Fic: A Goat for Azazel, (Tony, Ziva, Team), [13/15]
Title: A Goat for Azazel, chapter 13/15
Authors: Hagar and Sailor Sol
Category: gen
Rating: overall M for captivity elements and intense emotional content
Summary: Goes AU after Aliyah. When Tony disappears two days before the Saleem op is a go, the team scrambles to find him - and to understand what an associate of La Grenouille and Israeli domestic intelligence have to do with it.
Chapter Title: Deliverance
Chapter Rating: M for intense emotional content, including depictions of depression and PTSD
Chapter Summary: Prayer is, ultimately, for those who pray.
AO3 | DW | LJ Below:
Warnings: intense depictions of psychological debris including depression, PTSD and associated mindsets
The clink of the glass seemed startlingly loud in the dark house, but Abby - asleep on the couch not ten feet away from the kitchen - didn't react at all. Gibbs paused partway and considered her over the rim of the glass. She hadn't meant to stay the night, and so was wearing a fraying NIS shirt and a pair of sweats that was entirely too wide for her, if not too long. There was a perfectly good - if somewhat disused - guest room upstairs, but Abby said she preferred the couch and Gibbs refrained from mentioning how often he slept there himself, instead of in his own bed.
She'd showed up at eleven, straight from the hospital and so distraught that Gibbs had nearly called the hospital to demand answers instead of getting the story from her, except that it was Ducky's shift that night and Ducky would have called him if anything urgent was the matter with Tony. So Gibbs held Abby and rubbed circles against her back and tried to reign in the too-many scenarios running through his head, until Abby calmed down enough to tell him what had happened.
"He just looked at the glass, Gibbs," she said. "He just sat there and looked at it and he couldn't even tell me anything, just," and there her words broke into tears and hiccups again. "What happened, Gibbs?" she asked when she calmed down enough to talk again. "What happened to him? Because I read up on captivity and PTSD and all that and this is really really over the top, like - what did Ziva do?"
Ziva had given Tony a truth serum of sorts, Werth had said; Dunski had told them what it was made of, and Ducky had confirmed what she'd said of its likely after-effects. Gibbs hadn't asked for more information than that, because the subject made Ducky's lips turn into thin white lines and Gibbs did not really want to push this topic unless they had to.
It seemed they had to. He noticed Tony being too still, but ascribed that to trauma and sickness on top of plain emotional exhaustion; Dunski had claimed there was more to it, and Abby confirmed that claim.
Gibbs downed half the bourbon in a gulp. This would be his last for the night, as it was morning more than night even if the sky was still dark.
The thought of the damn woman and that tone of voice of hers, that look on her face, made him clutch the glass too hard and so he made himself put it down and turn his attention to Abby instead. Her lashes were short and her cheeks rosy, without the makeup, and the darkness preserved the youthful illusion, for all that she was nearly Tony's age. They fit into the empty places in each other's lives easily, and if it didn't ease the pain then at least it stemmed the bleeding.
He picked up the glass and took another swallow without taking his eyes off of her. He'd been a father more than an agent these past few days, since Cassie had said Tony has pneumonia. In the dark quiet of his own home, with a safe sleeping child and the drink blanketing the shrapnel inside his head, Gibbs knew that he'd do better by his people by summoning up the agent over the father, anguish be damned.
That held for all of them, he thought ruefully as he took another swallow of the bourbon. He and Ducky needed to have this conversation, even if neither of them wanted to and even if - he suspected - they were both going to hate the conclusions.
With nothing to do but wait and drink and watch, Gibbs wouldn't mind if sunrise got going with it, already.
Gibbs hadn't even tried to talk since he arrived, which was fine by Tony. Ducky kept trying to get him to talk during the night, and Tony still had no words - which seemed to have become the normal state of him - and no idea how to explain the new development other than Well, apparently I'm fucked up, but I think we already knew that.
He wondered whether he'd be able to stand up - if he wasn't so pathetically weak - but the thought gave him the same small, helpless feeling that trying to reach for the glass did, so probably not. At least he could still turn his head, so he could pretend to stare out the window instead of having to look at Gibbs, who was still pretending to not be disappointed to death with him.
Gibbs said something, a word, but Tony wasn't paying attention. The next second, though, someone else spoke, the flat inflection and short vowels of her Israeli accent getting through: "How much do you remember of being drugged?"
The bluntness of the question blindsided him, made him turn his head. Ziva's handler - what was her name? - stood by his bed, regarding him with an expression that was almost amused. Mocking seemed more likely, really. Behind her, sitting, Gibbs was most definitely frowning.
"What do you know about that?" he asked. At least he managed a full sentence, even if his voice still sounded like sandpaper.
