Once again, I'm blown away. Thank you for the kind words! I know I'm uploading these rather quickly - but the content of the chapters are so tiny, and I feel as I'm cheating you guys if I wait long between updates. Hopefully, there are no complaints there!
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jae
Three
On the third day, she learns just how much she's given up, and how much she's gained.
In the last fifteen years, she had exchanged a country, a father, a family, and a lifestyle.
She's learning that fortunately, every one of them were upgrades.
She is confident that her present self wouldn't have made these risks if the reward wasn't far more valuable than the price she'd pay. This country, it becomes evident, has given her the ability to evolve as a person; provided her with luxuries she simply couldn't afford to consider in the war-like life she has left behind. This version of herself has let the walls around her slowly recede, and allowed people in. People that she wanted to let in.
During the visits from the man she calls Gibbs, it's apparent just how much of an emotional connection they've built between each other. Neither express themselves with many words, and in this way they are very much alike. The care that radiates off him more than atones for this. His hand is gentle as it occasionally taps her hand or stokes her hair, and they mostly keep a companionable silence whenever she runs out of questions about their jobs and their daily lives.
And like Gibbs, her adoptive father figure, it becomes clear she considers the other team members family as well. She is surprised each time they stop in just how much she's allowed them past her defenses, all those walls she put up so long ago. People she never would have looked for, but were everything she wanted.
It's only the third day since she'd woken up with no recollection of these five few, but already she's more comfortable with them and their presence than she has ever known in her real father's company.
When it becomes late, Ziva finds herself alone again in Tony's ever-present company. They lay quietly together on her bed, and he tells her more about the family they've all become - and how she was the missing part that made them whole. Her heart swells at his words, and she's never known this feeling of love; of family. She also feels some responsibility to them; though as if she left their lives, she would be responsible for taking a piece of their world with her. She never thought she'd feel a bigger obligation, a stronger pull, than the one of Mossad, but it appears she has been proven wrong.
Ziva muses aloud to him her amazement that she has truly left Israel, her home. And when she asks for the reasons, he takes him time considering his answers, trying to word them carefully about why she had left everything she knew behind.
Avoiding all of the painful answers that can wait for another day (so long as her memory returns soon) he simply tells her,
"Everything you found here - it supersedes all the heartbreak that Israel, Mossad, and your father have ever given you."
Sensing that he was trying to spare her from harsher memories, she accepts his explanation and let's the subject drop.
She lays there - his arm under her head, and her hand tracing the faint bruise along his jaw, legs intertwined - thinking deeply.
She may have forgotten many crucial elements about her life, but she is still painfully aware that occasionally, half truths and lies of omission are sometimes easier than facing bitter facts and traumatizing memories.