It took ten minutes and three rounds of explanations of HIPPA laws to convince a groggy, defensive Ziva to sign the forms that would allow Tony to receive updates on her condition, but she finally did it. Hiding a sigh of relief, Tony pushed back through the curtain after delivering the paperwork to the nurses' station and lowered himself into the hard plastic chair beside Ziva's hospital bed. He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. The adrenaline rush that had kicked in when he and Gibbs had run for the elevators that morning was finally dissipating, and all he wanted to do now was crawl up on that bed beside Ziva and take a nap. A huge yawn engulfed him, and he rubbed his eyes harder, trying to will himself to wake up.
"Hey now, don't you go out on us too," said a female voice from beside him.
Tony looked up to find a petite blonde woman he didn't recognize standing a foot away. Judging by her lab coat, she was one of the many doctors whom he and Ziva had encountered since they entered the hospital. Annoyed at himself for almost dozing off and at the doctor for calling him on it, Tony started to offer an explanation, but the woman waved it away with a tolerant smile. "You need to keep our patient awake, and you can't very well do that while you're snoring," she told him teasingly, patting his shoulder. "No napping, ok?"
"Yeah." He cleared his throat and nodded. "Sure. And you are...?"
"The newest round of poking and prodding for our friend here. I'm Doctor Black, the neurologist," the doctor said, talking to him without looking as she concentrated on sizing up Ziva, who was ignoring both her and the plastic bag of blood that was draining into her arm.
If Tony hadn't been so worried, he would have had a good laugh when the nurse had come to set the transfusion up. It turned out that tough-as-nails Ziva detested needles; she had tried to scramble out of the bed when the nurse had moved to place the line in her arm. Between Tony and the impressively-patient nurse, they had calmed her down, but she hadn't looked away from the ceiling since except to sign the disclosure forms he'd stuck in front of her face. He suspected she was doing her best to pretend the needle wasn't there.
"How are you doing, Miss David?" the doctor asked, leaning over the bed so Ziva could see her face.
Ziva grunted, not bothering to move her eyes away from the ceiling.
"I'm afraid I'll need more than that." Dr. Black squatted down, putting herself closer to Ziva's level, and touched her arm just below where the needle penetrated it. "You're almost done with that unit of blood. Does that make you any more inclined to talk?"
"No."
"Ziva," Tony began in annoyance. He wasn't surprised that she was being uncooperative, but that didn't mean he had the patience to deal with it right now.
"Oh, very well," Ziva sighed, sensing that he was approaching the end of his rope. She blinked slowly to focus her eyes, then turned her head to meet the doctor's gaze. "I am fine. I am in pain and I feel weak, but I am fine. There, good?"
Tony gave her an approving mm-hmm; Dr. Black smiled and nodded. "Very good. Ziva, do you mind if I take a look at you?"
"You are looking now," she pointed out coolly. "I can hardly stop you."
"A closer look. And I'd prefer to have your permission." The doctor looked over her shoulder at Tony and raised her eyebrows. "Is this normal for her?"
"What, being grumpy?" He leaned back in his chair and grinned. "Yeah, that's normal."
Not looking entirely convinced, the doctor half-smiled at him but returned her attention to Ziva. "Do you know what day it is, Ziva?"
"Yes."
"Ok, maybe not this grumpy." Tony sat up straight and, in his best Senior Field Agent voice, ordered, "Answer the question, David."
Ziva scowled. "It is Thursday."
"Very good." Dr. Black pulled a penlight out of the pocket of her lab coat. "I'm going to take a look at your eyes now. Just look straight ahead for me." She shined the light into first one of Ziva's eyes, then the other, and then replaced it in her pocket. "Well, you look ok," she mused, taking a step back from the bed. "Your pupils are reacting to the light, if a little bit slowly. Do you know what happened to you? Why you're here?"
Of course she did. Ziva opened her mouth to tell the woman so, then closed it again when she realized that no, she actually didn't. "The doctor said I was shot," she finally ventured without much confidence.
"Do you remember it happening?"
