A/N: Hi, my dears! So, fair warning, this is the penultimate chapter. The summer is coming to an end…

P.S. Who else is watching the Ziva Appreciation Marathon on USA Network? It hurts so good!

- August, Pt. 2 -

There were few words between them for the remainder of dinner; there were even fewer on the way back to his apartment. As he had at the restaurant, Tony held her hand while navigating the nighttime streets, but any encouragement he received from her firm grip was siphoned out again by her faraway gaze, directed out her car door window.

A bucket of cold water, the dose of reality from McGee and Abby drenched the picturesque illusion they'd spent the summer constructing around themselves, instantly stripping the vivid colors to dull, gray streaks. It wasn't their friends' fault. This dilemma would have reared its ugly head eventually, and sooner rather than later. Summer was almost over.

Honestly, Tony hadn't been thinking about his job, or Gibbs' rules, or the ramifications of them. Not when he agreed to the piano lessons. Not when they exchanged pieces of their histories and of their hearts. Not when he held her, just held her close, because he could. The threat of returning to their former existence and its restrictions changed nothing of how he felt about her and this new relationship between them.

Whether or not Ziva felt the same or saw things differently, he wasn't sure yet. He didn't get a chance to ask when they got in, either.

"You can pick tonight," Tony said, tossing his keys in the requisite bowl atop the entry table as she closed and locked the front door behind them. "If you're not in the mood for a movie, we could always talk, you know, about what McDebbieDowner and—"

His suggestions were derailed by her hands, pushing him hard up against the nearest wall. He could already hear the guff his back would give him for it in the morning, but his playful protest was smothered by her lips, pressing fiercely to any additional patch of skin within striking distance: the curve of his jaw, the hitch of his upper lip, the hollow at his throat. Her desperate pace matched the ominous metronome he'd had in his head since leaving the restaurant, each tick a reminder of their time finally slipping away. He didn't have to wonder if she could hear it, too.

For one breathtaking moment, Ziva stopped, her cheeks flushed and her exhales ragged. She trapped his gaze in the darkened heart of her own, demanding his response to her counter-offer.

Swallowing hard, he muttered, "This works, too," while sliding his hands deep into the jungle foliage of her curly hair and eagerly pulling them back together.

Tony awoke not only with a start, but also without her. A glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand informed him that it was now firmly the middle of the night. He must have dozed off afterwards, because the last thing he could recall was listening to their breathing gradually return to normal as he draped an arm over her waist.

The same arm now stretched out at his side, taking the temperature of her half of the bed and finding it lukewarm, while at the same time the quiet strains of live piano music reached his ears. Relief filled his lungs on the next inhale. She hadn't gone far.

The bedroom lingered in shadows, the only reprieve a hint of artificial light seeping in through the door left open a crack. After he pulled on a v-neck t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants, his bare feet followed the sliver of illumination out of the room.

Ziva sat with her back to him at the piano, clothed in only the faded blue button-down she'd unceremoniously removed from his body before they tumbled into bed. She took up a compact amount of space on the right side of the bench, leaving his customary spot to the left open for him. The lamp atop the piano shone down on her hands as they moved steadily over the keys.

The few times he'd seen her at the instrument convinced him she was a natural. That disciplined back, those almost freakishly long fingers. The imperceptible sway of her whole body to the music. The lessons might have been for him, but she was the true pianist. It made sense that he discovered her here, at the same piano in the same dim living room that started everything. Their summer, bookended. A beginning, middle, and—

Suddenly, it was quiet; her fingers paused but were still poised to play. "Tony," she stated without a glance behind her.

It was good to know her ninja senses had evaded rust despite sitting dormant for months.

"Caught me." Tony approached, placing his hands on her shoulders, immediately detecting the bundles of tension under her skin. "Couldn't sleep?"

"I did not mean to wake you."

"It's okay," he soothed, his thumbs massaging the top of her back, even though it would do nothing to ease the true cause of her anxiety. The relief she craved wouldn't come from bedroom activities (however pleasant) or from the solace of the piano, but only as a result of somehow resolving their current conflict.

