Tony stood just inside the curtain that blocked Ziva from the rest of the emergency room, watching the organized chaos surrounding his partner. Three nurses had formed an impromptu bucket brigade of gauze pads, passing clean handfuls down the line and bloody ones back in the other direction to be disposed of in the biohazard container next to Tony. An orderly constantly scuttled through line, picking up blood-soaked pads that hadn't made it and generally doing his best to keep any of the medical personnel from setting a foot down on a slippery spot and putting themselves out of commission.
A grey-haired doctor stood at Ziva's head, surveying the attempts to stop the bleeding. "Hold it," he ordered, and all but one of the gauze brigade stepped away from the bed. The remaining nurse kept a large wad of gauze pressed as tightly as she could against Ziva's head, but attempted to ease her body out of the doctor's way. The doctor, his blue scrubs lightly smeared with blood, leaned down to inspect the wound. "It's slowing down. What's her name, again?"
"Ziva," the nurse replied, then looked to Tony for approval of how she had pronounced the foreign-sounding name.
When Tony nodded that she had gotten it right, the doctor leaned around the nurse and put his face an inch from Ziva's. "Ziva. Ziva, can you hear me?"
No response. The doctor didn't seem to have expected one, because he quickly straightened up and started dispensing orders to the assembled staff. "Hannah, type and cross-match. Raoul, go with her, call the blood bank, get some units up here."
Two nurses nodded and turned to go. Tony stopped one of them, grabbing the sleeve of her teddy-bear scrubs. "She's AB-negative," he blurted, hoping to save her and the blood-typing process some time.
The woman nodded, thanked him, and disappeared through the curtain. Tony got the distinct impression that whether or not she believed him, she wasn't going to take his word for it.
"Andy," the doctor went on without looking up.
The orderly scrambled to his feet, one gloved hand filled with bloody gauze, and said, "Yo."
"Once this bleeding stops, I want a look inside her head. Call up to CT, let them know we'll be coming."
"Got it." Andy followed Hannah out of the cubicle, pausing only to dump his load of gauze into the biohazard can.
"How long has she been out?" the doctor asked. Silence. He jerked his head up and caught Tony's eye before trying again: "You. You came in with her - did she regain consciousness at any point? How long has she been out?"
Taken aback at his sudden inclusion in the action of the room, Tony fumbled for an answer. "Uh..." He looked at his watch, its face half-obscured by a drying smear of Ziva's blood. It had cost him $350. He wondered if it was rated to work submerged in blood. Blood was way more viscous than water, after all.
What did that matter? he realized, snapping back to reality. Pulling his mind away from the macabre thoughts, he did his best to answer the doctor's question: "She was unconscious when we got to her - um, maybe half an hour ago? - and no, she hasn't woken up. I was talking to her most of the way here, and if she'd been awake she would have tried to shut me up, or maybe tried to hit me, so I don't -"
The doctor, looking mildly amused at the sudden torrent of words, held up a hand to stop him. "Ok. Thank you." He turned to look at the nurse who was continuing her pressure on the wound. "Definitely going to need a CT. How's it look down there, Kat?"
The nurse peeled back the edge of the gauze she was holding. "Better. Ziva?" she tried again, leaning forward. "Ziva, your head has almost stopped bleeding, ok? We're going to take a closer look now, honey."
There was a faint moan. Everyone froze for a second, and then exploded back into action. "Ziva?" the nurse repeated at the same time as the doctor grabbed a penlight out of his pocket reached to take the gauze from her.
The moan grew louder. "Ziva, you're in a hospital," the nurse said reassuringly. "You have a head injury, but we're taking care of you, ok?" She reached out to touch Ziva's hand, laying limply on the bedsheets. "Can you squeeze my hand?"
The almost undetectable moan exploded into a hoarse scream, and the doctor lifted his hands away from her head apologetically. "Sorry, Ziva, that was me poking around. I'll be more careful from now on."
"She squeezed," the nurse announced excitedly. "Good girl, Ziva. I'm Kat, and I'm a nurse. Do you know where you are?"
Ziva mumbled something indecipherable.
"That's ok, close enough," Kat assured her kindly. "I know, we never give anyone time to wake up before we start -"
"Holy shit." The doctor broke off halfway through the curse and looked up self-consciously at his audience. "Kat, look at this." The nurse scrambled to look where he was pointing. "There's no penetration." He looked over at Tony, who was having limited success parsing that statement. "You said she was shot, right?"
"That's what the witnesses said. There was a gun at the scene. And the way she was bleeding..."
The doctor smiled, suddenly looking more relaxed than he had since he entered the room. "I think," he said, leaning back over Ziva, "that you have dodged a bullet, young lady. Literally."
"She wasn't shot?" Tony managed to get out, eyes on the blood-stained sheets under Ziva. "Then why -"
"Oh, she was shot." The doctor squatted down and aimed his penlight at the back of Ziva's head for a closer look. "But either the guy had bad aim or our Miss Ziva has some ninja-like skills, because she managed to dodge the worst of it. She's got a big furrow in her scalp and probably took a bad knock in the head from the force of the impact, but unless the CT scan tells us differently, I don't think there's a bullet here. I think it buzzed her. We just couldn't tell that until we got the bleeding stopped."
Wanting a closer look at this miracle, Tony walked toward bed, but quickly found himself blocked as the doctor extended an arm between him and Ziva. "It just clipped her?" he asked, leaning around the arm. "So she's ok?"
"Well, I wouldn't say she's automatically 'ok'," the doctor replied, dropping his arm so the nurse could move to stand by Ziva's head and whisper to her. "But she's certainly more fine than she would have been if she was standing a few millimeters in the other direction. Bullets pack a big wallop, though," he added hastily as Tony, practically dripping relief, started to speak. "Even a graze can have the effect of some pretty heavy-duty blunt force trauma. And she's lost a lot of blood out of the wound. She's not going to be walking out of here anytime soon."
"But she's not - there's no bullet there," Tony tried again, still trying to convince himself of it. "So she's not going to have any..." He swallowed. "No brain damage or anything?"
Ziva mumbled something inaudible from the bed. "She says she can hear you," the nurse translated, smiling. Another mumble. The nurse blinked and looked from Ziva to Tony. "And that she isn't the one with a damaged brain. I'm not sure what she means by that."
Tony's face broke into a smile. "I am."