Disclaimer: Disclaimed
Monday, 21 December 2015
The next morning, Ziva prepared herself for the day like she would for any other day when she wasn't scheduled to interrogate the man who had almost killed her. She got up before sunrise and went for a quick half-hour run, then came home just as Tony was wandering around the kitchen in his regular morning daze, and looking like he wanted to eat something. She often found him like this on the mornings they were both at home, standing in front of the open fridge in his pajamas, staring at the contents without really seeing them, and clearly willing a pound of crispy bacon and scrambled eggs to magically appear in front of him. Most days, Ziva met the sight with a semi-affectionate eye roll. Every now and then, she met it with a sigh of irritation and a few curt words about wasting electricity. This morning, her nerves over what the day was destined to bring her twisted around in her stomach and head until all she saw in him was a cure for her restless energy. She reached for Tony's hand just as he reached for the milk, and after a few mumbled morning pleasantries she led him to a dining chair, straddled his lap, and then (happily) proceeded to do 95 per cent of the work.
The act soothed only about 50 per cent of her anxieties.
Later, after they had both eaten, showered and mostly dressed, Ziva felt his eyes on her as she leaned over the bathroom sink to brush on some foundation. She turned her head to see him leaning against the doorframe and looking at her knowingly. His tie hung open over his mostly unbuttoned dress shirt and his hair was still a little damp, and when she took a deeper breath she could smell his cologne over the cosmetics in her hands. She felt warmth travel between her legs again, and she considered coming on to him for the second time that morning. But that knowing look on his face stopped her. It wasn't an I know you're thinking lusty thoughts look. It was an I know where that came from and I want to talk about it look. In the past, the look would probably have annoyed her. But now she consciously considered where he was coming from, accepted it as one of the ways that Tony showed love, and got over it.
She had come a long way in the last two years.
Ziva met the look by leaning over to press a kiss to his still-soft lips, before returning to her place in front of the mirror. "I am okay," she told him.
"You were actually on fire this morning," he countered, drawing a smile from her. "And I know you're 'okay'." He repeated the word as if it were in quotation marks. "But can we have a quick talk about our game plan here?"
Ziva brushed some powder on her nose and eyed her reflection. On impulse, she decided she needed harder eye makeup today. Because eyeliner would clearly put the fear of God into Eddie Hertzog. "Game plan is to go in there, rough him up, make him cry, make him confess, and then perhaps accidentally-on-purpose stab him with a smuggled in toothbrush that I have fashioned into a shiv."
Tony took two steps to stand in front of the mirror beside her. She enjoyed the smirk on his face that conveyed his amusement, admonishment and affection all at once. "Premeditation, huh? I promise you I won't breathe a word of this conversation at your trial."
Ziva snapped her compact shut and tossed it in a drawer. "You are a good man, Tony."
"Failing that," he said, turning to lean back against the bathroom counter, "what's the other plan?"
She watched herself in the mirror as she tried to make up her mind. "Mossad Ziva," she said. "Closed off. Aloof. As scary as possible."
Tony nodded slowly, and she got the impression that he wasn't completely on board with that. "McGee's going with you?" he checked.
"Yes, but not to hold my hand," she said warningly. "I do not need—"
"I didn't say you did," Tony cut in, but as gently as possible.
Ziva selected a black eyeliner pencil from the drawer and uncapped it, but her eyes drifted to Tony. "I am not one of his victims," she told him.
Tony shook his head, not needing clarification on who him was. "You've never been anyone's victim, Ziva."
It was what she wanted him to say, and surely he knew it. He probably even believed it. So why did she suddenly feel like she was on the verge of tears instead of ready to take on the world? She recapped her eyeliner without using it and swept her hair out of her face.
"I do not know how I am going to feel when I see him again," she admitted. "Probably angry. Disgusted. And I can deal with that. I am familiar and comfortable with those feelings."
