Assignment

Two more weeks passed and they received an assignment from Gibbs. He came to them while they were in the observation room from another case. There had been a call that morning asking for their cooperation on an investigation that the police in CapeHatteras had. It turned out it was nearly identical to a case that NCIS had investigated twenty years ago and the Cape Hatteras Police Department was handing the case over to them, giving them two cases at once.

"You two," Gibbs said, looking at them after a long time of thinking about what he was doing. "We're going to CapeHatteras. This is almost wrapped. McGee and Dornegat can handle it from here with Abby and Ducky's help. Go home, pack your bags. We hit the road in half an hour."

They did as they were told and left the observation room, returning home and packing a bag to go out to CapeHatteras for who knew how long. This was going to be interesting. As they rode in the car with Gibbs he was talking to Vance on the phone, knowing that this was going to take more than the remainder of the day once they got there. They overheard enough to know that they got a cabin with two bedrooms in it. Gibbs was shaking his head silently, knowing that this was going to happen somehow. He hoped that those two would come clean, otherwise he would have them share again and hope that he didn't have to press them for details in the situation.

He continued to drive in silence. He noticed that there were a lot of loud looks from the front seat, where Tony sat, to the back seat where Ziva sat behind him. Sometimes those looks held fear. Other times those looks held hope and courage. But, those looks always shared one emotion with both agents and he knew that it was pure and unrelenting love that wouldn't ever fade away and would only grow.

Hell, he had seen it grow with time. He had seen these two go from two strangers many years ago, to worst enemies in a matter of moments. Then, they went from worst enemies to (and miraculously) best friends. Somehow, through their time working at NCIS their emotions deepened from best friends to something more than neither was ready to define. They had suffered losses together. They had been through hell together. They had been separated and reunited. They had gone through different relationships and faced their jealousies somewhat together. They had fallen apart and pasted themselves back together. Then, they had left Ziva.

That had nearly been their undoing. It was nearly Tony's undoing, and as much as Gibbs tried to deny it, it was nearly Ziva's undoing, though he hadn't seen that time specifically. Tony had nearly gone crazy without Ziva by his side and had literally travelled halfway around the world to avenge her death and ended up bringing her home from the near-suicide mission that he had chosen for himself.

They had been broken and torn apart at that point, to the point where Gibbs had thought they would never be the same. Now, they were better than the same. Since he sent them to Paris he had seen them grow closer together, at first, only as friends and partners. But, something changed the summer before this one, just about a year ago. Gibbs, of course, knew what was going on. He wasn't stupid and wasn't born yesterday.

He had seen the mistakes, and boy were there a lot of them. The number of times they were both late to work was unmistakable in what had happened with them. Then there was the phone calls that McGee refused to tell him about, though he knew that one of them had answered the wrong phone, based on McGee's strange expression and strange amount of curiosity.

But, something puzzled Gibbs. He wondered about it frequently since that day five weeks ago. After a weekend off, they had come back looking terrified of something. Absolutely horrified. But, there was hope in their eyes and they nearly clung to each other on the job. He had known that something had happened.

Then, later that week, they had shown up to work late two days in a row, once with no warning. The first day they had been so quiet that you could hear a pin drop and that was not the Tony and Ziva he knew. They were always play-bickering, bantering, and flirting (that was something that hadn't ever changed through all of their changes). That day they hadn't said a word to anyone at all. Luckily they didn't have a case, because he would have put them in interrogation just to see if they would talk about anything.

The following day they had both claimed to have a doctor's appointment at the same time that was very important that they couldn't miss and it was sudden. For both of them. That had been strange enough by itself. But, when they showed up to work (just like the day before) they were in the same car, as if they had gone to the same place. They both looked devastated, by whatever had happened, but they were clinging to one another again and sharing those loud looks that he knew they used to communicate, although it was a language of their own that nobody else could understand.

Since then they had become happy again and grown closer in the process of recovering from whatever they had gone through. He shrugged his shoulders as he continued to drive toward CapeHatteras. Whatever was going on, he wanted some answers to his thoughts. He wanted to know exactly what was going on, even if that meant they had to get into details with him. He wanted to know that they were okay, at the very least, even though he knew that it was his fault that they were hiding whatever was going on with them because of his stupid rules. He sighed.

A/N – some Gibbs thoughts as they drive toward an assignment. Leave a review.