She sat down. "That it happened," she said, matter-of-factly. "And what that drug is, and what it does." Her amusement disappeared so fast Tony wondered if it'd really been there. "And that Ziva forgets to think when she's angry."
She paused after that declaration. Tony opened his mouth, but it seemed all he could do was wet his lips.
"This drug makes thing stick," Ziva's handler continued, still factual. "Anything she did, anything she said, like ‘don't move'. That it got stuck is not your fault, just like whiplash when you get rear-ended." Her gaze sharpened. "This is what happened. And if you insist on thinking it's because you're weak, then your boss here should slap you upside the head."
"The woman's got a point, DiNozzo," Gibbs said, his tone dry.
No, Tony nearly said, but that would get him head-slapped, and he was in no particular hurry to have that happen.
The woman's eyes were still sharp, intense, expression otherwise unreadable. Then she leaned forward abruptly. He didn't realize what was going on until she already had his hand between hers. The feeling was as odd as Abby's hands on his face, shaving him the day before, or her laying next to him on her first shift. He almost missed her turning his palm face-up, and caught up - sort of - when she pressed her thumb to it, rubbing lines. The pressure and the feel of her skin - dry, a little rough - went straight to his head. Her words barely registered through the feeling. "None of this is your fault. It's hard to believe because this is how you're injured, not because it's false."
He tried to come up with an acceptable answer but she was still massaging warmth into his palm and looking at him with spotlight eyes, and what tumbled out was: "What's your name, again?"
She smiled. It was an odd, slow kind of smile, and it didn't disturb the way her attention was locked on him even one bit.
"Yael," she said. "It's Yael."
Ducky's after-shift report that morning had been as gloomy as Abby's tales of the afternoon, once Tim remembered to compensate for the difference in delivery. It was hard to not let it get him down, but Tim reminded himself that it'd barely been four days, and that recovering from the kind of ordeal Tony had been through could easily be months even before one accounted for what Tony had been like over the summer.
Tony had not been planning on coming back from Somalia. He'd seemed almost relieved at the thought. Tim remembered that. He could deal with the warning of every trauma handbook and Ducky that Tony would probably never be quite the same, if it meant that Tony was going to live.
Or that was what Tim tried to tell himself as he walked across the hospital, laptop and DVDs in his backpack. Tim could lay out the movies he'd picked for Tony, and Tony could pick the one he wanted or push away the ones he didn't, and that was a way of talking to each other, too.
He'd prepared himself to find Tony in a state much like Sunday, and Gibbs scowling in the chair. Gibbs was indeed scowling when Tim stepped into Tony's room, but the expression was directed at the game of Taki spread over the tray table, and Tony was sitting in bed without support and seemed reasonably attentive to the game, though he - like Gibbs and, surprise upon surprise, Dunski - looked up at Tim's entrance.
"Uh, hi," Tim said, trying to not wince at the stammer.
Gibbs, typically, grunted; Tony attempted to smile; Dunski frowned a little at the cards. "We can deal again," she said. "We just started this round anyway."
"You aren't dealing cards," Gibbs said shortly. "And Tim can have my hand."
"Aw, Boss," said Tony. It sounded almost like a protest, almost like something recognizably Tony. This was definitely not an improvement on Monday, but it wasn't all the way back to Sunday either.
He ended up taking Gibbs' hand, after some negotiations, and Gibbs hung around a little before leaving. Dunski stayed. Tim figured the movies could wait for after she left, but when she did - a couple hours later - Tim figured it could wait for when Tony got tired. In the meantime, Tony was still alert and relatively talkative, enough for Tim to try and get Tony interested in office gossip and - when Tony didn't immediately zone out - try and talk shop.
"So I've been thinking about the Somalia folder," he said, carefully gauging Tony's reaction. There was none. Odd. "I mean, the op is obviously going to be shelved, but the CIA probably won't mind a pile of analysed data, right?"
Tony was still giving him a blank, slightly puzzled look. "What op?" he asked.
"Tony," Tim said carefully, trying to not sound too exasperated, "this is your op."
"What op?" Tony repeated. There was nothing blank about his expression anymore, and he'd gone from puzzled to outright confused.
Tim stared at him. He couldn't be. And if he was, then Dunski was a miracle worker. "You're kidding me, right?" he said. "Ha ha, Tony. Very funny."
"Tim," Tony said. His voice was strained, and Tim knew that the distress had to be real because his name was followed by a short bout of cough. He poured a glass of water and handed it over to Tony.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Tony rasped once he stopped coughing.