"No. I remember..." She paused. "I remember writing a note and sticking it on top of my keys, to remind myself in the morning when I picked them up. It said..." She sucked in her breath as an unexpected spear of pain shot through her head. "It said," she continued shakily after the spear faded away, leaving behind only a general, heavy pounding, " 'coffee'. And then I went to sleep. And then..." She bit her lip and shook her head, then winced at the new pain that caused. "Nothing. There is nothing."
Black smiled reassuringly. "That's pretty normal when someone takes a knock to the head. This morning may or may not come back. It's nothing to worry about." She patted Ziva's hand. "Once you're done with this unit of blood, we're going to take you up to CT and make sure the inside of your head's clean. Then we'll find you a room and you can relax. Sound good?"
"Kus ima shelcha!"
Confused by that response, the doctor looked over her shoulder at Tony.
That was one of the few Hebrew expressions Tony had picked up from Ziva in the course of their work; she had once blurted it out at a suspect who had tried to grope her. Tony had later asked her what she had said and been a bit shocked at the answer, considering Ziva's normal restraint.
"She said it sounds good," he offered to the doctor now, plastering a smile across his face and deliberately mistranslating the Hebrew equivalent of "Go fuck your mother".
Apparently, Ziva didn't like doctors prodding at her any more than she liked grabby suspects.
Looking from him to Ziva, the doctor nodded slowly and straightened up. "Can I talk to you outside?" she asked Tony, tipping her head toward the curtain that separated them from the rest of the Emergency Room.
He obediently followed her out, mind racing with the various possibilities of what she could want to tell him outside of Ziva's presence. Was she dying? Had they missed something terrible in their initial examination and now needed to tell him about it?
His worry quickly overtook his sense of the-doctor-speaks-first hospital propriety, and he blurted, "Is she really ok?" as soon as she pulled the curtain closed behind them.
The doctor sighed and crossed her arms. "Probably. But we won't know for sure until we see that CT scan."
That told him nothing. Tony felt like all he'd been hearing for hours now were different variations on nothing and we don't know. "What, exactly, are you afraid you'll find?" he pressed, tired of it.
"Bleeding inside her head - what we call hematoma. It's essentially bruising, but it's a lot more serious when it's inside the skull than when it's anywhere else. Your skull can't expand to make room for swelling like your skin can." At his look of alarm, she raised a calming hand. "It's a small chance after this type of injury, but not a negligible one. That's why I want to clear her as quickly as possible."
"So take her now!"
Black shook her head. "There's a ladder of priorities here. She needs that whole blood transfusion right now more than she needs the CT scan. Once we get the blood into her, CT moves to the top of the list. And once that's done, we'll evaluate whether she needs any more units of blood. In the meantime..." She looked over her shoulder through a crack in the curtain at Ziva, who had returned to her study of the hospital's ceiling. "We need to keep her awake. Keep her talking."
"Why?" Tony asked as a nurse brushed past him to pull back the curtain and enter Ziva's cubicle. "I thought that was just in movies, that you can't let someone who got hit in the head go to sleep."
"It's not that being awake confers any special protection," the doctor explained, keeping her eyes on the nurse as she leaned over Ziva. "It's that while we're operating blind to what's inside her skull, we need to get as clear a picture of her neurological state as we can based on what's going on on the outside. 'Unconscious' doesn't help with that. At least while she's awake, we can monitor her for any signs of brain swelling or internal bleeding - things like disorientation, a 10-on-a-scale-of-10 headache, numbness in her extremities. You know her better than we do, so we need your input on this while we're waiting. Anything that doesn't seem right, anything that's not her - let me or a nurse know."
Tony swallowed, intimidated by the charge, but finally managed to draw in an almost-confident breath and nod. "Sure."
"Good." She patted his arm. "Now, you obviously don't like being separated from her, so I won't keep you. Go on back inside. Keep your eyes open. We should be ready for the CT inside an hour. If anything doesn't seem right, grab me or a nurse right away." She stressed the last words.
