Author's Note:
Content warning: Some of their discussion gets pretty dark. There are mentions of suicide ideation, torture and violence, and implied sexual assault. At one point, Tony graphically imagines how a particular scar was given. Please only interact in a way you are comfortable with.
With thanks to tiva-fic-challenges on Tumblr for the inspiration, and the patience when I'm publishing this almost a month late!
And, as always to my beloved Chaos Fam for coaxing me through some of the darker scenes. Ya'll can have the dang angst demon muse back now.
Also responding to the 50 Kiss Prompts that do the rounds on Tumblr from time to time.
#20 On A Scar
As always, enjoy!
But I'm all tied up on the inside
No one knows quite what I've got
And I know that on the outside
What I used to be I'm not
Anymore ~ Crossroads, Don McLean
Chapter Text
Paris did not bring Ziva the excitement Tony expected. She'd taken the news of the assignment with her usual professionalism, arrived promptly for their plane and would not join him in humming I Love Paris on the way up to their room. Instead, she'd glanced at the single (in quantity, not size) bed, sighed and tossed her bag on the sofa without a word.
Dinner had been silent, too. She'd ordered her meal, briefly in French, but her English was non-existent. When they returned to their room, she disappeared between the pages of a novel and didn't argue when he sat down next to her and found An American In Paris airing on the TV.
As the credits rolled, he glanced over and tried to determine why she was even more self-contained than usual. Recalling the flight over, he didn't think he'd been that annoying even though she had complained that he'd fallen asleep and drooled on her shoulder, a fact he continued to deny. DiNozzos didn't drool. The unexpected visit from his father during their last big case hadn't gone dreadfully either, in fact, she seemed to like him. She was reading a book, not studying the pages for her Citizenship Exam, so theoretically that should have been more relaxing, although come to think of it, he couldn't honestly describe her as tense, either. She didn't even seem to be focusing her energy on the witness protection detail for the morning nor radiating the quiet anger that warned him to stay away. Instead, there was almost nothing coming from her.
He knew better than to think she wasn't mulling something over, but the total quiet was unnerving. She enjoyed coming to Paris and had spoken about trips in the past, mostly about cases and with very few details, but the way her voice softened whenever the City Of Love was mentioned by name was evident. He couldn't figure out why an international trip on the agency's dime, complete with several hours for sightseeing thanks to a delayed return flight, didn't seem to be as enthusiastically received by his partner.
Maybe that was it. The international trip. They'd been back for a little longer than she'd been held captive now, but this was their first time out again since their return.
"It's a relief to get on a plane and know you'll come back alive, huh?" He tossed the statement casually, along with the remote onto the small coffee table as he turned off the TV.
Ziva turned a page but did not favour him with a glance. "It is never a guarantee," she replied, deadpan.
"Kinda is this time though," he reasoned. "I mean when McGee and I shipped out to..."
"I do not want to talk about it." She cut him off, a little firmer now. "And I did not ask you to come."
So it was Somalia. "But it's on your mind," he insisted. "You've been acting strange since Vance gave us our marching orders. Where's the crazy Ninja who loves Paris, runs circles around me speaking French, and fights me for possession of the bed?"
"I am not that person anymore, Tony." She still wouldn't look up, her eyes flitting right to left across the page; he would probably never quite get used to seeing her read Hebrew. "And I said I do not want to talk about that. I am doing my best to put it out of my mind."
He shuffled a little on the sofa and tried to guess what she was reading. The cover was nondescript and blobby, with text on random colours. Some kind of suspense, he figured, maybe crime; there was a lot of charcoal grey and navy blue and a hint of romance in the crimson script outlined with silver. "You can't just forget something like that," he reasoned.
"I did not say I could." She turned another page. "But, I do not want what happened in that place to define me. I want to move on."
"Does it count as moving on if you're sitting there all caught up in yourself, though?" He shrugged, even though she still wasn't looking at him. "Keeping it bottled up inside isn't good for you."
She snorted emphatically. "You can talk!"
"Yeah, exactly. Look where it gets me." He gestured at himself. "My closest friends are my colleagues, the hottest night out I've had in months is this one, and I'm pretty sure the nearest chapter of AA would welcome me with open arms. Not exactly healthy coping mechanisms. But we're not talking about my issues. It's weird how you're sitting there all silent and brooding."
Finally, she lowered the book to look at him. "I am fine, Tony," she said. "But when I decided to join NCIS and become a citizen, I also decided that some parts of myself were not as useful as they once were. That I needed to change my behaviour, not only my circumstances."