"Yeah, well you share a bathroom with me. Angry and disgusted should be second nature," Tony said, doing his best to keep her emotion from snowballing. And God, she loved him for it.
"I do not want to be scared," she told him. "I was scared in those moments when we fought, and he had the upper hand. Terrified, Tony."
"I know," he said softly.
"And yesterday when Charlie Fields was taking Gibbs through the way he got on top of Bonnie and started squeezing her neck, and how it tired him out because her death was taking so much longer than he expected it to, I started feeling that fear again." She glanced at herself in the mirror and was startled to see how shell-shocked she looked. "When I had that nightmare the other night, I felt that fear again." She shook her head and refocused her eyes on Tony. "I hate fear, Tony. I hate it. It is useless."
"It's not useless," he said. "Not always. It's there to make you rethink what you're doing and to keep you safe."
"You think I should rethink interviewing Eddie?" she asked.
Tony looked at her quietly for a moment, his lips pursed as he thought about how to respond. He had tried to talk her out of it the day before, and had made it clear that he was desperately uncomfortable with the idea of her going anywhere near the guy who'd left her unconscious and bleeding on his kitchen floor. In fact, she wouldn't be surprised if he had put in a sneaky phone call to Gibbs last night after he'd heard of her plans, and tried to get the go-ahead to interrogate Eddie himself with McGee, instead of letting Ziva go. (He better not have, so help her God. But she would not be surprised if he had.) But ultimately, she knew he would support her on it.
"No," he finally said, but with a tightness to his voice that spoke to his worry. "I think it's important for you to face him again. Because this case…it's dredged up all this stuff you thought you'd dealt with. Stuff I thought I'd dealt with too. And it's sucked away some of that power you thought you had over it."
As soon as he said them, Tony's words hit home, and hard. She had lost her power over the situation. That was why she had found this case so difficult. That was why she felt so disappointed in Bonnie. It wasn't disappointment, but resentment. She resented that by being killed through no fault of her own, Bonnie had left behind a situation that had exposed the lingering vulnerability Ziva felt and had tried to hide. Exposed that she didn't have the control over her life and her fate that she thought she did. Exposed her flaws, and the mistakes she was prone to making over and over again. Exposed the fact for all to see that sometimes things happened in Ziva's life that scared her almost to death.
Self-awareness settled over her, and she looked at Tony with raised eyebrows and a shrug. "Yes," she said simply.
"So, take it back," Tony told her. "Go interview him, show him he's not so smart. He's not so powerful. And make sure he knows that he's going to rot in jail for the rest of his life." He paused. "Then you can stab him with a toothbrush fashioned into a shiv."
"It is what Mossad Ziva would do," she said with a thin smile.
Tony slid his arm around her waist and pulled her close enough to him to kiss her shoulder. "You don't need to be Mossad Ziva. My Ziva is more than capable of handling this. Look, McGee's going to be there, right?" he said, and she recognized the change in his voice that he got when he went all Team Leader on a situation. She kind of liked it. "Talk to him in the car on the way over. He won't need you to tell him—he's going to be all over this already—but say it anyway. Say that if you get too angry, and you probably will, you'll give him a subtle signal and he can take over the interview until you calm down. Just let him have your back, and you'll be fine."
Ziva nodded, letting his pep talk boost her mood and fill her with the confidence she needed. "Yes," she said. "I will."
"And then call me when you're done," he added quickly.
She smirked and started buttoning up the top three buttons of his shirt. "You want to make sure I am not being held for murder?"
"Partly."
She wrapped her hands around the ends of his tie and leaned in to kiss him. "You are a good man," she told him again, with far more sincerity this time.
"I have my moments."
Ziva lifted a hand to brush her fingers through the flecks of grey forming at his temple. In contrast, one of Tony's hands slid down to her butt. "Thank you for having my back," she said. "I do not know why this particular encounter has stuck with me so much. Dozens of people before Eddie had tried to kill me. I do not understand what made this time so…" She searched for the right description. "Special is the wrong word, but…"
"Memorable?" he offered.