When her hands abandoned the keyboard, dropping to the tails of his shirts that covered the bare skin of her thighs, Tony adjusted as well, maneuvering into his reserved seat beside her on the bench, his back pressed up to the piano.

His full attention focused on the slope of her downcast eyes. "Ziva, we're going to have to talk about it sometime. Doesn't have to be right now, but—"

"What is there to talk about?" The gaze he was waiting for rose, traces of melancholy hiding in the shadows of the tiny, closed-lip smile that deflated before it had a chance of convincing him she wasn't affected by this, too. "We should have known this was coming. We have been foolish to believe it could..."

"What? Mean something?"

Her eyelids flicked down and up, doing nothing to clear the cloudiness from the hazelnut orbs.

"Last," she said.

The small shrug of her slim shoulders was resignation in a single gesture, catapulting him back to the minutes before turning their badges in to Vance.

After a final verification on the plan of action, Tony regarded his partner. "You may not like how this ends, Ziva."

It should have told him something that he was more worried about the fallout for her than for himself; after all, he was quitting, too.

"I have never depended on happy endings," she replied, calm despite the significance of walking away from her hard-won career and the only semblance of family she had to speak of.

"Well, you should."

He didn't mean for the words to come out as heatedly as they did, but he let them blaze a trail from his lips to her ears anyway, because she was his partner and his friend, and he'd witnessed—a few times fist-hand—all the crazy shit she'd been through, and he wanted good things for her, so sue him.

Besides, her eyes would roll and she'd pay the comment no attention, just as she did with most of what he said to her. He never anticipated the slow dawning of a reserved smile, accented by the soft light of the lamp on her desk, or the minute lift of her shoulders that said that was how it was and how it always would be.

Now he realized she hadn't been exaggerating about her expectations. What they'd spent the past four months building together was just another in a long line of good things that would be ultimately denied to her. Things she once had and lost, or that she never had and longed for, and that she didn't even try to keep anymore.

But it was time for that to change.

Snapping Tony from his momentary reverie was one of her delicate hands coming to rest, flat palm down, on his chest, delivering him back to his apartment and the narrow bench they shared in the center of it.

"It is what it is," Ziva stressed. Her chin dipped, aiming to disguise its tell-tale trembling, but he saw it nevertheless. "We would be wise to—"

His broad hand covered hers, interrupting both her concession speech and the run of her fingers over the wrinkles in his t-shirt. "But what if...?" Half of his thought was enough to gain her eyes, captured from their aimless wandering. "What if this didn't have to…end?"

Tony refused to accept that this summer with her was a time out of life, an interlude, something that had an expiration date. He'd—no, they'd waited too long to come away with nothing more than a teasing morsel of what could be possibly theirs. If they were brave.

Wariness sparked dramatically in her eyes. "And what would you have us do about our jobs?"

"Technically, we don't have them anymore, remember?"

They'd been operating under this unspoken assumption that they would eventually go back to their previous posts as NCIS special agents, but there was no guaranteeing they would have jobs to go back toverysoon. The bold thought of moving forward, rather than retracing their well-worn steps, set his pulse galloping.

"NCIS is everything we know. It is our family." The deliberateness with which Ziva tucked a strand of hair behind her ear revealed her apprehension as much as her tense statements.

"That won't change—you know Abby wouldn't let it—but if we're all reinstated, you and I will be back in the same boat as before with Gibbs' rules," he countered. "Besides, we're highly-trained federal agents. Who wouldn't want to hire us?"

Judging by the hesitant look she gave him, Ziva wasn't as easily swept up as he was by the idea. He didn't blame her; it sounded crazy to him, too. What would they do instead? Where would they go? He didn't have any definite answers yet, but that didn't stop him from trying to give them to her.

Taking both of her hands in his own, Tony smiled down at her. "In the meantime, you can come with me to visit Senior in the Big Apple. Last I heard, he was shacked up with some wealthy widow on the Upper West Side." His eyebrows waggled. "Should be interesting."

