Thank you all so, so much for your amazing reviews. It honestly makes me smile and I look so forward to writing another chapter because of them.
This is a great distraction from the essay I'm supposed to be writing :)
Please let me know what you think.
I grabbed onto the walls as I dragged myself to her room, it sounds terribly cliché and self-inflicted, but at the time I honestly had no idea what I was doing to myself. Though I have a sneaky feeling that even if I were aware of the damage I was doing, I would have done it anyway.
Anyway, I finally arrived at her room, it was probably 20-30metres from the stairs, and it had taken me a good 15minutes to get there but I had arrived nonetheless.
At first I couldn't see her there was nothing but blankets and a web of tubes, so I hobbled in further and for the first time I was exposed to a reality that I was not yet prepared for. She nearly looked peaceful if it weren't for the tube stuck down her throat and the shades of purple carelessly painted across her face.
I found an empty chair and eased into it, I had forgotten that I was in a hospital robe and had nothing else but my trusty IV stand, I thought having finally found her I would have at least felt happy, or at the very least relieved. I no longer had a distraction; my whole focus was finding her and here I was and now what? I didn't prepare myself to feel so empty or numb, this wasn't how it was supposed to be, which sounds so stupid because an SUV impaling your car isn't really how it's supposed to be anyway.
I guess this was the first moment that I kind of realised that something terrible had happened, and yes terrible things happen everyday – but this was the first time I had bare witness to every heart wrenching moment. As an agent, you see the aftermath, you deal with how distraught people are but you are there to do a job, you get the bad guy and you close the book. This was different, I saw the before and now this is the middle – this was the needles in my arm and the tube in her throat. This isn't something you can just walk away from or tell yourself "we'll get him" words are easy, you know? They don't fix the relentless feeling of your insides being ripped out and waved in front of your face. It really fucking hurts, and that's a hard fact to accept.
Do you remember how I couldn't find Ziva at the crash sight, and the medic said she was on top of me? Despite the fact that I was so sure she wasn't, it turns out they were right.. I don't like to talk about it, I don't like to remember it, but it's always there… And I guess we're a little past this whole "I don't wanna talk about it" huh?
So yes, she was on top of me, in every sense of that word.. I guess the car impacted so hard it had pushed, no, hurled her body onto mine.., The impact caused my head to smash against the window causing it to shatter the glass around my skull, the blood loss is what caused me to feel cold and wet. It hadn't been raining afterall.
From what I read from the report I was slumped over the steering wheel with Ziva kind of on my arm and lap.. The car hadn't flipped; I was just pushed up against the window frame with a bleeding body in my lap, which I still cannot quite comprehend.