Sorry this took me so long!

Ziva had been famously stubborn as a child.

Not ungenerous, not unreasonable, not unloving—but endlessly stubborn. "You get this from your father," her mother had said grimly with every struggle over walking this way not that way; braids, not barrettes; bedtime after Abba came home, not before. Her Bubbe David had always agreed with that assessment, chuckling and patting Ziva's face with her plump, wrinkly hands. "Puts me in mind of my little Eli," she would say, and Ziva's mother would press her lips together and refrain from saying anything.

"I can be just as stubborn as you're being," Tony had told her when he first reached Be'er Sheva.

"No," she had said, turning away from him, "I do not think you can."

And she had been right, of course.

So it had been perhaps unsurprising how steadily Ziva had managed life the first few weeks after Tony's departure. She had said she was staying, had said she needed to, had made her mind up. So after the first night—sleepless and awful—she had set her chin and she had set her goal: being normal.

She had showered like usual. She had gone to bed like usual. She had ushered in the Sabbath—alone—on the first Friday night, then the next, because although she had rarely done so during the ten years prior, now she somehow felt it necessary. She had cooked healthy things, and she had eaten them. She had walked near sacred places and watched people from around the world cry and kneel and rock and pray and wonder, and she had tried not to feel like she was an imposter in her own homeland. She had tapped a pencil against her thigh and listed out things she needed to do and steps she needed to take. She had forced herself to take action on the first few items on the list. Get a phone. Contact someone.

She had spent two weeks in South America with Monique, but it felt like a vacation, and Ziva had not wanted a vacation. She did not deserve a vacation. So she had come back to Israel, and she had showered. She had gone to bed. And on Friday, standing by the window of the house in which she was born, she had lit the candles.

She wonders if she's doing this at all correctly. More than once it crosses her mind that she may be completely unfixable; doomed to wander the Earth alone until she runs out of money and is forced to live out the remainder of her life with such unfulfilling pursuits as serving coffee and waiting tables. Fortunately, she has a while to go—that is the benefit of being the sole surviving member of her family.

She kicks herself when she has such thoughts, because they're melodramatic, but it's difficult to stop them from coming. She does not let herself actively think what am I doing, but it permeates every second of her day nonetheless.

The next Thursday, she is walking through a park when a wail catches her ear and turns her around. A little boy is having a meltdown nearby, and since watching people is what she does lately, she stands near a trash can and watches from the corner of her eye as his pregnant mother, rather than getting angry or shushing him, sits down heavily on a park bench and pulls him onto her lap. "It is all right," she murmurs to him in Arabic. "Cry until your heart's lighter. I will hold you." Watching the mother hum and rock gently from side to side, running her hand over her child's head while he sobbed into her shoulder, Ziva's breath catches in her throat. She suddenly thinks of her own mother, of her grandmother, of women who had loved her even when she was being difficult, and she feels almost nauseated.

It's not entirely an unpleasant sensation. It beats numbness. And it makes her think.

That night, she sits cross-legged in bed in the dark, and waits for the pain to come.

It does not find her. Nothing curls inside her chest except the same dull, ugly ache that had been there for months. Guilt, she can feel. The heavy weight of sadness, that she always feels—and has always felt. But she had realized for the first time today that for the past month, she had been unwilling to access the hot wild pool of emotions that might actually bear results, and it made her hope that there might be something worth fixing inside her, after all. There might be something that could bring relief. Now, she is willing. Now, she is trying.

Nothing.

Eventually, frustrated, annoyed with herself for being immune to her own feelings, she tucks herself under the covers and falls asleep.

But the next morning in the shower, her eyes fall upon the razor Tony left there. It's not his nice razor. Just a stick of black plastic that needs to be thrown away. Every day she puts the task on her mental to-do list, and every day she forgets, but today—today her eyes snag on it balancing there, and a hard-edged rush of hurt and guilt and loneliness and why and what have I done slams into her chest. Her instinct is to breathe carefully through it and go on with her day, and she's already fighting it off in a valiant effort to return to rationality when she remembers the mother from the park. She remembers how she spent last night, sitting empty and frustrated against the headboard, and she throws her instincts down the drain and lets the pain come in to stay. She droops against the shower wall and cries until the water goes cold, and then she gets out, pushing water out of her eyes with the heel of her hand like a little girl, not bothering about the fact that she'd never touched the soap or shampoo, and wraps herself in a towel. She takes her raw-eyed self to put on clothes, and when she pulls on her pants she catches a glimpse of a scar left by her time in Somalia—just a small one, a ring of tissue low on her hipbone permanently whitened by a burning cigarette—and finds herself squatting on the floor with her head against her damp knees, battling a dark haze of feelings she had thought she'd dealt with several years ago. She has the sudden and completely useless thought that she wants somebody to hold her—not like Tony had held her last month, passionately and desperately and nearly voiceless with emotion, but like the mother in the park had held her son. She craves calm hands on the back of her head and a steady voice guiding her through the worst of the storm.

