Title: The Rescue
Warnings: a few bad words, melodrama, un-beated speculative fic
Summary: rescue and reconciliation
Disclaimer: I'm poor, and I'm not getting richer from this…XD
There is still shooting going on outside when Tony bursts into the room where they have held her. Of course he is the first to find her. Of course.
"Ziva." He breathes her name and pulls her up out of the chair, gun at his side as he wraps her in a one-armed embrace that is too tight on her wrenched shoulder, uncaring of her blood-smeared clothes. He holds her with all the fear and anger and relief that she herself feels, and then she is too tired to be anything but grateful as her legs, unused to standing, start to quiver. He takes her weight and lowers her to the gritty floor, thumbing the call button on his radio as he does so.
This is how Ducky finds them, once the building has been cleared and a marine escorts him to the room. Ducky, who drew up all his unimpressive height and informed Gibbs that the dead sailors on his table could just wait a little longer, he was coming with them to take care of what needed taking care of. Ducky enters the room, Ziva's cell really, to find Tony sitting on the ground, cradling Ziva's head in his lap. Her eyes are closed but he's keeping up a running stream of meaningless commentary anyway.
"…once your dear old dad notified us, well, Gibbs couldn't get us on a plane fast enough. Vance worked out a plan with the Israelis, made sure we could come get our own, you know?" He pauses, swallows hard. "Gibbs was unstoppable, Ziva I gotta tell you, it was amazing. And scary. We've barely had to eat because we had to come bust this place up and rescue your sorry ass." Ziva's lips quirk at this, maybe it's a grimace of pain, maybe amusement. "Anyway," Tony continues, "Ducky will be here soon enough, but I think Gibbs had a couple more terrorists that he had to chat up using his rifle butt."
Ducky puts a soft doctor hand on Tony's shoulder and the younger man looks up, eyes shiny and bright, mouth set in a way that belies his chatter.
"Hey Ducky."
"Tony."
Ziva cracks her eyes. "Hello Ducky," she croaks, and motions feebly. "I think they broke my arm, my, ah, right radius, it feels…fractured. Other than that I've only sustained superficial…" She trails off when he raises a gentle doctor hand.
"Rest my dear, I shall determine your injuries if you'll allow Tony to act as a chair of sorts." He sets his bag down to give himself a chance to look away from the bruised mess of her face, pulls on gloves and turns back. He's here to care of what needs taking care of. "Tony," Ducky says, "Raise her up a bit, I must get a look at that arm."
** *
She's out cold on pain meds for the plane ride home, head leaning against a thin airplane pillow, eyes darkened with lashes and bruises, hair spilling across the seat, but in a somehow more subdued way than usual, as if her scalp itself is tired. Tony takes the seat next to her, though he usually argues with her for the window.
Gibbs, on the way to visit the head, puts a hand on his subordinate's shoulder, squints towards the opposite window while he remarks, "It's not for your fault you know."
"Don't follow boss," Tony says, trying to look like he's really into typing up his report on probie's laptop.
"She chose to stay in Israel. She chose to go on this mission." Gibbs, never one for spelling things out, pauses, but feels the necessity of making an exception this time. "Nothing you did or said is the cause of what happened to her."
Tony shuts the laptop with excessive force, ignoring McGee's indignant squawk of protest.
"She did it because she was fulfilling Michael's mission. And if I hadn't shot the bastard he would have been in that room instead of her." He knows this isn't exactly true, knows that the other captured Mossad agents were killed and Ziva was interrogated because of her links to NCIS, knows that in some strange way they were her saving grace as well as her damnation. He doesn't care much for the distinction. Gibbs merely releases his shoulder, goes to take a leak. McGee reaches across the aisle and retrieves his laptop with an injured look.
Tony sighs, and Ziva shifts in her sleep, her brow creasing in silent dream-like worry. It's going to be a long flight.
** *
Ziva's apartment is still blown to pieces they realize, once they've landed. Her employment itself could be considered equally in shambles, but they'll work on that tomorrow. For now, Tony and Gibbs load Ziva, her pain pills, her extra antibiotic ointments, and the batch of cupcakes Abby baked for her into Gibbs' car and then deliver the mostly silent assassin to Gibbs' house. The spare bedroom is clean and quiet and her eyes are closed as soon as she's kicked off her shoes and clawed her way under the covers.