"Something like that."
"Because, Ziva, it happened at a pretty vulnerable time in your life," he said. "Your dad had just died, Gibbs was gone, and you'd quit your job, which had gone a long way towards defining who you were as a person. You and me were going through this really, really weird period after that time in Berlin and the crash and the Israel thing."
"Adam," she interjected, inexplicably looking for another opportunity to feel bad about what she had done in a moment of despair.
"I'm not trying to fight," he began, but Ziva shook her head.
"I know."
"Your life was upside down," he summed up. "And you and me and McGee were all trying to work out who the hell we were and what we were good for. What happened with Eddie just amplified it and made it a whole lot more confusing. That's why it's the one that really bothers you. Because you were already doubting that you were going to be okay for the rest of your life, and Eddie came along and essentially told you that no, you weren't. But he was wrong. Because you are."
Like they had before, his words hit home and left Ziva amazed that she hadn't seen it before when it was all so simple. Or maybe she was simply amazed that she had found someone who just got her like Tony did.
"Tony, sometimes I think that you were really a psychology major," she told him.
Tony kissed her temple. "I told you before, sweetcheeks. You're not so complicated."
Ziva remembered that distant conversation (make that 'argument'). It was one of the hardest the two of them had ever had, and probably the most terrifying. But it had paved the way for what they had now. Tony was right; sometimes, fear was necessary to confront. Because if you didn't, you couldn't move on to better days. And God knew that her days were much better now.
"Do you know what I find most impressive about you now?" she asked.
"Tell me."
"That the whole time you were delving into what is going on in my head and explaining it for me in a way I can understand, you did not stop squeezing my butt."
Tony gave her a wide smile, and squeezed her butt one more time. "And you say I'm no good at multitasking."
…
Prison life was not known for its positive health impact upon the incarcerated. Drug abuse was rife, nutrition was inadequate and stress levels were high. People went in for a five-year stint but came out looking like they had aged ten. It was common, and Eddie Hertzog had not been immune. When he was convicted of stalking, break and enter and attempted murder two years ago he looked fit, healthy and was well presented. The lightness of youth touched his features, and he carried the confidence of a man who never considered that his life would not go exactly the way he had planned.
When Ziva sat down across from him at Greenvale Federal Penitentiary, Eddie looked like a different man. He had aged faster than he should have. His eyes weren't as bright, his complexion was sallow and spotted, and his hair was longer and lank. There was a new sliver of a scar on his chin. He would still be handsome if he had an intensive session with a beauty therapist, and if you didn't know what was beneath his skin and what he had done. But he looked harder. Angrier. And, if it were possible, even more arrogant. Quite the feat for someone who was stuck in jail.
He did, however, brighten considerably upon seeing Ziva—a fact that made her skin crawl, but which she chose not to dwell on.
"Well, look who's here to see me!" he exclaimed jovially. "And it's not even my birthday. Although, Christmas is just a few days away. What a wonderful present." He clutched his chest as he kept up his long lost friend act. "It's good to see you, Ziva. You look well." He paused and eyed her critically. "A little fat, perhaps. But I guess that's what happens when you get old."
Ziva's eyes slid over to McGee, who was leaning against the wall in the interview room. McGee rolled his eyes, and she barely raised her eyebrows in acknowledgement. Eddie Hertzog was, without a doubt, once of the biggest douchebags they'd ever had to deal with.
She returned a withering gaze to Eddie. "Are you done?" she asked impatiently.
"No," Eddie said, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. The chains that connected his handcuffs to the belt around his waist rattled against the tabletop, but Eddie clearly wasn't interested in being polite. In fact, he looked like he was gearing up to have more fun than he'd probably had since being arrested.
