The alternating view continues with the next exciting (ish) installment...
Just Add Fuel
3
The calm is a pin shoved into her voodoo doll.
So far a warrant is the sole thing that Gibbs has executed and this is troubling. Not that she greets the evening hours with an eagerness for bloodshed, but a passing mention, a poignant gripe or some form of rule refresher should have accompanied the day. This is either acceptance or the hush before the hurricane.
Accomplices should have the decency to look worried.
For no other reason than guilt, Ziva feels like the ringleader of their crime and Tony, the human form of sin's complexity, stands at a broken window, letting moonlight filter between torn Venetian blinds to cast aspersions on her claim that he started it. No one this handsome, his posture declares, could lead someone else astray. His reputation notwithstanding.
When the conversation with Abby had been detailed via discreet text messages during the hunt for clues, Ziva could see the dread in his composition. Mobile shorthand had become lengthy, spelled-out dissertation on the many ways he was a dead man. Tiny letters on her screen would have made a passable suicide note.
The public image is a different matter.
Suspect number two's home is the size of a trash bin and yet no link is found to the dead child. Which doesn't deter Gibbs' certainty. Meanwhile his senior agent is sticking to the gut feeling that had been birthed during a near-fatal horse snack. Smudging the marker lines of reasonable boundaries, Tony had picked a fight with Gibbs in the elevator to prove his point. And again in the car about a central piece of evidence that will intrigue a jury despite the lack of substance.
Nudges in the ribs had failed to silence him. The DiNozzo Oblivion should be trademarked.
Except now, with their desks threatening to revolt over the weight of unfinished reports, the fight has fled the man. A pencil begins a rotation from end to end in his hand, his eyes straining to maintain their present direction. Down. Decidedly down and away from whatever passage Gibbs might stalk through. Ziva is halfway through a banana when the revelation sees her spitting out yellow bits in a coughing fit that stops Tony's pencil routine.
The time spent dangerously defending his suspect over Gibbs' heir apparent wasn't about the killer. It was a distraction.
If Gibbs is forced to argue his beliefs on a crime, there's little oxygen left in the room to sustain an assault on their rumored activities. Damn, she's nearly proud of him.
Reigning in their mutual fidgeting succeeds in flooding the space between them with unspent energy, scalding the muted carpeting ad ratcheting her notice of his shirt. Gray does nice things to his eyes. Her morning headaches may have a potent cure but the evening ones are more difficult to relieve. Because ducking into the restroom in their traditional fashion will spray gasoline on the gossip fire. But worry is not an unpleasant look for him. At the very least, it shows he is capable of adult concern. Mostly for his life.
It's understandable, but she's been watching the ladies room, noting the times of occupation and emptiness. Like now.
Distraction indeed.
That's all this was supposed to be; an extension of the verbal thread, a progression of stresses and a resolution to supposition. No one gets hurt. No one finds out. Even if one tramples through the delicate heather, the path of destruction is difficult to track. Such is the resilience of nature. Thus they'd started out so carefully, slipping across the minefield with trust that deliberate movement will see their secret safely to the other side. They're trained investigators, right? As long as they continue to show hourly disdain and pent-up tension to the others, there should be no discovery that said tension has a functional relief valve.
Blame for the recent slips can be laid at his door, the one his grin coaxes her through repeatedly. Only now Tony follows her through the entry, cautious but willing. Freedom arrives with confinement, locked into their own stupidity like criminals scheming amongst the guards. Gleeful and damned all the same. The restroom lacks witnesses, cameras and sadly soundproofing.
The third time he tries to speak, a task made tricky with her invading tongue, the question is a cold water bath. "What're we gonna do?"
"Change nothing. Codes are more like guidelines, isn't that what the pirate movie says?"
"Dear God, she's quoting films." It's a supplication heavenward even as he relieves a few of her buttons from duty.
"Come what may?" She's asking for loyalty to this nameless, misshaped thing but something too warm spreads across his face.
"Gotta work on word choice."
"Or we can forgo words?" The suggestion comes with a mental note to remember that his belt has just been kicked under the sinks. While she has far too much sense to let this go where Harlequin says it must, there's something to be said for the workplace aphrodisiac.
Only he's experiencing a stronger moment of sense, rare thing. "Not here." A warning belayed by his fingers inching below her waistband. "We're in enough trouble."
"Based on the nothing we've heard from Gibbs?" When did she trade down to the mantle of rebel?
The rationale works because he reclaims his rightful crown and bites down hard on her neck, the vacuum of his mouth dragging blood to the surface. Marking her. She might have murmured his name or shouted an obscenity, might have sent out a beckon and flashed the bat signal. There's something about that hand, lately scrubbed clean of horse drool and recently carving designs on her bare thigh, something about the texture and the placement that offers an engraved, gold-leaf invitation to what McGee would label the dark side.
She is a citizen of that darkness now, eyes squeezed shut against that. Right. There. If they're already caught and condemned, she'll be damned if this should be hidden. Let them question, cite regs and threaten. She's already picked out the curtains she'll hang in hell.
And they match his eyes.