The random proposition ignited surprised confusion in her gaze, just as he knew it would. "Your father would not mind if I was there?"

"Are you kidding? Between the two of us, I'm pretty sure you're his favorite."

Tony didn't realize he was aiming to make her laugh until her airy chuckles echoed like wind chimes in his ears. It was all the encouragement he needed to press into the centimeters of space keeping the sides of their legs from touching. Anything to be nearer to her.

"Then, one of these days," he continued on in a voice shedding its humor to make room for sincerity to move in, "we can go to Israel and visit your Aunt Nettie or any of your other relatives."

"How is it that you remember her?" Ziva asked, astonished and slightly perplexed. "I have only mentioned her once, perhaps twice, in all of these years."

His thumbs swept steadily along her knuckles, while his eyes held hers, unwavering. "I told you, Ziva. To me…" A helpless smile overtook his face. "You're unforgettable. It's one of the things I love about you."

For a long second, she stared through the short distance at him, not blinking. Only the shifting of her eyes, scanning him for genuineness, told him she had indeed heard him. Every word.

"One of many," Tony tagged on, shrugging his apology for not mentioning it sooner.

At that, her expression softened into the look of contentment he'd grown so fond of bringing out of her, and now he had another way of evoking it to add to the list. Her hands untangled from his hold to grasp at his chest and then his neck, moving all the way up to the sides of his face, framing him between her fingers, making him visible for her eyes only.

"My Tony…"

The endearment was a whisper on her lips, indistinct from the wisp of warm breath that carried it to his heart.

Forcing himself to swallow, to breathe, Tony inclined just enough for their foreheads to rest against each other. He was wrong before, when he told himself this was something he could get used to. In reality, it was already something he knew he couldn't live without. So he did the first thing that popped into his mind to leave her with no doubt of them.

He brushed his thumb across her lower lip, and then he kissed her—deeply, lovingly. His fingers raked into the silky hair at the nape of her neck, and her arms wrapped around his back, their dual efforts bringing them as close as the cramped space on the bench permitted. He considered it a good sign when her lips parted, granting him access to all of her, as if he didn't already have it. They kissed and nibbled and tasted for what seemed endless minutes, but he would have been satisfied to kiss her all night, or what was left of it, because their time was no longer running out. This was just the beginning.

At his hip, two of her fingers slipped under the waistband of his pants, doing nothing but owning that small, concealed piece of his body—and there was no denying how hot that was to him. His mouth plunged to the base of her neck in response, sensing the vibrations of her breathy moan before it sighed through her teeth, clamped down on her swollen bottom lip as he began nibbling at her collarbone. It was her turn to glide her fingers into his hair, holding on while her head tipped back, opening up more silken places for him to devour.

And had his elbow not accidentally struck a smattering of piano keys, producing a dissonant clamor that shocked them apart, they might have been lost to their passions until morning.

"Naturally," he groaned, and they shared a quiet laugh, neither relinquishing even a gasp of distance from the other.

All manner of her previous despondency was replaced with flushed cheeks and something like anticipation in the tilt of her head, as though she was already envisioning what came next for them while regarding him.

"This will not be simple."

Perking at the implication of the phrase, Tony took hold of the collar on the shirt she was currently borrowing from him, righting one side and tugging her closer by its persuasion. Her skin smelled of him, and he hoped her scent lingered on him, as well. It required all the restraint he possessed to keep from falling into everything she offered all over again. Instead, he sought clarification with a cautious smile.

"So is that a 'yes' to giving us a whirl?"

He couldn't promise her a happy ending—there were too many complicated variables in their lives—but a new beginning, with the possibility of happiness along the way, was well within his power to give. That is, if she allowed him to try.

Her smile was radiant, matching his widening beam as if through a mirror. Curling her hands around his forearms, she linked herself firmly into his embrace.

"I would like that," she whispered to him, "very much."