He looked across at McGee and gave him a 'what's up?' head nod. "Hey, Tim. Glad you could stop by as well. But it's not a proper Christmas celebration without all of you here." He returned his unsettling gaze to Ziva. "Where's your boyfriend, kitten?"
"Special Agent David," she corrected firmly.
"Special Agent?" he echoed, and sat back in his seat again, as if in awe. "Well, it sounds like congratulations are in order. Which agency?"
"You know which one." She, Tony and McGee had been going through the process of being reinstated when Eddie's case went to trial.
"Your old one, huh? That's great. Good people there." He lowered his voice. "Although, I hear their hiring standards have dropped. They take any old hag now. Present company excluded, of course." He gave her a wink.
"Well, please tell me who you are including," Ziva encouraged.
"No one in particular," he replied, as his arrogant smile returned to his face. He was lying, and he knew she knew he was lying. And he loved it. "It's just something I heard."
Ziva leaned over the table. She had been worried that she would not react well to seeing him again, but his attempts at intimidation were so pathetic that she was finding every one of his comments gave her back a bit more of that power she was looking for. So much so that she felt like she could actually make fun of him. "It sounds like you boys in here like to gossip."
Eddie shrugged. "It passes the time."
"Special Agent McGee and I have been gossiping with someone you might know," she told him. "Charlie Fields?"
Eddie's lip curled in a smile. "Rings a bell."
As Ziva watched him, she realized that he wasn't in the least bit worried about what he surely knew was going to happen, and that he had probably accepted long ago that he'd be found out for his involvement in Bonnie's death. She doubted he would confess outright—he didn't possess the kind of compassion and empathy that would require—so she would have to come at this a different way.
"It should ring a bell," she said. "He was your cellmate for a year. And we all know how easily you get attached to people."
He shrugged again. "I'm a passionate guy. What can I say?"
"Really?" She rested her chin on her hand and cocked her head to the side. "Tell me more about this passionate relationship you had with Charlie."
That hit a nerve. His eyes narrowed. "Watch it, kitten."
"Thank you for the warning," she drawled, and then got them back on track. "Eddie, I am sorry to say that we did not make the trip here to celebrate Christmas. I am Jewish, and McGee already has plans. But we would like to talk some more about Charlie Fields."
"Cheating on your boyfriend, kitten?" He made a tutting noise. "I'm disappointed. Thought you were better than that."
"Oh, he's very encouraging of my current interest in Mr Fields."
"I didn't get the vibe that Tony swung that way."
"Bonnie Stewart is dead, Eddie," she cut in, as blunt as possible.
But Eddie didn't even flinch. "Oh," he said, sounding bored now. "Well, it happens."
"It does happen, yes," Ziva said. "In cases of murder."
"Murder, huh?" Eddie repeated, and then sucked on his teeth thoughtfully. "You sure she didn't kill herself? She seemed pretty crazy."
McGee interjected for the first time, but didn't change his position. "You're the one sitting in prison for stalking her," he pointed out.
Eddie looked annoyed by the interruption. "Excuse me, Tim, but I think you'll find that I only got a couple of months for my alleged stalking of that stuck up bitch."
"There's nothing alleged about it," McGee pointed out. "You were tried and convicted of the crime."
"No one asked you, Tim," Eddie said dismissively. "And the point remains that I'm still here because things got a little too rough during play time with Ziva."
Ziva didn't take her eyes off Eddie, but she heard and felt McGee push himself off the wall and come to stand behind her. She knew he was there to take over—as per Tony's suggestion, they had discussed signals in the car—but she didn't need it. She had this. The control was all hers.
"Yes. Things did seem to get out of hand in that first moment when you tried to punch me," she said conversationally. This wasn't getting to her. She wasn't worried. It turned out that that thought of the boogeyman was much worse than facing him.