But all she has is herself.

And it is entirely her own fault.

She is exhausted by the end of the day, despite the fact that her only activity has been moving from place to place within the house and weeping over her ruined family and her ruined relationships and the terrible things she's done and the things she wishes were different. Her slacks lie where she'd kicked them off on the bedroom floor that once belonged to her parents, and because there are apples lined up on the windowsill, that is what she eats for both lunch and dinner. Her throat hurts and her eyes burn and she feels silly and a little irresponsible for the way she has spent the day, but somehow, it also feels right. This is a step towards healing, she thinks. You can't atone for things just for guilt's sake. You have to make yourself soft. It only hurts if you let it.

So let it.

That is the longest day, and the worst, but not the only one.

On Friday, she gets halfway through the Shabbat blessing before having to lower her hands and look at the candles, wavery through her tears. It's not the right order of things to look at the candles before the blessing is finished, but she figures even if that's something G-d actually cares about, He has several thousand bigger problems with her than an untraditional blessing to ring in the Sabbath. She looks at the empty chairs around the table and feels her choices very acutely.

It strikes in the park, at the market—she refrains from crying on strangers, but she sees the concerned look on people's faces as she rushes past. She sort of hates letting things hurt; in a way, it feels like an affront to everything she's been and everything she's been taught. It doesn't suit her, exposing her raw emotions so openly, and she hopes that in time, she'll strike a better balance.

It's not that she's self-conscious, exactly, but she hates feeling she has no control over the way she grieves. She doesn't like that she's not grieving anything in particular. This reaction would be explicable if it were January again, her father freshly dead. She cannot explain whatever this is. She just knows that whatever it is, it feels necessary.

Plus, what else does she have to do? At least confronting her feelings and her memories head-on gives her some sort of variety to her days. And she's always been able to relish a little bit of pain.

The fall days pass quickly. Ziva goes here, goes there, watches people, reads the papers, and spends most of her time thinking.

It's a strange country, Israel. The distance she's experienced over the past several years has magnified its uniqueness; the papers concern and sadden her. It is funny how she somehow learned to be so much more empathetic to people in her own country while living in an adopted one. She finds herself wondering more about Ari's motivations, about her father's motivations, about the circumstances of her mother's and Tali's deaths, and sometimes she has to stop and find somewhere to run a few miles and clear her head, because the world is a complicated place. She cannot feel that the loyalties she has felt her entire life are wrong. But are they right? She always did have a more nuanced view on terrorism and war than her coworkers did, but now she is even more aware of the blurry lines crisscrossing everything.

Maybe there is no right. Maybe everyone is right. Maybe they're all wrong. She feels this last option strongly right now.

Many days, maybe even most days, she feels as if her spark has gone out—she remembers the eternal flame at Kennedy's grave in Arlington, the flame always burning at the Holocaust Museum in DC, the flame at the Peace Palace in The Hague, and she feels that her own flame has guttered and piffed into smoke. It's been a long time since she spent this much time in her native country. Last time she did so, she was the youngest soldier in her unit, seventeen and training for the hardest everything. But she was a different person then—a child, her hair darker, her heart lighter, her certainties so much stronger. She may be better now at not shoving her emotions to the side, but she still tries not to give in to self-pity too often, considering all the people in the world who deal with pain of more honest origins. Sometimes she indulges, though, and when she does, her heart clenches with grief for that seventeen-year-old girl. Already in too far, already seeing things a certain way, already hurting over her mother's death, her father's life. That girl, who still had her sister and her brother, and didn't let herself think they might ever be gone. That girl, whose heart sang with satisfaction when she flicked her finger and sent a bullet dead center into her target, who reveled in the elaborate playacting of an undercover operation. Just a girl. She had slept with a boyfriend she hadn't even known very long on a long training mission because he looked at her in her olive drab and braid and said she was beautiful, and she was just a girl still, and had wanted to hear it.

Ziva simultaneously remembers being that girl, feeling her feelings and making her choices, and sees her as an entirely different person, and it's a disorienting sensation. She doesn't entirely want to divorce her younger self, or to look at her purely as a learning experience. Young Ziva had done good things. She had loved ferociously and tried hard to be strong and read Faulkner and Garcia Marquez for the first time and memorized quotes and lines from poems she liked and thought them over while she was running or patrolling or soaping her hair. She had smiled at children and offered an arm to grandfathers struggling up steep steps. She had honestly wanted to do good. It's just that her idea of good and older Ziva's idea of good are very different things.

