This one's mostly about Tali, it's not really based on anything mentioned in the show, just something I made up. I really don't like this chapter, but it makes some good points so I feel like I had to post it.
When I was young, I was naïve. I wanted world peace when most girls my age wanted a car or a boyfriend. I envisioned myself as a sort of Mother Theresa, the MLK of the Israeli and Arab peoples. I used to drop all of the change I had on me into UNICEF collection boxes and I never missed a day of school when Peace Now was running a program there.
Of course I never intended on being a martyr, although I would become one. I was a martyr for all the wrong reasons. My death was not an incentive for peace, but an excuse to continue fighting. I would rather have my death considered an accident and left at that. I would rather have been forgotten than remembered as an innocent that must be avenged. I never wanted that.
My dream was indisputably impossible, but I liked to dream it anyway. It became my constant refrain whenever someone asked me what I wanted as a gift from the time I was 8.
"I wish I could give you world peace right now, Taliah." My father told me. "But then I would be out of a job, you know."
Ziva snorted at me. "Sure Tali, I think I saw some world peace on sale somewhere." She was 12, and even she knew the fallacy of my dream.
One thing is for sure, I would have made a great beauty queen with all my knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I was persistent to a fault.
I remember exactly what I wore that day as I pulled up to the Mossad base in the Middle of the Negev desert. A pink sweater that had shrunk in the wash and a pair of denim shorts that wouldn't have been acceptable even if they had shrunk in the wash.
I got there at midmorning in my father's car; the sun was already high in the sky. Three commandos at the heavily reinforced gate aimed their rifles at me. The tinted windows probably made it difficult for them to identify me. It didn't help that I was wearing black sunglasses either. I came to a stop at the gate and removed my keys from the ignition. I stepped out of the car with my hands up.
"Hello boys." I grinned. "You must be the valet."
"This isn't your car." The guard on the right side of my car remarked.
"Well spotted." I said petulantly. They searched the car methodically.
"You don't even have a license." He stated.
"I have a Mossad badge." I shrugged.
"Well you shouldn't." He said viciously, smirking in my face.
"Aw, Reuven, you grow on me more and more every time I see you." I said, still smiling and patting him on the cheek. His face was already trapped between grinning and scowling whenever I saw him. "You'd better hide it." I handed him the keys. "It stands out."
"You are not the heiress to this place you know. You do not own it anymore than your father does."
"Oh?" I said in an amused tone and took my messenger bag and my titanium government issued briefcase from the other guard.
"Why are you here?" Reuven asked, crossing his arms.
"I'm not training this time, I'm here for business. I'm not sure really, when Hadar handed me an indestructible case and said 'Deliver this package to Eli in the desert immediately' I didn't ask too many questions."
"Of course, what better courier than a girl too young to drive in a very noticeable car. Very inconspicuous, eh boys?" His minions chuckled.
"Leave me alone." I rolled my eyes and pushed him out of the way.
"Come back soon!" He called to me as I wobbled away on my platform sandals.
"Fuck you!" I yelled back in an equally cheerful tone.
Not all recruits understood my involvement in the agency. In Tel Aviv they were used to me being around a lot. Some officers and trainees in the desert couldn't understand for the life of them why my father had let me join Mossad. But I wasn't a threat, I wasn't in the way, so there was nothing they could do but disapprove. I was used to whispers and prying glances.
They joked about my French manicure and my hair extensions. They joked about how I couldn't be less like my sister in both appearance and personality. But they couldn't joke about how incredibly good we were at our jobs.
I wandered across the gritty yard, heading toward the only air conditioned building on base. The barracks I would be staying in would be no where near as comfortable. I was grateful for the cool air that greeted me when I stepped through the office doors. The walk from the gate to the building seemed like an endless trek, and I had already begun to sweat.
There was no front desk and no one was there to greet me, as usual. I cursed as a six pack of Goldstars clanked together in my bag. The sound reverberated in the empty hall.
"Tali?" I spun around. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh! Namir! Hi! What are you doing here?"
"I asked first… I did not expect you to be here." He said, his brow furrowing. I hoped he wasn't recalling the spur of the moment make out session we had shared the last time I had seen him. I had a crush on him for years, but I decided he wasn't for me.
"Ziva will be here tomorrow, I'm going to wait for her. I haven't seen her since I first got back from France, so I jumped at the chance to come here. I'm being a paper pusher today." I indicated the briefcase. "I presume my father is here?"
"Yes, he's in his office. I just saw him, I was checking in after a mission…" He did look scruffier than I remembered. "I think he has a conference call now."
"That's good." I sighed in relief. "Maybe I won't have to talk with him. You… wouldn't happen to have seen Ari, would you?" I said quietly.
"Haswari? No, I haven't. He comes and goes, sometimes in the dead of night."
"Yeah I figured. I'll see you later, Namir. I'd better go get this shit to my father."
"See you. Oh, and Tali? I expect to get one of those beers."
I groaned. "You'll get it." I promised, and then made my way down the hall.
I had not been disappointed when no one had been there to greet me at the airport. I did however; find it somewhat pathetic that I went directly to the Mossad building to find out where my family was.
