Jeez, I haven't disclaimed in a while. Must mean I own NCIS.

Days pass. Watches tick on, eyes become tender and drowsy, hospital nurses no longer protest when Tony turns off the light, slip off his shoes and curls, wary, around his small and trembling charge. Gibbs makes phone calls. Several. A young girl with a hoarse and hopeful voice, one of the few people in the world who could kill you without leaving any forensic evidence, answers, and the smile shines through. For she is getting better.

The wounds are healing. The hair is longer, feathery light and irresistibly soft. The bruises are fading. Even the swelling around her eye is receding, and they say there will be no lasting damage. Her ribs and hips have stopped bleeding through achingly taut and silvery skin. She smiles more; the other day, Tony heard a dirty, throaty laugh and turned to find Gibbs and Ziva chuckling at a lewd joke about McGee.

But at night. Oh, all through the night...

Eventually one of the nurses, a coppery, pretty young thing, takes Tony aside and smiles warmly.

"Mr DiNozzo, somehow I get the feeling that you're not particularly keen on Tel Aviv."

"No shit." But his smile is soft and guarded.

"I've spoken with Mr David. He seems concerned about his daughter."

"Finally." The nurse twists her lip, and his gaze flits from her face to Ziva, sat up stiffly in her white bed. Looking out of the window. He does not know if she is crying.

"Mr DiNozzo, I can understand your feelings. But he's arranged for a car to come and pick her up this afternoon. We've decided to discharge her. He has private nurses that he thinks she will be much more comfortable with. It's going to take a while, Mr DiNozzo, but she will get better. And I think you and your...team...will be relieved to return to America." The smile she plasters across her silly dimpled face seems strangely out of place to him.

Once, he would have argued. Once, he would have tried to joke her around to his way of thinking. Perhaps even flirted a little. Maybe even made love to her like he meant it, and then persuaded her to change her mind. Break the rules. And, of course, when Ziva was first found, he would almost certainly have crashed a fist into the face of anyone who opposed him.

But Tony is so tired, and he is not delusional. An arrogant employee of an unknown agency of a foreign country, up against the director of Mossad, based right here in this hellish city. He knows who will win. So he turns away.

She was crying. Sweetly and completely, and it breaks him.

"Ziva."

"She told you."

He moves to sit by her, crowd her with his protection, but restrains himself, and kneels, almost prayer-like, on the floor.

"Yes." A silence, wavering and forlorn. "Apparently your father thinks it will be best for you. A private nurse. Familiar surroundings. Your family. I can understand why ... why it would appear that way."

She turns her head. Without the glossy protection of her hair, her eyes are huge and bleak and so like a child. They are helpless, and hopeless. And so is he.

"Please, Tony."

He does not know what she is pleading for, but he knows - quietly, suddenly – that whatever it is she is begging for, whatever she wants or needs, he would willingly, gladly go to the ends of the earth just to find. And she knows this, because he already has done. So she looks at him with open eyes, and, for a second, a tiny particle of time trapped between this breath and the next, she opens her heart a little too. And it floods.

"Tony. Family? That's not my family. That's not, not my...he's my father. Where is he now? Where had he been for the past weeks? Where was he when you made the call, told him I was alive? Why didn't he drop everything and rush here? Why wasn't he the one that saved me?"

And, of course, Tony has no answers. He wonders – idly, languidly – whether he ever has done, or whether his entire life has been poised, suspended, on the success of a blag. On how his voice is sweet and brown and cracked, treacle, and how people believe what he tells them because they want him to be right.

"Ziva, I don't know, but-"

"Are you just going to leave now? Is that it? After...everything you've done for me?" And it doesn't make sense, not out loud, but it doesn't have to. It doesn't.

"Ziva, what the hell can I do? He's the head of Mossad, and I'm just one guy that goes along and makes it up every minute and hopes to God that it all works out OK. I've no idea what my plans would be. He's made some, and that's more than I've done."

"And Tony, you've been here! You've done more in the space of just over a month than he's done for me his entire life! You stayed with me, every night, even when I was hating you, and you put your hands in the same place every time, on my arm and my heart, and I could feel it beat through your fingers, and it made me safe. It made me sure. Because I wasn't certain, otherwise. I wasn't certain if I wanted it to be beating, and then I felt you next to me and I was sure. And I know how you used to breathe gently on my head when you thought I was asleep, and talk to me more truthfully than you've ever done, all the time I've known you, and I've heard what you've said to Gibbs, about how you're scared of what I make you feel. And I know all this, and you never ... you never ... you didn't know. You knew none of it. And know, after everything, after everything¸ it's just ... you just... leave."

And as he watches her crumple and break, the frailest of paper caught in the rain, he knows just how he failed her. And a tired, bitter little voice in his head tells him he was too slow, and it's just too late, and although he mutters that it's not, it's not, he knows that it is. It is.

Yay! Stupid library and stupid students are banished from my life foreverrrr. I actually didn't go in yesterday, pretended I was ill and had a fabulous time watching NCIS boxsets instead. I don't know how I'm going to earn a living in future lie, but I DO know that it sure as hell won't be through 9 to 5 workdays :)

Again, I hope you enjoy. Please don't be discouraged by the seemingly hopeless ending of this chapter, I wanted Tony to have a bit of an epiphany and get his fricking act together before whisking his beloved away and them have a rampant old time of it happily ever after. Well, it won't happen quite like that but whatevs. Reviewez-vous, s'il vous plait! (Can you believe I'm actually expecting a qualification in French by September?)