode in which he remained for most of the time. Once the monitor lit up he ceased from it though and began to pile up seemingly random files in front of him. "Right. So... what'd ya got, McGee?"

"Ehm... I don't know-"

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"T-there's nothing to start from, boss. We know barely anything at all except what we've been told, it's... it's not even our investiagion-"

"She's one of us so it is our own damn case to work!", Gibbs cut McGee off sharply as his subordinate helplessly stuttered, feeling as if he was digging a hole for himself. How do you explain that there's little you can do, when all you want to do is... something?

"That's not what I meant. We just don't have anything so there's... well, there really isn't much I could search for so there's nothing I found and I can't tell you anything except that there's nothing suspicious in her NCIS e-mail account. You... ehm, you've just talked to her, so what have you got?"

"She... she confessed." Gibbs' voice was much more calm now. It was worrying McGee immensely -way more than his boss' previous snubbing at him- because it meant that Gibbs wasn't as sure of himself. But Gibbs, he thought, followed his guts, his instincts. And instincts weren't doubtful.

"Well, she is... we could talk to her tomorrow again, when everyone's calmed down a little. Take a deep breath, give it some thought, you know? Maybe... the world's going to look different tomorrow and it will just... work out."

"You think giving it some thought can make this any better, McGee? You really think so?"

"Boss, she's... she's lying, you know that too, right? She's simply not telling us the truth-"

"Why would she lie to us?"

At -50°Celsius it's cold enough for the water vapor that emerges from our mouths as we breathe out to freeze in mid-air and to solidly fall to the ground. The sound that those tiny icycles make is known as the whisper of the stars. McGee inwardly shivered at the question and its dizzying understatement.

"So you really think she killed somebody? That's Ziva we're talking about, she's just not-"

He dried off mid-sentence and swallowed hard when another thought struck him. Gibbs and Ziva had both executed people for a living. When they had been instructed to take a life, they had carried out their jobs. That Ziva could have gone back to torturing people, even if it were innocent ones this time, was a terrible idea but -as much as it hurt to admit it- there were more unbelievable ones. McGee had never even given much thought to it before. Ninja-jokes and allusions to torture were... well, they had never been more than jokes; humorous scoffings among friends. It was easy to forget that all of them probably contained a quantum of truth, as all things did, and the truth was that people's lives had taken terrible ends.

So he decided that he didn't want to believe and deny all reasonable doubt. Screw objectivity, she was his friend. And his friends didn't commit such crimes.

"She was a killer, but that's different, right? People do that all the time. She has changed."

Roughly seven hours ago the world as he had known it had begun to go down the drain a little bit. Early in the morning -if not rather in the middle of the night as it hadn't been past 3:30 am- his cell phone had played A Hard Day's Night and it had been Gibbs, telling him the unbelievable. He had never heard of the Buckleys before, but learned that they had been a middle-class family of four that had been found in their apartment in Petworth, tortured and executed in a concerningly professional manner. It seemed that they had been ordinary people; the children attending their local elementary school at which their mother used to teach a sixth-grade class and coached the girl's softball team while her husband worked as the manager of a small deli close by. As for right now it seemed they had never done anything dangerous, neither been involved in illegal activities nor kept any secrets that usually killed people those ways... and yet their pup dog was the only survivor.

Why they had died the way they had remained unclear to the NCIS team, but it really wasn't any of their business.

The only reason why the FBI had eventually taken over the lead of the investigations from the MPDC was the element of torture and a possible connection to another execution in West Virginia three weeks ago. It was considered rather unlikely theory, but they weren't willing to take that risk for it had basically happened at their doorstep. They just wouldn't ignore this, and neither would the public.

But nothing -absolutely nothing at all- about this was an NCIS case. Except for one detail.

Ziva had been there. A neighbor had found the Buckley's door wide open and called the police. When the two MPDC officers had arrived, Ziva had already been waiting for them, identified herself and confessed to everything. The officers had arrested her and invoked a CSU team to secure the crime scene. Their fights with Special Agent Tobias C. Fornell over whose case this would be had been vain, and at the end of the day it had been this very investigator who had decided to call Vance, who had passed the news on to Gibbs.

Who had called McGee and Tony. Who still found themselves unable to believe that this was actually happening.

"I don't know", Gibbs eventually answered, "we'll see."

"Abby is checking the records on her cell phone and tries to trace every call she recieved in the last 24 hours. Most of them will be us, so let's hope she'll find something quickly."

Wait a moment, he told himself, beginning to question his own stream of thinking. Was that right? She won't find something... would be better, wouldn't it? But then again, it wouldn't clear Ziva off the suspicions either. The chances that they would dig up any evidence that suggested another perpetrator and disproved her confessions were rather low. How often did things like this happen, really?

McGee let out a long sigh and opened his e-mail account. "I'll check if she's made any progress yet."

When he received no answer, he looked up to see if Gibbs had heard the question, but his boss was already gone again.

Sources:

The Harp that Once Through tara's Halls: .de/ books?id=ENdgFkCgU3gC&printsec =frontcover&hl= de#v=onepage& q&f=false (page 174)

The Whisper of the Stars: basic-facts- about-russia/ climate/

A Hard day's Night: youtube watch?v= 70QfHtKdh_0