It's tiring.

It's hard work to stop policing her thoughts, but she's making herself think them all out. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes they weave around to weird, only tangentially-related topics, and sometimes they circle back to the beginning and make her miserable, but she feels it's for the best.

It's hardest when they venture to her families—both the real one that is gone and the constructed one that she left. She knows the reasons she is alone. It really doesn't help.

November twelfth dawns rosy and warm, and Ziva's up early to sip at a mug of strong coffee and watch the sun rise through the long, east-facing windows of her new apartment. She'd wanted west-facing windows, but—never mind. It's probably better this way.

Thirty-one. She holds the mug close to her chin and feels the steam warm her face. Strange, to ring in a new year like this. Usually she does nothing—but Abby could be counted upon for birthday cupcakes and minor festivities, and last year Tony had let her drive and then he and McGee had taken her out for drinks after work. She'd found a card from Ducky tucked under her keyboard after lunch, and Gibbs, of course, had given her nothing. But before disappearing into Vance's office at 5pm he had stopped by her desk and given her a funny little smile before setting a warm hand on her shoulder and leaning in to rest a kiss on the crown of her head. "Night, Ziver," had been all he'd said, but she had gotten his message—I'm glad you were born, kid—and returned to her report with a smile tugging at her lips.

This year, it's just her. There will be no cards, because they don't have her address; there will be no calls, because they don't have her number.

It was your choice, she reminds herself, finally putting the mug down and tearing her eyes away from the pink glow illuminating the white buildings. The streets of Tel Aviv are very rarely empty, but the traffic that's picking up several stories below is now comprised of people heading to work rather than people staying out late. Ziva takes two eggs from a blue bowl on the counter and cracks them into a pan.

She has a job interview today. At 10am she'll head to a different part of town to discuss her potential role in nonprofit outreach work. She's been preparing for days. No, she has no education in this field, but she has practical experience at connecting with people of all creeds and colors; yes, she has a position as a spy for the Israeli government on her resume, but she can twist that into an experience that made her aware of the deep social and religious problems in the Middle East; yes, she inexplicably quit her American government job, but don't they want people who are passionate and able to follow their hearts? She understands how it feels to belong to different cultures and the same time, and she considers herself both compassionate and practical. She had a brother with a Palestinian mother. (She will not need to mention how he died.)

She's still Eli David's daughter, and they'll still probably tell her no, but she feels good about making the attempt. She thinks Gibbs would probably approve.

Thirty-one. And her feet are cold on the linoleum. Thirty-one years old and she still kicks her slippers under the bed every morning and pads about in her bare feet. She tosses a fragrant green handful of herbs into the skillet and decides that there are worse habits she could have.

Thirty-one. It's not what she had expected, but then, she muses, what was? She never had been much for sitting and contemplating her future. Maybe that's why she's here now. Maybe she should start thinking about it—but then, these days it doesn't seem there's much to plan. Get a phone—check. Get an apartment—check. Visit Shmeil—that's an ongoing check. Write periodically—so far, so good. Get a job—she's trying. After that, everything's awfully hazy. Big ticket items, as Tony and McGee would call them, are not so easily crossed off. Fix things. Feel better. Do right. But they're on her list. She scrapes the eggs onto a plate and eats them standing up in her tiny kitchen, watching the clock tick.

Thirty-one. She certainly hopes it's better—no, not exactly. She certainly hopes it's different from thirty. She'll do everything in her power to make it that way.

"Ziva!" Shmeil cries when Ziva approaches the small patio adjoining his first-floor room, motioning her up. "A beautiful day for a beautiful woman's birthday." She grins back at him.

She had thought about giving Shmeil up, too, and the thought makes her feel terribly guilty even though she'd decided against it. He's not as divorced from the life she's trying to leave as she would have hoped—but he's old, and he would miss her, and there's something to be said for living in the area.

Now that it's just her all the time, she feels as if she lights up all over when she walks into Shmeil's presence. It's the only feeling she won't let herself examine. She can't give herself reasons to doubt her reasons for separating from her other loved ones. She simply can't.

"Come here, my dear, sit down. Have some wine and tell me about things. So what did you do today?"

"My interview went surprisingly well," she tells him, accepting the wine and squeezing his hand.

"Good! That's good!"

He sits down and pulls his chair up to the card table beside Ziva. Puzzle pieces are spread across it, mostly with their brown backs facing up. "Okay, yes? Or shesh besh?"

She assures him the puzzle is fine and begins to sort through the pieces, enjoying his spiel about Yenta, the widow in the next building he had his eye on. She has several blue pieces—ocean, she thinks—snapped together in just a few moments, and she feels happier and more relaxed than she has in quite some time.

