A/N: Okay, change of plans. Some nasty stuff happened while I was in Spain and I had to cut my research trip short, detoured for a spell in Israel to recuperate and came back home prematurely. Bright side? Quicker updates.
I was a little conflicted with this chapter…because originally, Mike Franks was meant to be one of the six character deaths I set out to explore, and on my old hard drive (when I was first outlining this story back in 2012) I actually wrote most of the Mike Franks chapter, but it got lost somewhere in the data transfer. And honestly, even though I found a decent angle for it, I was uncomfortable with that particular chapter because I didn't feel comfortable with the character. And the points that I was meaning to make about Franks' death were actually very similar to points I already made in the chapter about Jenny.
So instead…I decided to swap out Franks for another character here. Now, because I try to keep my fics consistent and compatible, some of what I've written here is a reiteration of points that I made in other fics (namely The Lances Unlifted, Becoming, and The Conjugates…and, okay, Hocus Pocus to a much lesser extent) but I made a serious effort to take some new insights that would vibe with the overarching theme of this particular fic.
This chapter is also a lil' different because it's now dealing with characters that were introduced/died during the series rather than before. It's also just different in general. Kinda choppy. Not my best.
Anyhow…enjoy!
And thanks for all the reviews!
For a month before the mandated therapy began, she would awaken at the tail end of the same dream: a resounding gunshot piercing the muddied window, the lurch of his skull upon impact, the sound of his body falling to the ground. A strange, unbidden wave of grief. Shocked silence despite the scuffle.
And a fleeting, unwarranted kind of envy at the fact that she wasn't the one who had pulled the trigger – wasn't the one who had killed Saleem Ulman.
She would awaken with grief for a man she hated.
She would remember how cold his hands had been; how mockingly tactile and hard. She would remember the sloppy coldness of his saliva. The look in his eyes like a dead thing being brought back to life. Knowing that she had been reduced to a simple distraction from a life of hate and boredom; something for him to kindle, to hurt, to control.
Something to do.
And how badly she wished she could slide a knife into his ribs.
As if unaware of Ziva's extensive and unfortunate experience as a victim of torture, the woman sitting beside her in her group therapy session misread Ziva's quietly revolted expression for guilt; patted her softly on the shoulder and crooned: "We always know that we shouldn't blame ourselves for what happened, but we do it anyway, don't we?"
Ziva's jaw tightened.
"I do not blame myself for being tortured."
And she'd wanted so very badly to add: I blame myself for having missed the chance to kill him.
The sun had barely moved above the horizon, and the asphalt on the edge of the turnpike was already hot enough to scathe her knees as she kneeled. She clicked her tongue and rocked back onto her heels. The weight of the camera in her hands seemed cruel. Crouching back beneath the shade of a pine tree, she snapped another photo of the roadside.
She sensed Tony's approach and had to control herself to keep from grimacing. It was still too early to deal with him.
"What're you doing?"
She replied without looking up: "Photographing the scene."
"The scene is over there. You got a telephoto lens on that thing?"
"There may be evidence here. I am simply being thorough."
He clucked his tongue and peered around at the tree.
"Oh," he said, a grin in his voice. "I get it. You're keeping to the shade. Very sneaky, David."
She shot him an exasperated look, nearly pouting.
"It is too hot."
"Aren't you from the desert?"
"I'm from Israel," she corrected. "It is not all one big desert. It snows in Jerusalem, you know."
Tony's jaw twitched as he slid his gaze to the far side of the road, where the body of Natalie Gardner lay still and badly mutilated in the scorching morning light.
"Eaten by wolves on the Connecticut Turnpike," he mumbled, shuddering.
Not far away, McGee cut him a look.
"Raccoons, Tony. She was eaten by raccoons." he said.
"And in Virginia," Ziva added for good measure.
Tony ignored them.
In a thicket of weeds and dead grass not far from Natalie Gardner's corpse, a glint of metal caught Ziva's eye. She snapped a photo and, careful not to sting herself on the thistles which lined the field, maneuvered her hand into the space and retrieved the remains of a silver dog tag. The bottom edge was jagged and bent; the eyelet and all the metal that had once surrounded it was gone. But the name, though caked now with mud, stood out clearly: Vincent Landing.
Most of the patients in her therapy group were soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan; a few older ones who had been civilians in Kuwait and Rwanda and Sudan; a woman from Somalia; another one taken by soldiers in the open streets of Guinea; a veteran of the army who had been taken from a training base, beaten, and tortured by Abkhaz rebels near the Kodori Gorge.
She had been asked if she would have preferred an all-female support group, in light of the details of her torture, but she primly declined.
She had nothing to be ashamed of.
At least nothing to do with that.