Eddie clicked his tongue. "Ziva, Ziva, Ziva. Always placing the blame on someone else. I'll forgive your lapse in memory over the way it began. You did take a few knocks to the head. Actually, more than a few, wasn't it? Let's see, there was the fridge first." He paused to chuckle. "Man, the thunk noise that your head made on impact was perfection—"
"That's enough," McGee barked, and Ziva thought that Gibbs and Tony would be impressed by his tone. She certainly was.
"Your cell mate with whom you had such a passionate relationship has admitted to killing Bonnie Stewart," Ziva told Eddie. She was unwilling to play into this anymore. She was running the risk of allowing him to have too much fun.
"What a coincidence."
"It was not a coincidence," Ziva charged. "He killed her on your order."
"Now who's crazy?"
"Charlie already told us that you directed him to kill her."
"Well, Charlie's not a very nice guy," Eddie returned. "That's why he was in jail."
"Charlie is not a nice guy," Ziva agreed. "But he strikes me as very loyal. And I think you saw that. I think you saw that he was a guy who would be easy to manipulate—especially by someone as practiced in manipulation as you—and you took advantage of it."
"Are you flirting with me, kitten?"
She didn't bother acknowledging the stomach-turning comment. "Here is what I think happened. Somehow, you found out that Bonnie had joined NCIS. You knew I was already there, and the idea that Bonnie might follow in my footsteps, and the two women who beat you and exposed you for the controlling, manipulative and disgusting fraud that you are might work together, made you crazy." She paused as she felt heat rise in her face. Perhaps she wasn't as in control of this as she thought. She had to starve her emotion, because the moment she fed it, she started giving back power to Eddie.
Ziva took a steady breath, and brought some of her old Mossad self back to the table—the part that was able to compartmentalize everything. When she continued, she was calm again. "I think the idea of Bonnie and I together removed the last bit of pride you had, and it enraged you. Perhaps you wanted to take it out on me the most. You said it yourself, our little fight made up most of your sentence. But I put up a fight." She smiled as she allowed herself to feel a bit of pride at her most natural instinct. "If I had not had one arm tied up, I would have put you in the hospital. And you know it."
"Tough talk for a silly little girl," Eddie baited, but Ziva wasn't having any of it.
"You saw Bonnie as the softer touch," Ziva said. "And she was the one who rejected you to begin with. The one who started all this. You wanted to ruin her life like you think she ruined yours, and stop her from succeeding. So you got Charlie Fields on your good side. Fed him whatever lines he needed to hear to make him think that you were someone he needed to look out for. Then, right before he was released and when you had his trust, you gave him information on how to find her and told him to scare her. To torture her and play with her, make her beg for her life before killing her anyway. Because you hated her that much. You hated that she might be happy and successful. And in the end, it was probably not even about revenge. You just wanted to win."
Eddie flinched at that, his face twisting into a grotesque scowl for just a moment before it was gone, and his arrogant smile was back in place. He didn't have a witty (or pathetic) comment ready to return, and the hair on the back of Ziva's neck stood up. They had him.
"You told Charlie to strangle her," she went on, feeling McGee beginning to pace back and forth behind her in a show of their confidence. "You have probably been fantasizing about that level of intimacy. When you tried to strangle me, you realized how close you had to be to the person. You realized how physical it is. How you can literally see the life draining from a person's eyes. You have been fantasizing about it."
Eddie's smile grew before he could control it, but he pulled it back quickly.
"You knew you would not get the chance to do it yourself for years, though. And perhaps you were too scared to do it yourself," she suggested. "Bonnie was a trained federal agent. What if she fought back? What if she kicked your ass? What if she showed you yet again how pathetic you are? So you convinced Charlie to do it for you. You made him feel like if he did it, it would make you brothers for life. He just had to prove himself to you. So he went ahead and did it."
Eddie didn't deny it, but his eyebrows twitched upwards in what seemed like confirmation. Part of her wished he would argue with her or give her something back while she was on such a winning streak. But victories were victories, and it was better to have a case wrapped up neatly and with little fanfare than it was to risk it with drama just for the thrill of it.