** *
She wakes, if not refreshed, then less tired, and more achy. Her wounds, as she told Ducky, were mostly superficial, apart from her arm, but her body's memory is long, and the abuse lingers in her bones. She stumbles downstairs, and stops when she sees Tony sprawled on the couch. She thought he would have gone home after unnecessarily accompanying her to a safe place, but no, he's taking up the couch and then some, clad in his undershirt and dress pants, a tie and a button-down shirt abandoned on the armchair, an old brown blanket tangled around his midsection.
She goes silently past him and into the kitchen, assured that he sleeps still. She finds tea on the counter in easy reach, and puts the water on to boil. It's in retrieving a mug that she runs into trouble, her right arm in a sling and her left protesting at the idea of rising higher than her neck. She kicks the cupboard in frustration and hears something stir in the next room. She scowls harder at the shelf above her, casts around for a stool, and then Tony's arm easily reaches over her head, plucks a Navy mug from the shelf, and sets it on the counter in front of her. He is standing too close behind her, and she can feel the warmth of his chest through his t-shirt, and smell the creased-clothes scent of a night spent worried on a couch with a worn brown blanket for company.
"Thank you," she says quietly, picks up her mug and turns to get back to her kettle, but he doesn't back away. Instead he looks at her, in the same way he held her hours, days now, earlier, all fear and annoyance and relief, plus the deep and abiding affection that she's pretending she doesn't see yet.
She knows he's not sure yet if rescuing her "sorry ass" cancels out killing Michael, and frankly she's not sure yet either. She knows she will come back to NCIS, somehow. She is safer there than in Mossad, certainly, but safer isn't something Ziva David worries about. No, she will return because she is beginning to trust Gibbs more than she trusts her father. What she will return to is uncertain though. Who she will return to. Who she will return to be.
She does not know how to deal with these things she sees in his face, does not know if she can feel for him what she was beginning to feel for Michael
The really dangerous part is she may not have much more time to decide. She may never have had a choice in the matter to start with.
All this flits through her mind in a second, while she stands still and his hand gently traces the bandage covering a cut on her temple. He looks wordlessly down at her with an expression she can't help but return, even if she can't put a name to it in any of the languages she knows.
Then he smiles, steps back, says only: "Anytime."
Her kettle boils then, and she goes to fix herself tea, and by the time she turns back around his tie and shirt are gone from the chair and the front door is closing.
Later, Gibbs will mention in his offhanded manner that Tony refused to leave that night, settled on the couch without even pretending to be invited. Tomorrow, when Tony's back with McGee and Abby to check up on her, she will stumble going up the stairs and he will be there on the step below to catch her, supporting her weight like he did in her cell, her face inches from his as they were in the darkened room of Domino. They repeat the same steps over and over in this dance, and they are getting better and better at them.
It takes a little longer for her to forgive him, but that too comes, when the bandages come off and he mercifully refrains from asking awkward questions or acting on any of the varied emotions that she has glimpsed on his face. She relaxes a little when he only teases her about her lime green cast, and watches with an expression just a little too intense when Abby hugs her hello in the bullpen on her first day back.
** *
The reconciliation comes the day they wrap up the third case they've had since Ziva's come back to full duty. Tony has been whacked in the head with a shoe full of concrete, best not to ask how or why, and she yelled out his name when she saw him go down, involuntarily, caught by surprise. Of course he was up on his feet and charging to her rescue a moment later as the shoe-thrower held her at gunpoint, even though she told him she had it all under control. His fear wide eyes matched hers, and she saw echoes of a hundred similar events, stretching behind them and in front of them, one in danger and the other flying to the defense, not out of duty or partnership but out of a deep nameless fear and obligation.
Ziva is a soldier, which means she knows how to follow orders and she understands how fear and obligation, and maybe love, will fuck you over in the line of duty. She's thinking about this afterwards with Tony's eyes on her from across the bullpen. She's typing her report with hard angry jabs at the keyboard, and he's just watching her, a pack of ice at his temple and a dark expression on his face. She makes a last vicious keystroke and pushes her chair back.