It wasn't long before they'd managed to track down a home address. While Ducky was still working with the body down in the morgue, Gibbs ordered Tony and Ziva to check on the whereabouts of their only suspect, Vincent Landing.
"On it, boss," Ziva had blurted before Tony could get a word in.
Tony shot her a surprised and dejected look, and she smiled sweetly back at him.
"Sorry," she said. "Go ahead, Tony."
He looked at Gibbs.
"On it, boss."
She spoke once to the man who'd been tortured by Abkhaz rebels. He rarely opened up during their sessions. But she had bumped into him, once, while pouring coffee, and as she moved to apologize he simply smiled, brow knit, eyes cast elsewhere, as if his attention were split. She shrugged it off.
PTSD does funny things to people.
In group, he occasionally gave details of his captivity in blunt, emotionless diatribes.
"I thought I heard somebody was comin' in to save me," he would say. "But it was just more of the same. Guys with sacks on their heads, the eyes cut out. Maybe not men. Maybe monsters. Anyway, they'd put a gas mask over my head and seal off the tube so I couldn't breathe. My hands cuffed under the chair. The pressure inside'd get so bad I thought my eyes were gonna pop right outta their sockets. They'd be laughin', sayin' why ain't he breathin'? And then I die and they take off the mask and I come around again. Them devils still in the room, just laughin'."
His tonelessness sent shivers down her spine.
There was a pair of sun-bleached antlers fixed with chord to the grill of the truck when they arrived at the address they'd been given. She stared at it as they headed up the driveway and felt a strange tug of recognition that she couldn't quite place – she was sure she'd seen the truck before. It unsettled her that she couldn't remember where.
But then they were knocking on his door, and before she'd had a chance to prepare herself, Vincent Landing was standing across from them, staring at her in calm, controlled surprise.
The man from her sessions. The man who'd been beaten by Abkhaz.
"Ziva," he said, sounding shocked, but oddly cheery. "What're you doing here?"
She hesitated for only a moment. Only a moment, but she could feel Tony shifting nervously beside her. She couldn't bring herself to speak and in the silence, Tony stepped up, flashing his NCIS badge by way of explanation.
"Vincent Landing?" he asked.
Vincent nodded.
"We're with NCIS. Seems your tag was found with a corpse on Shafer Road."
She wondered if it was the heat or Vincent's familiarity with her that made Tony blunt. She realized with a jolt that she didn't much care either way.
"Oh?" Vincent replied.
Tony scoffed.
"Yeah, 'oh.'"
"Well I had to hitch up that way about a week ago. My truck got laid up and I had to get into town. It could've fallen off then, I guess."
"Would you mind coming with us back to headquarters? Just to ask a few questions? Maybe get that tag back?"
He furrowed his brow, shot Ziva a blank look.
"Keep the tag. It don't mean nothin' much to me. But yeah, guess I can come along for just a bit."
Saleem had once pushed iron nails up under her fingernails, meticulous and bored, mentioning off-handedly that iron was a good tool for expelling evil, and he believed that there was still much evil in her.
She wanted nothing more than to press those nails into his eyeballs.
"So…" Tony started once they'd returned to the car. Landing was sitting quietly in the backseat, distractedly watching the road flash by outside his window.
She considered playing dumb, but she knew it wouldn't fly with him. She rolled her window down an inch and took a breath of the cool air running across its frame; really, it was too hot for her to have the patience for pretense.
"I barely know him," she whispered, at length.
"Boyfriend?" he asked. His face pinched up for a moment as he said it; it was only brief, but she noticed.
She shot him an indignant look.
"I said that I barely know him, Tony."
"Right," he said. "Sorry."
They lapsed into silence again for a beat.
"He is…" she started, glancing in the rearview mirror to be sure that Landing wasn't listening. "I know him…barely…we have spoken before."
"He seemed pretty happy to see you."
"Will this be a problem?"
"I think it depends on how you know him."
"I do not think that I can tell you. It's private."
"Oh." He looked hurt.
"It's not my privacy I wish to protect, Tony. It's his."
"They'd put a slab of wood in my mouth and saw it back and forth so that it sheared my teeth," Landing would say in therapy, "and they'd tell me they were sawing wolf canines."
Gibbs figured it out almost immediately. Landing knew Ziva; Landing was in a support group for victims of war crimes.
Gibbs caught her in the elevator. She shouldn't have been surprised by his intuition, should have been less surprised when he hit the hold button on the lift. But things had changed since Somalia. She found she scarcely cared.
Without prompting, she elaborated on the question that she knew he'd ask:
"Landing is in a support group for victims of…for former prisoners of war. He was held captive in Georgia last year. That is how I know him."
Gibbs refused to meet her eyes.