She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs casually before smiling knowingly. "The problem, Eddie, is that the weakness in Charlie that made him the perfect candidate to carry out your dirty work is the same weakness that made him fold under interrogation. He squealed and told us everything." She paused and lifted her eyebrows in challenge. "What do you have to say to that?"
A full five seconds of silence followed as Eddie stared at her with arrogance still shining in his eyes. Ziva could tell he was weighing up whether to confess or plead ignorance, but she had a feeling about which way he would go. His ego was too strong to let someone else take the credit for his work.
He leaned forward, inclining his head towards her as his chains clacked against the table again. "I won," he finally said, calling back to Ziva's earlier comment.
Ziva controlled the overwhelming satisfaction she felt from those two words, merely allowing her smile to grow by a millimeter as McGee stopped pacing and stood beside her.
"Gee, that sounds like a confession."
"It does," Ziva said with a nod. "But you are wrong, Eddie. Because now you will spend the rest of your life in here. You are done."
That didn't seem to come as any surprise to Eddie. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Bitch is still dead."
And that was something that would bother Ziva forever. But she would do her best to do right by Bonnie now. "Well, I'm not," she said. "And as long as I am alive, I will be at every parole hearing you manage to get and make sure you rot to death in here."
…
It was almost 2100 when Ziva dropped her completed report of her interview with Eddie on Gibbs' desk. The team leader looked up at her in the dim light of the bullpen and arched a single eyebrow.
"My version of today's events," she told him.
Gibbs nodded, and then gestured at her to take a seat. Ziva blew out a breath as she turned to retrieve the closest chair—McGee's—and then rolled it back to position it beside Gibbs' desk. He scooted his own chair a little closer as she took a seat, and gave her a searching look as she tried to massage her own tight shoulder.
"Tense?" Gibbs asked.
Ziva nodded, then shook her head. "Only from typing for several hours. Not over Eddie."
"You've seemed more like yourself this afternoon," he commented.
Ziva dropped her hand and let her shoulders slump. She doubted that there was a significant change in her mood from yesterday to today, but supposed that Gibbs would be able to pick up on the slightest of changes. He was a trained federal agent. And a close friend—substitute father, at times—who had known her for ten years. "I am just relieved that we were able to make arrests."
"And that you were right."
She gave him a wan smile. "That is a bonus. But it would not have been necessary."
Gibbs tilted his head back as he gave her a silent laugh, and then met her eyes again. He turned serious. "I'm proud of you," he told her, shocking her and making her throat quickly close up. "You stuck to your guns and listened to your gut."
The sentiment was sincerely appreciated. Praise from Gibbs always was. But she had to quibble. "Really?" she asked, cocking her head to the side.
"Even if it was a pain in the ass," he added.
That sounded more like it, but Ziva didn't take offence. "I see. But that is not what you wanted to talk to me about."
A smile ghosted across his face. It seemed she knew him as well as he knew her. "Rule number ten. Don't make it personal."
"I thought it was never get personally involved in a case."
Gibbs waved a hand between them. "Same thing."
Ziva crossed her legs and rested her elbow on his desk. "That was somewhat unavoidable with this case."
Gibbs bobbed his head from side to side as he weighed that up. "Yup. But there's a line."
"Do you think I crossed it?"
The way he hesitated told her that he thought she had. But, for reasons she didn't understand, he went easy on her. "Came close. Have you thought about talking to Man Hands?"
She frowned at him with disappointment. "I really wish that you and Tony would stop having your secret little chats about me."
"Haven't talked to him," Gibbs said.
She watched him closely for signs of deception, but decided he was probably telling the truth. And looking out for her. She backed down. "Yes, I have thought about it," she said tiredly. "I will make an appointment." If the two people who were closest to her were telling her the same thing, she had to accept that perhaps they were on to something. "In the meantime, I am talking to Tony."