"How are you feeling?" Shmeil eventually asks, after they discuss everything even remotely entertaining in their favorite newspaper and she has pointedly ignored the bait he's dangling to get her to talk about America two or three times.

"I'm fine," she tells him, and hands him the piece he needs for the splash of red he's working on.

"You smile, Ziva, but you are not yourself."

"That was the point," she murmurs.

He gives her a knowing, vaguely parental look, and it makes her feel the slightest bit squirmy. It's been a long time since she's been on the receiving end of a look.

She rests chin in hand and considers him for a long minute. "I feel…"

"Mm?"

She turns back to the puzzle "…like this."

When she doesn't continue, he waves his hand to push her on.

"I—hm. I had it mostly put together, but every time the table bumped," she smacks her palm on the side of the card table and watches unattached pieces skitter, "it fell to pieces. It was not put together correctly. And now there are so many pieces."

And they're all the same color and not an edge piece in sight and several of them are probably missing altogether, she admits to herself. And on top of that, she's lost the box, so she has no idea what the thing is supposed to look like in the end.

Shmeil does not need to hear that part.

"That is a very pretty metaphor, my girl," Shmeil says. "Perhaps it is you who should be the poet and not I." It is his turn now to consider her.

"You know, my dear," he says eventually, "for a sabra, you are less Israeli these days than you are American."

She dips her head, because she knows that already. She does not belong in either place. Perhaps she should've picked a third place to go—but after Argentina hadn't worked out...

She looks up to see his eyes still steady on her. "And yet here I am."

"Here you are," he repeats. "Yes. Well."

She expects him to have more to say after that, but he just clicks two pieces together and hums to himself.

"Will you do an old man a favor?"

"Certainly I will."

"There is a box on the dining room table. Will you bring it here?"

She's moving through the apartment before he finishes his sentence. The box is smaller than she expects, smaller than a shoebox, and although it is postmarked from the U.S., it has no return address. She's curious in spite of herself.

Back on the patio, Shmeil has poured her more wine. He pats the seat of the chair she vacated, but she chooses to lean against the armrest of his, instead.

"You should not have, Shmeil," she says, but she can hear the pleased warmth in her voice.

"I did not." She looks at him in surprise. "Open it; satisfy this terrible curiosity!"

When she slits the tape and pulls the flaps open, there's a littler box, barely the size of her fist, and inside that box there's a wad of newspaper bunched around a fat wooden acorn that tumbles happily into her palm. She knows immediately who sent it, but just to be sure, she looks in the little box again, and pulls out a post-it note. "Happy birthday, kid," the scrawl reads.

Words desert her, and her eyes prickle with tears. She has absolutely no right to feel so glad Gibbs remembered her birthday. It's embarrassing, in fact, how touched she feels.

"Nice men, those NCIS guys," Shmeil says, squinting at the acorn. "Both of them."

Ziva frowns. "There are three men on my team."

"But two sent you birthday messages."

"…one."

"Oh, I forgot," he says, in a way that lets Ziva know he hadn't forgotten in the slightest, "the other just said to pass on his warmest regards—and to check on how you were doing." He holds up a finger triumphantly. "I remembered that part!"

She glances at him skeptically.

"There may have been a small amount of personal concern involved in the question," he admits, eyes twinkling. "But DiNozzo did insist that I ask."

She feels warm all over, and her throat needs clearing several times.

"I like that DiNozzo. Good stories. Good man."

"You're all good men," she manages eventually, with a tiny sideways smile.

"Easy to be good to a lovely lady," Shmeil says brightly. "You look a little flushed; are you sure you're all right?"

She blinks hard to get her eyes back to normal and shakes her head. "It's just the wine."

"Of course." He pats her knee. "Did you finish the ocean?"

Ziva slips the acorn into her front pocket before she returns to the puzzle, even though it digs into her leg painfully. She doesn't need it to remember them, of course. But she thinks she may have needed the reminder that they remember her.

It hurts. But it's a good hurt.

Thirty-one. Maybe it will be better than thirty, after all.

I don't know that Ziva is in character here, but that's sort of the point. As much as it frustrates me that our last glance of Ziva was her standing there crying with absolutely no plans beyond these nebulous "fix this for him" concepts, I feel that it's actually somewhat appropriate for Ziva to not have any direction at first. She was left broken and sad, but she hadn't fallen apart quite enough to be able to reconstruct herself like I think she wanted to, and this is my idea of how she might've shaken the broken pieces loose enough to actually start the process of rebuilding. I think she'd need to access her most emotional side for that to happen, and I think that process would make her kind of confused, and not altogether thrilled, and set her questioning a lot of things and feeling very uncertain about her own identity and her place in the world.

I apologize; I didn't set out to write a novel here in the note. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!