"From the support group," he said.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"About a year, on and off. It was a requirement for my continued employment at NCIS."
"That's all?"
"I barely know him."
It was clear from the start that there was something wrong with Landing, and Ducky was pulled in to watch through the glass as Ziva interrogated the man.
"You see how he hesitates?" Ducky mused.
"They always hesitate, Duck."
"But he's listening. Look at him. He's trying to sift through the voices, to determine which of them is Ziva's."
"You think he's schizophrenic?"
"This would be difficult to fake. If he's lying, then he is certainly a talented actor."
The confession didn't take long.
"I went up the turnpike, but I was out past the boonies and there wasn't any light. No streetlamps or anything. It was real dark. I drive around a corner and my headlights come across this lady standin' with her car on the shoulder o' the road, and I'm wonderin', should I help her? But then there's somethin' else standin' in my headlights, some devil, and it says to me…this lady is bad. She's one of the bad ones. Like them that hurt you. You gotta cut her down to make it right."
"So you picked up a rock…"
"I don't like it, ma'am. I wanted it to stop, but they say 'cut her down.' They keep sayin' it. 'Cut her down.' So I did. I used the rock. Over and over. Until you couldn't see her face no more. And there's some song still playing from the radio in her car. Hotel California. It gets me all worked up. Can't stop. So I cut her down again and again and then her face is nothing. There's just nothing there."
He paused, his hands twisting together, and met Ziva's eyes.
"I've got devils, you know" he said. "Tellin' me things."
"Devils?"
"Yes'm. They find me at night. I don't want 'em to, that's why I go for drives when I can't sleep, so I can get away from them. But they find me anyway. Always have. They used to hide under the stairs when I was a boy, and at night they'd press 'emselves up against the floorboards to tell me things. I could hear 'em through the floors."
"What did they tell you?"
"Nasty things. I wasn't a good boy. They'd tell me so. Now they say I've got to redeem it. Make it better. 'Cause I wasn't a good boy, ma'am."
"Is that why you killed Natalie? To redeem yourself?"
His neck reddened and the muscles of his jaw began to jump. He maintained eye contact, his whole demeanor tense; but she could see his brow twitching, the way he hesitated.
"She was bad," he muttered. "The devils told me so. I took care of it 'cause she was bad."
"The voices told you to kill her."
"The devils did."
"Did they tell you why?"
"I don't ask."
"Why not?"
He ground his teeth. His eyes darted fleetingly to the tabletop and then back again, and she had the sudden realization that the look on his face was forced concentration, that he was trying to hear her above the noise.
"It don't matter why, ma'am," he said, looking away again.
She leaned forward.
"Vincent," she said. "Can you look at me?"
He forced his eyes upward.
"Are the devils speaking to you now?"
He stared and then, after a moment, eyes wide, he nodded. There was sweat beginning to glisten at his temple.
"What are they saying?" She wasn't sure why she was asking or if she even wanted to know the answer.
"They say…" he paused and ground his teeth again. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath as if to steady himself. "They're saying, 'cut her down.'"
Her stomach clenched.
"Cut who down?"
He stared.
"You. 'She's bad,' they say. 'Cut her down.'"
The nightmare shifts – she remembers and a part of her present remembers for her. Laying on the dirt floor of her cell with her fingers broken, staring up at the thatched ceiling, wanting to be able to want to die.
But all she can think of is putting those nails in Saleem Ulman's eyes. Driving a knife into him.
Devils come around her in the dark and whisper to her: "cut him down," and she thinks there will be no better feeling in the world than the day she finally manages to obey that cruel demand.
Cut him down.
He's bad.
In that cell, it became an obsession. She was ready to die, but not before taking him with her. She imagined all the ways. All the pain. Humiliation. Everything that he deserved.
Cut him down.
And then the bullet breaking through the window and he was dead in an instant on the floor and it felt like her breath had left her all at once. He was hers to kill.
He was hers.
And that resentment and disappointment and shame spun itself together like a bur of barbed wire and tucked itself away beneath her breastbone, burning and scathing, and something inside of her changed.
She shifted into a state of numbness.
That great death taken from her.
And a low, heart wrenching realization that a bit of her humanity had gone and rolled away again – because she wanted death like an animal, wanted death without rage or logic or demand. She felt a jolt of something primal.
And she hastily shoved it deep, deep down inside. She couldn't be that person anymore...could she?
"Are you bad?" Landing asks from across the table.
"I was."
"Have you got devils?"
"Sometimes."
"Did you redeem yourself?"
She hesitated, that primal something still burning to be let loose inside her chest. After a moment she knit her brow and glanced at the wall behind him, saying earnestly, "I'm working on it."
He sighed.
"Me too."
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