Gibbs gave her a single nod. "Good. Take it from me. You don't want to keep things bottled up."
"You always keep things bottled up," she had to point out.
The smile was back. "Yeah. You want to be like me?"
She pursed her lips as she thought about how to respond. In some ways, yes, she did. In others, such as the emotional baggage he carried like a 500-pound weight on his back, no, she absolutely didn't. She decided not to answer the question directly. "Tony has been…well, exactly as you would expect him to be. I am lucky to have him."
"Don't take him for granted," he advised her, softening his tone considerably.
The lump returned to Ziva's throat as she thought about her best friend and partner. "I won't."
Gibbs nodded, and then retrieved his badge and gun from his top drawer. He leaned over to turn off his computer monitor, then stood and clipped his gun to his belt. Taking the hint, Ziva got up and rolled McGee's chair back to his desk, then crossed back to hers. She turned back when she felt Gibbs' hand on her shoulder.
"Go home," he told her, then leaned in to press a light, fleeting kiss to her temple. "Good work, Ziva."
She smiled at his back as he walked away to the elevators. "Good night, Gibbs."
She followed his lead and gathered her badge and gun, then shouldered her backpack. She checked that her desk drawers were locked, then turned off her desk lamp and headed to the elevator at the other end of the floor. She rode down one floor, and then walked through the bullpen, nodding at the smattering of other agents around on her way to the group of desks that was almost directly below Team Gibbs'. Tony was still at his desk, making handwritten notes by the light of his desk lamp. He was the only one in his team still around, and she wondered if that meant that while she had been closing Bonnie Stewart's case, he had made a breakthrough on his case of the disembodied feet.
He looked up as she approached, and the lamplight cast shadows on his face that made him look even more tired that he probably was. His face lifted when he saw her, though, and the sight made her chest grow warm. Some days, she couldn't understand how he could always look so happy to see her. But then she remembered that she was always happy to see him, and she added it to her list of blessings.
"Hey," he said softly, even though there weren't too many people around to disturb. There was something about working in the dark by lamplight that just made you speak in a hush.
"Where is your team?" she asked.
"Sent them home."
"Did you close your case?"
"Not yet. We're close."
Ziva nodded and looked around. "Why are you still here?"
He smiled. "Waiting for you."
"I was not sure you would be here."
Tony shrugged. "It's a good bet."
As she had done upstairs, Ziva commandeered another agent's chair and rolled it over to Tony's desk. She placed it right beside and facing his, and then took a seat before leaning over to give him a warm, lingering kiss.
Tony put his hand on her thigh and gave her a proud smile. "So, Eddie confessed?"
"More or less," she said. "He has been charged. Charlie Fields has been charged. Bonnie's mother has been notified." She paused as she remembered the tears she had cried over the phone when Ziva called her earlier in the evening. "She is relieved."
"Yeah." He watched her silently for a moment. "You look like my Ziva again."
She had to chuckle. Sometimes Tony and Gibbs were too alike. "How so?"
He waggled his eyebrows. "You got your mojo back."
Ziva nodded thoughtfully. "He was pathetic, in the end. I am glad I got to see that."
"McGee said you directed the interview like a badass."
She chuckled and shook her head, and squeezed his hand. She didn't want to think about the interview or Eddie Hertzog anymore for the night. "Well, now I want to direct a bottle of wine into my stomach, have a bath and take you to bed. Because today was a good day, but I want to think about something else."
Tony pointed to himself. "You know, I can help you out with all three of those things."
Ziva gave him a wide smile, and gave silent thanks for him. "And that is why you are my favorite person."
I owe many of you replies for your wonderful comments. My apologies for falling behind on that again, and my thanks to all of you who insist that you're still here and will hang around for the final few chapters. You're all incredibly good looking and talented and smart.
That more or less wraps up the case(s), but there is still stuff on the relationship side of things in both timelines to address. I hope you enjoy it.