Tony returned to the cubicle, quickly taking up a watch from the chair beside Ziva's bed. The nurse standing on the other side of Ziva's bed, monitoring the blood transfusion, smiled reassuringly at him but didn't attempt any conversation, for which he was grateful; he didn't think he could multitask at this point. After a few minutes, the nurse gave the bag of blood hanging beside Ziva a final shake, patted her arm, and left the room.
Ziva's eyes fluttered open as she looked for the source of the touch; when she didn't find anyone on that side of the bed, she slowly turned her head on the pillow and focused on him. "Hi," she said in a voice roughened from a dry throat.
"Hey," he replied, leaning forward. "How do you feel?"
"Hurts," she rasped, then licked her lips. "It is as if someone is stabbing me in the head. And I am terribly thirsty."
Tony smiled and gently pushed a lock of tangled hair out of her face. Her entire head was a mess; what hair wasn't matted with blood or tangled in her face had been clipped off to allow access to the bullet wound. He didn't look forward to having to explain to her that she would have a bald patch for a few months. "Yeah, well," he teased, deliberately keeping his voice light, "taking a bullet to the skull will do that to you. Next time, stop the bullet with some other body part and try not to bleed so much."
"I will keep that in mind. Tony?" she asked, turning her head on the pillow to try to track him as he and his hand disappeared from her field of vision.
"Still here," he said, leaning forward again so she could see him. "Just trying to get comfortable in this crappy chair."
"Am I the only one who was injured in this...event?" She paused, realizing that no one had told her quite what the 'event' was. "Tell me what happened."
"You were in that corner store, the one by your apartment." He looked up at the bag of blood, which was now almost empty. "Two guys tried to rob the place. You got caught in the middle." Smiling, he looked back down at her. "Or more likely, knowing you, you put yourself in the middle."
"The robbers?"
"Dead."
"Good," she replied fiercely. "Was anyone else in the store? What about Carlita?" she added, half-sitting up in alarm as pieces came together in her brain. If the store had been open, then Carlita, and possibly others, had to have been present.
"Carlita is fine." He pressed her back to the bed with a hand on her shoulder. "Everyone's fine except for you."
"Good," she said again, returning her eyes to the ceiling and putting up no resistance to the force of his hand. "This day...such a balagan."
Tony raised his eyebrows. "A what?"
"What?" Ziva asked blankly, blinking at him.
"What's a balagan?"
"It is a..." She searched for the right English word. "A disaster. A mess. Why?"
Tony half-laughed, waiting for the punchline that had to be coming. "Because you just said it," he reminded her. "And I don't speak Hebrew, despite your best efforts to teach me all the dirty words."
Looking unconvinced, Ziva inclined her head in a slight nod. "Oh." Then, as if something terrible had occurred to her, her eyes widened. "What about Carlita?" she demanded, sitting up again.
"You just asked me that, and I told you she was fine. Look," he began, standing up, "I'm going to go get the doctor. She said I should let her know if anything seemed wrong, and -"
Before he could take more than a step away from the bed, Ziva had grabbed his hand. "Al tezayen li et hasechel!" she snarled, squeezing until the bones in his fingers grated together.
"Ouch! Ziva!" Forgetting what he had been about to do, he tried to take his hand back. "Ok, fine," he finally relented, sitting back down with his hand still attached to hers, "but if you're going to call me mean names, which I'm sure is what that just was, you're going to have to do it in a language I understand. Otherwise it just doesn't have the same impact, you know?"
The fury suddenly drained out of Ziva's face, leaving behind only confusion. "Tony?" she asked tremulously, looking down at where she was still clutching his hand. "Where is Carlita?"
Something was definitely wrong. "That's it. I'm getting the doctor." He tried to pull his hand away again as he stood up, but her grip tightened even more. "Ziva," he began, looking back at her, "you can't just - Ziva!"
Ziva wasn't paying attention. Eyes rolled back in her head, teeth clenched, Ziva was arching off the bed like a bow.
A/N: Have slightly updated the Hebrew with some corrections from a reader who actually speaks it (thanks Mastool). This is what I get for researching curses in languages I don't speak on the internet...