27 What Ziva needs
Ducky turns off the comm. equipment and hooks up the monitors again, and turns the morphine drip as high as he dare. Not too long after, Tony is treated to the sight of a blond man with blood and snot on his lower face being frog-marched to the ER to get the end of his nose stitched up. Gibbs walks past, too, but all he gives is a quick jerk of his chin.
And finally Ziva. She hugs Becks and then faces Tony. Her eyes are dark and unreadable, so he reaches for the wrong weapon. "Love the uniform. Will they let you keep it?"
"Tony, don't joke." She takes his face between her hands, his poor tired face with the scraped cheek, so that he can't turn away. Why does he make it so difficult? He knows all her secrets but tries to hide his own. She needs to see that her Tony is still in there, the Tony that lives behind the clothes and the fancy watch, the athlete's swagger and the deflecting humor. She loves all the outer trappings of Tony, but it was the hope of seeing the rest that had drawn her to Rota, and seeing it is what keeps her there. That Tony, she sees, is badly shaken but still there. What follows isn't movie-love kisses, she doesn't need kisses. She puts her arms around him and hugs him as hard as she can, harder than Abby ever hugged. She doesn't care if it hurts, she needs this. And he must not care either, for his arms are just as tight.
But then the morphine does kick in, and he's soon out cold. "You should go home and get some sleep, my dear," Ducky says.
She shakes her head. "I'm going to take Rebecca home and give her a bath. But we're coming back. Gibbs is interrogating Hamilton tonight. I want—I need to watch. I need to know why this happened. But you should come home with me, Ducky. You've done so much for us already. You must be exhausted."
"Another night will hardly matter. I daresay Tony will be fine, but he's done much too much today. I should be more comfortable if I say."
She smiles. "The ICU people must hate us, there are so many of us and we never leave."
"They're used to it. But perhaps tonight we could get a cot or two. You might actually sleep."
"I can't remember what sleep is," she says.
Rebecca is tired and cross and sobs in the tub, not wanting her hair washed. Ziva can't bear to let it go undone any longer. She is ashamed that she's been too caught up to get her daughter fresh clothes, that Becks has been sitting around all this time in the same white dress she'd put on for school the terrible, terrible day before. She wants everything about these two days scrubbed off. Ziva thinks: I will give all of this to Abby and it will disappear into an evidence locker forever. Our house will not be contaminated by anything they touched. I will get her a new backpack and a new tiara, and all of this will be gone. Please may it be that easy.
She herself is filthy, but she doesn't want to miss the interrogation. Instead, while Becks chooses pajamas, she goes into her bathroom and picks up the fallen towel. It smells just as she'd thought it would. It's almost as good as a shower.