"I'll be back," she says shortly, marching around the corner of her desk without looking to him for a response. She waits for the elevator with her back to him as well, but she's not quick enough on the close-door button and he slips in after her.
"What do you want?" she snaps, not even bothering to stop him as he flips the stop button and the elevator jerks to a halt.
"Why are you so angry?" he shoots back, forehead shiny and wet and red-turning-purple in the place that he had the icepack.
"You keep behaving in a manner that, that is not befitting an agent," she retorts, because she really wants to say something about how fear and obligation will get you killed when all you want to do is save someone else.
"Is this about trying to disarm the guy? Because like I told you already, I was fine and you were in a compromising position. And not the fun, kinky kind." Tony is still sour, but the crudeness is irrepressible and practically comforting.
"No. No, it's about all of it," Ziva says, pushing past him in the small space, so he has to spin around and pinch the bridge of his nose out of dizziness.
"All?" he asks quietly, eyes still squeezed shut against the surely spinning walls.
"I mean…" Ziva says, but she doesn't know what she means, so she crosses her arms instead.
"You mean my utter lack of professionalism and competency right? You mean how you can't trust me, not to do the right thing, not to watch your back, not to know when I shouldn't watch your back. Is that it Ziva? Say it! You mean all the reasons you stayed in Israel."
That wounds her. "You know why I stayed in Israel, Tony," she says lowly. "I was...unsure. But I forgave you. And I do trust you. You're my partner."
Tony leans back against the wall and sighs. "Then let me be your partner Ziva. Let me look out for you, concussion be damned. You're NCIS, always, whether Mossad has their hooks in you or not. We look out for each other here."
"That is not what this is about," Ziva says dismissively, defensively stepping forward to jut her chin at him. "You stray from the point. I mean that you endanger yourself, which in turn endangers the success of the operation."
"I don't want to endanger anyone," Tony says tiredly. "Least of all you."
Ziva frowns. She wants to say that she did not speak of endangering herself at all, but he'll still here what he wants. "We go in circles," she declares, throwing up her hands just like her mother used to. "We're each too concerned about the other's safety. It's going to handicap us. It's…" love that's going to get us killed she wants to say, but instead finishes lamely with, "unacceptable."
"Ziva," Tony says, and his eyes are open now, filled again with things she cannot understand, can no longer withstand. "Of course I'm concerned for your safety. You're definitely not." His mouth has a wry twist, but his eyes are haunted with a nearly empty room and a broken Ziva on a chair.
"I'm fine Tony," she says, impatient and understanding all at once. She touches his shoulder, because that is a safe place to touch to show compassion in the workplace, even though they are alone in the elevator and he would be among the last to complain if she touched him otherwise.
He looks at her, disbelieving because just this afternoon she had a gun in her face, as she has many a time before. Even though he was the only one who wound up injured, it feels like a closer call than it was, because she has had had the closest call of all, and now any danger puts him right back on Gibbs' old couch, feigning sleep as he listens to her limp down the stairs that first morning.
She knows what he's thinking and it makes her leave her hand on his shoulder for too long, until it ceases to be workplace appropriate. She holds his shoulder, and can't tell if it's to keep him away from her or hold him close. He inclines his head just a little.
"Ziva," he sighs, and his breath blows softly on her skin, like it did on Gibb's stairway, like it did in Domino's fake closet. "Don't you ever let anyone protect you?"
Then he kisses her, a careful, half-concussed kiss, tentative, like he's afraid she'll give him a companion lump. She doesn't, so maybe she wasn't holding him away after all. At first he kisses her like he's still in Israel, telling her not to leave him, or still in Africa squeezing her too tightly. But then he kisses her like she's Ziva and he needs to correct her English and tease her about staring down her shirt while she defuses a bomb and trade smoldering, teasing looks across the bullpen, and she kisses back like he's brash and kind and smarter than he lets on. They're not pawns in some political ocean-spanning game, just Gibbs' people, kissing in the elevator until Gibbs himself calls Tony's cell and tells them to get the hell back up here, they've got a new case to solve.
For the first time, neither one of them thinks of what number case this is since Ziva got back. They just ride the elevator back up, knowing that the next time Ziva will rescue him.
((AN: While I will never be quite satisfied with this story, I thought I should stop rewriting it and post it before the premiere. Can't wait!!!))