My father was indeed on the phone. I attempted to toss the case on his desk and run away, but before I could he snapped his fingers and motioned for me to sit. I flopped down into the chair and the bottles in my bag clinked mercilessly. Luckily my father was too occupied to notice.
I felt suddenly self-conscious and tucked my newly highlighted hair behind my ears and clutched my bag to my side. I sat there rubbing my feet together and didn't listen to anything my father said.
"Hello Taliah." He said when he finally hung up. He removed a key from a locked box inside his desk and unlocked the case to reveal what I knew was information too sensitive to be sent over the wires. "What have we here…"
"Mission reports, sit reps, statuses." I shrugged.
He glanced up at me curiously.
"I have of course opened them, read them and resealed them. Ziva's really in Cairo?"
He pursed his lips and moved the papers around. "In other circumstances I would be proud, but I refuse to condone this."
"I'm sorry father, but I don't really care that you don't condone it. Now if you don't mind, I have spent the better part of this morning navigating uncharted desert to get here." He shook his head, still studying the documents as I stood up.
"Ah Tali, you are the finest diamond in all of Israel." He seemed to be smiling in spite of himself. "Beautiful, but so hard that you are nearly impossible to break."
"I suppose." I said suspiciously. Where is everyone?"
"They are out training. Officer Eschel just came by as well, he is awaiting reassignment. I myself will be returning to Tel Aviv at the end of the month."
"And I will be here to greet Ziva."
"Very well." He said. "Oh, and Taliah?" He stopped me before I could walk out the door. "These documents; I know who you are looking for and you will not find him. He is a komemiute* now."
I forcibly curled my lips up at the edges. "It is nice to see you, father."
It hardly took an hour to make me wish I had never come to the desert. Eschel, who would become Ziva's partner, had offered me a cigarette in exchange for the beer I gave him. I graciously accepted even though I had never really enjoyed smoking. The one he had given me, a Noblesse, also happened to have a ridiculously high nicotine level; it was no where near the nicotine level I was used to in Paris.*
We sat outside the barracks in the dark; my shoes and sweater were long discarded. I sighed and watched the lights in my father's office moodily, taking a deep drag and hacking a bit.
"Not a smoker I'm guessing?" Eschel asked, laughing at me.
"Not really Namir." I said crossly. "Only when I'm stressed out."
"You don't look stressed out."
"Am I making you uncomfortable?"
"Oh no, I don't care. It's certainly hot enough out here to walk around shirtless. Besides, it's nothing I haven't seen before." He rolled his eyes.
"Let's agree to never talk about that ever again." I hissed, digging one of my long fingernails into his collar bone. "And don't mention it to anyone or I will twist your balls off and play a morbid game of ping-pong with them, then I'll rip you kidneys out and wear them as earrings." I growled.
"That's creative."
"Thank you." I left a moon shaped dent where I had been poking him.
"But what will you do if someone walks by?"
"If you're so worried why don't you get me one of your shirts? I was only planning on staying until tomorrow morning, so I didn't bring anything else." I shrugged.
"You didn't bring anything to sleep in? Why don't you just ask your boyfriend, he should be back soon."
"We weren't planning on sleeping." I said suggestively.
Namir sighed. "How did Michael end up with a girl like you? You are so different from all of us and you're nothing like your sister. You have so many sides… sometimes I think I can see right through you and other times…" We chuckled quietly. "Never mind, I don't know what I'm saying. It must be the beer, what did you put in it?"
"It's alright; I'm used to people analyzing me, especially when I come out here." I rubbed my temples. "The troll at the gate this morning felt like he needed to tell me that I "wasn't the heiress of this place" and my father called me a "diamond". What's up with that?"
"Maybe that should be you nickname." He grinned.
I laughed. "Do you know what my name means in ancient Hebrew? Taliah means "lamb". I am a lamb*!"
I smiled, just as the lights went off in my father's office.
Ziva arrived on schedule the next day. At the sound of a helicopter touching down I sauntered into the midday sun. Ziva tossed her head phones and jumped out of the helicopter before it was fully grounded to meet my father, not me. She looked furious, and I would later learn that he pulled her out of a mission that had been compromised, even though she claimed that she could clean up.
My hair blew around in the sand that was inevitably disrupted by the chopper. The noise was disrupting my thoughts and my ability to hear what they were saying. My sister was screaming, my father was yelling back at her, the flight crew scrambled to secure the helicopter as the sun beat down on us all.
It looked like a war zone.
Fleeting moments- that is all I ever got with the people I cared for. But that day I went back into the building; I could talk to Ziva later. For now, I was glad to leave this scene behind.
*the Komemiute Division is a part of Kidon; the members do not interact with headquarters and have a very deep cover.
*out of curiosity, I looked it up and apparently when this story is taking place, there was no smoking age in France or Israel. (not that it would have stopped her) Now I guess it's 18 to buy it in a store… but you can buy them out of a vending machine when you're 16? I have no idea, it is way too complicated.
*when I found out Tali meant "lamb" and Ari meant "lion" I freaked out and had a major revelation. I don't think anyone has noticed the relevance of that… did you?
*Remember when Eli called Ziva "the sharp end of the spear"? Well I started wondering what he called Tali and I thought a diamond fit. Israelis know their diamonds, after all.