"I liked the old you just fine," he said lightly. He was rewarded with a sideways half smile and her full attention as she tucked their room card into her book to mark her place. "So what does this new and improved Ziva David entail then?"
She sighed and shrugged. "I am not yet sure. But you do not live through something like that and come out the same."
"Mmm," he hummed. "Second chances and all. You gotta do things differently after that."
"Something like that," she agreed vaguely. "But until I know what that looks like, it is safest to keep to myself. So yes, I may be less entertaining than you expect right now."
"I don't want you to be entertaining, Ziva. I want you to be okay," he said, lightly affronted she thought he expected her to be his own personal dinner and a show. "And I get the whole starting fresh thing you're after. But I gotta say, acting like it didn't happen doesn't seem like your best move. Maybe part of this whole "Ziva: the sequel" is being more open. Talking about it, you know? I've been told I'm a good listener if you feel like testing it out," he added hopefully.
"I know it happened, Tony. All of it!" Her novel slammed down emphatically next to the remote. There was a flash of anger and sudden tension, but she swallowed, suppressing the response of his "old" teammate who might have bitten his head off with his repeated prodding. She considered him quietly for a second, head tilted slightly to one side. Then she exhaled a long breath through her nose, looking down at the floor. He waited in silence, watching her guard fall away in tiny increments, her shoulders dropping, breath steadying, fists unclenching, before she finally raised her eyes, met his gaze directly for the first time that night and spoke again.
"I cannot forget any more than I can undo it. The things that happened in that place will probably never leave me; the memories, the nightmares, the... the scars. I live with it every single day. I do not like that it happened, but I can accept that it did. Perhaps it was meant so that I could learn from it. But I did not only expect to die in that place, I welcomed it. I tried to find a way to make it happen for myself when things were the worst. They knew I would try, so they left me nothing to let me finish the job. When I refused to eat or drink, to end things that way, it was forced on me. I wanted to die and yet they would not let me, it would only ever be on their terms if I did. I never want to be in that position again, nor be the person who would knowingly walk into that." A shiver rippled through her; even picturing herself back in that mindset seemed too much.
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying not to linger on the sentence where she'd confessed she'd thought about ending her life. "Scars?" he murmured instead, finding that concept only slightly less unpalatable.
Ziva stood and he expected her to shut herself off in the bathroom, to avoid any further discussion. "You know, or can assume well enough what I endured. Of course, there are scars." She turned, raising the back of her shirt slightly. Red, raised welts, not yet old enough to fade to white with age came into view. Some patches were pinker, almost shiny; he realised it was fresh skin formed beneath now fallen scabs where blood had been drawn as the... Belt? Whip? Rope?... had cut in with each lash. "Much of my back and shoulders look like that."
He winced at the sight, reaching instinctively to soothe any lingering hurt. He caught himself a moment before he made contact, curling his hand into a fist and dropping it to his lap. "They're gonna heal though, right?"
"With time." She straightened her clothes and faced him again. "They liked to mix things up, as Abby might say, to try new techniques to get me to talk. The blessing of that, such as it is, is that the doctor believes few of these marks grew deep enough to last permanently."
"There you go, you're halfway to this new version of yourself already. Like, I dunno. A butterfly or something." Ziva's hands fell to her hips and he was quick to clarify in the face of her obvious disapproval. "No, not like you're fragile. God, I'd be an idiot to say that. More like... Shedding something tough you built as protection to be even better underneath."
She sighed again. "I do not know another way to be. I was angry and reckless, I did not trust the people I should have, and I followed orders blindly. It is going to take some time to learn who I am without revenge and duty to act as a compass. I am not even sure there is anyone under that at all."
Tony gulped, even as he'd poked until she opened up, he hadn't been prepared for just how deep she was going to get. "Start with the things you can see then, I guess. Those scars you showed me. Maybe it'll be easier when they're gone," he suggested hopefully.
Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say; the already troubled look on her face crumbled into defeat. "And what if they do not heal?" she asked quietly. "What then?"
"But you just said..." he stopped, confused.
"I said most should not be permanent," she clarified, reaching for the buttons on her blouse. She hesitated, then breathed deeply again, beginning to undo each one with trembling fingers. "This one will always be there."
For all the times Tony had imagined Ziva taking her clothes off in front of him, it had never been like this. The setting seemed right, a hotel room in Paris, how he couldn't blink as she released each button in turn, slowly revealing more of herself and the way her skin prickled into goosebumps in response to the air was right too. That was where the fantasy ended.
