Ziva shivered. She had blocked out her daughter for so long and now she was being forced to remember her. All the feelings that had been locked away for a lifetime, her daughter's lifetime, were being revisited, the dust being shaken off.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. The day that she found out she was pregnant swam before her eyes. She had been so scared, so worried and strangely happy. She was terrified because she loved her job and she couldn't foresee her future anymore; anxious because she was not naturally maternal or even caring; and happy because after shoving all emotions to the back of her mind, she would now have to confront all of them and they would all be happy.
Her fists clenched shut. Telling Gidon had been hard but he seemed to be fine with the bombshell. Telling her father had been even more difficult but he also seemed pleased. She hadn't particularly like being pregnant but she had gotten through it telling herself that it would all be worth it. As it turned out, it wasn't.
A single tear trickled down her cheek. The day of the birth had been exciting and tiring. She felt like she had known the baby presented to her for years. She knew immediately that she could love her child and could care for it. That had all changed pretty quickly.
She had taken four months off work and had been deathly bored by the holiday so when her father called requesting her assistance for a mission she had accepted gladly. The job took her to Turkey and then to Bulgaria and although she missed her baby she felt safer and more at home than she would have done looking after a newborn. She felt secure in the knowledge that she had left the child in capable hands. Her aunt Nettie had always been great with children. She was gone for ten months and by the end all she wanted to do was get home and see her child. As she stood in the airport, her eyes searching the crowd for her familiar faced aunt and her unrecognisable daughter. Finally, she saw her aunt but she was not holding a child. Frowning, she hurried over, desperately willing her Aunt to explain that she had a cold so couldn't come. However, her aunt did not.
'Ziva, Ziva. I am sorry. I couldn't stop them,' her aunt wailed. Ziva's mouth opened, aghast. She had no idea what Nettie was screaming about but it didn't sound good.
'Nettie. What happened?' she asked, forcing Nettie's flailing hands down to her sides.
'They took her,' Nettie cried, still hysterical.
'Who? Who?' Ziva screamed at her poor aunt, losing all patience with the emotional woman.
'Her father's friends.' Ziva let out a sigh of relief. Her daughter was not in any real trouble, Nettie was just missing her terribly. But then Nettie continued and Ziva's relief was proved to be unfounded. 'They took her away to Russia to train her. They want her to become a killer. They are training her. They came in the night and took her. They wouldn't tell me where. Her father did not know about it but he told me that they would be in Russia. I made Eli look for her but they couldn't find her.' Her aunt let all this information out in one garbled breath so Ziva only caught parts but she heard enough to make her blood run cold.
Ziva took a team of Mossad officers to Russia and they found that they had taken her daughter to North Korea. Gidon knew nothing of the friends' intentions and nobody had suspected that the friends, trained Mossad assassins, had gone rogue. Ziva went to North Korea but couldn't find her daughter. After just two months of searching she gave up. She had never known her daughter and they would not be mistreating her. Ziva had lost all love for her child, in her exertions to find her, the affection had gotten misplaced and forgotten.
Ziva returned to Israel and continued her life, rarely thinking of her lost daughter. However, it was only six years before she saw her again.
Her daughter was seven years old when she first went back to Israel with her new guardians. On the cargo plane that was flying them there, she amused herself with the loaded gun on the seat beside her. They had hijacked the plane, slaughtering the crew and through them out of the door on the ascent to the sky. The girl, already trained how to shoot a gun and throw a knife, had pushed the pilot out, with a relish unknown to every other seven year old in existence. Young children sometimes enjoy pulling the legs off an ant or taunting a puppy but they don't generally take pleasure in throwing a human being out of a plane at 600 feet. The girl had grown up around death and could not remember a week without seeing someone die. Her closest friend, the man who had originally taken her, had been shot two weeks prior to her current visit, and they were now flying to Israel to attend his funeral. The girl cocked her head. It was funny, all those deaths and this was her first funeral, the first time that she honoured a memory of life. Ziva knew all this because she talked to her daughter after the funeral. She had gotten a call that afternoon telling her that her long lost daughter was in Israel. Ziva leapt from the chair. After not having thought about her daughter for many years, she would now get to see how she had turned out. She was horrified. The way that her child had grown up, the girl she had become, was worse than anything Ziva had ever seen. She had witnessed child suicide bombers blowing themselves and others to bits, child soldiers killing men without blinking an eye, but her daughter, her own offspring, was worse than them. Her daughter sat in front of her mother whom she didn't know, she should have been either ecstatic or nervous, not calm, and detailed to her mother her favourite method of killing. The description that accompanied had been extremely graphic even for an experienced assassin but this was a little girl, her little girl.
Ziva also found out that her daughter's favourite colour was red, her favourite food was lamb, her favourite subject at school was history and her favourite book was Doctor Zhivago (she didn't understand it but she loved the words) but the phrase that Ziva could never forget, that haunted her even if she didn't think of her daughter, was the account of her favourite method of extermination.
Ziva bit her lip and drew blood as she remembered the immortal words. 'First you have to make them suffer. Show them that they have been beaten by a little girl of seven, that you win and that they will die a loser. I always twist their fingers off their hand, then snap them one by one in front of their face, the look they adopt can never be bettered. If you have time, prise their fingernails off as well, it makes them squirm with pain even though they cannot feel it. Then, take your knife, and slit their arm. If you can hit the nerves on your way down, even better, their disembodied arm dances in front of you, twitching manically. I generally follow this by kicking their spine. This makes them nice and weak, helpless to your power, when you finish them off by slitting their throat with a knife so sharp they don't know what you did. They don't feel a thing until the blood starts gushing down their front. They die with a puzzled look on their face. When she finished she looked up, triumphant. Her face was glowing, her eyes gleaming and her hands clasped tightly in her lap. She smiled brightly at her birth mother before running out of the room with not so much as a backwards glance.
That was the last time she saw her daughter. Everything else she knew came from a secondary source. Her father told her some things, Ari others. Both of them were close to the girl. They were the only two people other than herself, Gidon and Nettie that knew the girl's real name. Ziva frowned once more. She was certain that Eli would remember it, Gidon called her by her new name, Ari was dead and she... She had blocked the name out. It was too personal, too painful to recall. And now, even if she tried as hard as she could she could not remember the name she had given her daughter, the only thing she had given her daughter. Her daughter. Uggh. She shuddered.