NOTE: NCIS season 14 premieres in America Sept. 20 at 8/9 c. Alex and Nick are the new characters. I am assuming season 15 will be the last season.
Bishop, McGee, and Gibbs had already "welcomed" on two new full-time agents since Tony's departure. Tony was a mad-dog. He was an aggressive, fast-paced NCIS agent; when an employee with tremendous talent leaves, a gap has to be filled. Vance expressed his concern to Gibbs, who considers a few worthy candidates but set his sights on this one particular woman.
Alex Quinn, whose work at the Law Enforcement Training Center impressed Gibbs. When Gibbs sees potential, he certainly goes for obtaining said talent. Gibbs, through all his years at NCIS, sees the rookies with big heads and faulty judgments walk in and walk out of this department, it makes his jaw clench at the thought of another amateur. Alex, a seasoned professional in the field, marked all of Gibbs qualifications. In some ways, her resilience reminded him of Ziva.
But, Nick Torres, he was something, he was more inexplicably dark than all of them put together. The agent wore a mask three inches thick, enough to put his co-workers at ease. Alex knew him from a former life, when she was his teacher. This was before his fall into a secret cave of undercover work, before he was damaged. The other team members wonder silently to themselves if it was ever romantic or mere mentoring. Maybe, just maybe, it is possible the two of them don't know for sure.
Clayton Reeves isn't an agent, as he still finds the British Intelligence a fulfilling career with tremendous perks. He is professionally confident in an appealing suave manner. Bishop finds those traits likable. Clayton acts on behalf of MI-6 when NCIS and the latter correlate in international cases. More and more smuggling schemes and deaths of Navy and Marine Core affiliates link to a very different scenario than at first glance. The United States isn't the only institution looking for the catalyst in a very messy game play. Everything comes full circle in the spring of 2017. Loyalties are tested and an intense retribution of a particular member of the wolf-pack overrides the necessary action.
Tony and Ziva principally parted ways with the team they used to know on the Navy Yard. They were no longer involved in these lives of co-workers long ago. Because co-workers don't divulge into anything more than work and office politics. McGee keeps in contact with Tony every now and then, as Gibbs does the same. Ziva still admires Gibbs and vice-versa. He never talks about her at NCIS and he rarely, almost never, brings up Tony, unless it is in reference to work Agent DiNozzo had done. He does this to distance himself from the past and focus on his team as of right now.
Gibbs was the first to know of Ziva's status when the three of them initially came back to America. The agents who came after her resignation did not know of her status, it was privileged information. McGee, unlike Gibbs, had a silent knowledge of Ziva. After Tony resigned to take care of Tali, McGoo (or McLicious) couldn't help but figure out the inside "joke" between Vance and Gibbs. The moral Special Agent McGee dug up was a solid one, one with many branches but only one viable closing: don't believe what the words tell you, only believe the evidence. He had a flashback to various assignments and under the table courtesies that pertained to the job security of Gibbs (long ago in Mexico), security of NCIS (short-term replacement of Gibbs's entire team to secretly filter out the devious mole), and then, who could forget, the actions in Somalia.
…LATER…
The whole situation is cloudy if you aren't in the loop. No, they aren't on the lam or hidden away in solitude in some state far away. Quite the opposite really, they live and they eat by the fruits of their labor. Tony works better hours at another agency in the DOD, Vance put a good word in for him. Ziva, after getting a supplemental degree, teaches literature and holds a self-defense class at a local gym. When word got around than a previous Mossad, former Navy cop was teaching a defense class, the classes could no longer be held in a small studio. Ziva steadily became a highly respected and revered woman. She was asked to speak on women's rights along with Middle Eastern subjects at various summits and schools. Tony went along for the ride and he also spoke at black-tie events held by the State Department.
The family had built a new life, away from old memories. They were moving on and after a couple of years and being together as a team, they had.
Gibbs retired from NCIS in the year of 2018, the first stop on his list of many to-do items: go to Frank. The man, Mike Franks. A constant allusion to Gibbs because no man with that gigantically ferocious persona could ever really die. So, Gibbs kept the memory alive so he still existed. But he never saw him in Mexico when he visited, not even a shadow in the corner of the room. Maybe because it wasn't necessary.
Necessity is a different breed from a simple need and a simple want. Necessity are the bare things nature proves humankind needs. Debating on love and faith could all be deemed meaningless. To one person, who might as well be called a callous man, considers those abstract ideas without value, he grades, Food and water and shelter before all else.
However, to another individual, who goes without food or without water or even a tiny, minuscule amount of shelter but knows that faith and love exist and that she existed with love, she could say that "the food and the water and the shelter could all dry up and we all face a painful death, not knowing the compassion humanity is capable of. Or you could find the faith to go on one more day until the rain pours down on us after a drought. While those who believed and loved find purpose once again, not with the things people create with their hands or machinery, but in each other, they will watch from afar as the people who deemed love empty with no need for it, go back to their corners of the world and merely survive."
She would take a deep breath and finish telling you, "Man did not create love, man did not create faith; man can only mirror a love God has given us, and man needs faith in order to begin loving another. It is a gamble. Yes. The ultimate distinction between necessity and need is what we think we need and what the nature of humanity has already given us, even if you are too lost or too scared to realize it." She looks down to her husband and her child (even if her daughter is no longer a child but a beautiful young adult) and finishes "Thank you".