He didn't even look at anything he'd normally check out, as she pushed aside her shirt. If anyone had asked him at that moment what colour her bra was, he couldn't have answered, even as her finger fell less than a quarter inch below the bottom of the cup, taking his gaze with it. He swept his eyes downward, taking a brief mental inventory of her status.
He could count her ribs, still too thin after her time in the desert. Not quite so brittle as she had been at rescue, but hovering a few pounds below truly healthy. With more skin exposed and better lighting, he noticed that some patches were still darkened, mottled slightly with the last remnants of fading bruises. The tail end of whatever had been used as a lash hadn't stayed on her back either; he noticed some of the scars she had shared moments earlier curling around her sides.
Tony could imagine with painful clarity how the end of the weapon had wrapped around her torso, searing back up along her skin as her captor withdrew for another blow. The tapered lines of the scars disappearing behind her reminded him of claw marks that had first tried to pull her out of this world, and then dragged her back to it when she most wanted to leave. Returning to the place Ziva was pointing out, he remembered suddenly and quite irrelevantly that he'd once gone out with a woman with a tattoo there. It was the opening line of the 23rd Psalm of all things and "shepherd" had been misspelt. He'd never made a second date, unable to think about her afterwards without imagining their late Director. He blinked and shook that image from his mind, focusing again on his partner. What confronted him now was not a Bible quote. Or even a tattoo in the traditional sense. But it was just as indelible.
Tony knew what torture looked like, even without the real-world demonstration she'd just provided. But this was different somehow. The marks on her back had been messy, haphazard almost, beatings given in fits of rage that crisscrossed and overlapped randomly. The new wound looked more deliberate, the scarring raised and thicker; it took him a second look to understand fully.
His blood ran cold as he realised it was Arabic, each character had been purposefully etched into her skin.
"Oh god, Ziva..." His knowledge of forensics overrode his desire to protect himself, assessing the damage before he could stop. The scar was short, probably a single word, quick enough to leave her conscious for the whole process and carved directly over the bone to cause maximum pain. The blade had been sharp enough to leave the lines clean, each one stark and angry against her usual tanned skin. It had never been Saleem's intent to have Ziva survive the ordeal, but it seemed that he had prepared for the wildcard that led to her escape anyway, repeating this many times during her captivity and branding her in a way that she would carry forever.
He knew better than to ask for a translation.
The coldly calculated nature of it all struck him hard. His stomach churned and he tasted bile, turning his head away with a rush of shame at his response. This was far worse than anything he had ever imagined. His mind swirled with ways to fix it for her, suggestions, solutions, anything to erase it. He wanted to ask her about skin grafts, laser treatment, or that weird oil that always appeared on the shopping channel at 2 am. She didn't seem to want answers though, just to be seen.
"It's still new," he offered, still not quite brave enough to let his eyes drift back to where it lay. "It won't always look so rough." Even as he spoke it sounded weak.
Ziva gave a disappointed sigh but didn't comment on his cowardice at being unable to look at her. She tugged her shirt back across her body but did not button it and sank beside him again. "It is not as simple as waiting for my skin to heal," she said when he found the courage to look her in the eye again. "This will always be with me. No matter how many times I redefine myself, I will always wear this reminder that at one point in my life, this was true of who I was, who I am."
"Come on Ninja, you don't care what other people think about you," he reminded her, the falsely upbeat tone nearly choking him. "I know you better than to think you're going to let a single word defeat you."
She hummed dispassionately. "You cannot read it."
"I can't," he agreed with a shrug. "Doesn't mean I'd believe it if I could."
Ziva's eyes grew far away and fixed on a point that might not have even been in the room. "Traitor, infidel, coward, whore. It does not matter." She listed them off monotone. He didn't know if any of them were true, but each suggestion was as plausible and horrifying as the one before it. "You could not even look at it for more than a second, Tony. Even now, I cannot bear to look in the mirror until I am dressed. If I ever reach a point where I want to..." She paused and shook her head, unable to end the sentence and the look of shame that crossed her face confirmed what he had long suspected. What she had suffered had not only been about inflicting pain but also a violation in the most intimate sense. "Well, it is not exactly something people will find attractive," she finished. Tony could tell she was deflecting her emotional worries to the more superficial one of physical appearance.
"Look at me." With that new revelation on the table, he curbed the instinct to reach across and turn her chin till she faced him and instead waited for her to come back of her own will. "Anyone worth doing that with will be crazy about you for a million other reasons. Whatever that looks like or however it got there won't matter, who you are will be way more important."
"Tony..." Ziva's voice cracked. Her broken tone made his heart ache for her with a visceral jolt that he felt in his chest. "That is what I have been telling you all along. I do not know who I am right now."