Tim's blood froze cold. "Saleem Ulman," he said carefully. Not a flicker of recognition across Tony's face. "We were going to go to Somalia to kill him. It was your op. You spearheaded the whole thing, took it up with Vance..." His voice trailed off.
No. No way.
Tony slumped back against his pillows and summed it up: "Well, fuck my life. No, wait."
Tim buried his face in his hands because somehow, despite having somehow forgotten whole months of his life, it was the most Tony sounded like himself since they got him back.
She'd brought beers with the pizza. The 2J's steering committee refused to commit on the spot, of course, but the meeting had gone well and Ziva was confident that they would instruct the Southern California chapter to put Ziva and Oren in touch with their suppliers. Another day and, hopefully, they'd be going on a car trip down south.
So she'd brought a six pack with dinner to communicate her optimism, and Oren's eyes lit even if he bitched at the weather being too damn cold to enjoy their drinks on the porch, and Ziva called him a little girl, again, and they bickered like they hadn't in almost six days.
It was only when Oren left to throw out the trash - still grousing at the weather but refusing to sleep in a room that smelled like pizza - that Ziva realized she'd forgotten, for a few hours, that Oren had beaten a thirteen-year-old boy and left him for dead in the fields because the boy's grandmother had thrown acid in one of Oren's soldier's faces, and that boy - only nineteen himself - preferred to die rather than live blinded and disfigured.
It was a good thing that Ziva was alone in the room.
Yael was still maintaining the radio silence that Ziva had started the night she had decided to let Tony catch her, and Ziva was beginning to get stressed. The woman who pulled her off the suicidal Somalia op wasn't the girl Ziva had last truly known eight years before, when their paths separated at the end of basic training, but these many years in the field had only refined the Dunski in her; Ziva found it difficult to believe that Yael would do anything that had any chance of risking the op out of petty vindictiveness. It followed that Yael had to have a reason to risk Ziva thinking she'd been left out in the cold, and as much as she wracked her brain, Ziva couldn't imagine what that reason could possibly be.
Hours later, she still couldn't make sense of it. Ziva lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, half-wishing she hadn't had those beers. She was supposed to be going home this time, she thought. It'd been a nasty shock, when Vance had disbanded Gibbs' team a year before. She'd expected Israel - chaotic, restless Israel - to change, and had followed the news closely enough to have an idea of what she'd be returning to. She still hadn't expected the shock of it, and she certainly hadn't realized how much she'd changed - grown up, become infused with American - until she was among people and places she'd known and who had known her once. She couldn't deal with it; she threw herself into the first op that came her way just to give herself time to think.
She'd met Michael.
And when she was recalled to the US only a few months later, apprehensive at having to go back when she'd only just begun growing her roots again, she had Michael to keep her tethered.
Somalia would've been death, but at least she would've died herself rather than an empty doll carved off the woman she'd once been. She would've died, except one of Yael's cousins was Kidon and happened to be in the country this time. Yael had pulled her off that op and moved Ziva from her father's apartment to Yael's spare room within two days. Ziva spent the whole of the first day sitting on the balcony and staring out at the sea, trying to get used to the feeling of being welcome.
She was supposed to be going home, this time. How did everything go wrong, again?
Wednesday, September 23
Gibbs kept sneaking looks at him. He probably thought Tony didn't notice, but Tony isn't that kind of mentally retarded. He doesn't bother correcting Gibbs or drawing attention to it in any way. If it mattered to Gibbs that Tony was cued to him this way, he would've noticed at some point in the last eight years. So Gibbs kept pretending he wasn't sneaking looks at Tony, and Tony kept pretending to stare out the side window.
He was supposed to be happy, he knows. Relieved, at least. Dr. Pitt discharged him from the hospital not an hour before, announced the fluid accumulation in his lungs to be sufficiently low and steadily decreasing, and said Tony should get out of the hospital before he catches something worse in the hallway.
There was expectation in the serve, for Tony to be glad for leaving. Tony hates hospitals, and he should be happy to be well enough to get out of this one, but for some reason it just felt like an itch. Gibbs' expectation is worse. Gibbs' disappointment, looking at Tony out the corner of his eye like that, is worse.
Tony kept his eyes on the ground on the way from the driveway to the front door. It wasn't even ten feet, and Tony was exhausted and nearly wheezing before he crossed half of that. Gibbs, of course, took his elbow and supported most of his weight. Tony still didn't look at him.
He almost turned back at the door. Almost, because it's never an option and he knows it. He stepped up to the door with Gibbs still holding his elbow mechanically, not showing at all the impulse to turn and run. The impulse didn't connect to his body at all, and Tony knew he should've expected it but there was still a numb shock to the realization.
Gibbs threw the door open and pushed Tony through, and then there was Abby.
"Tony!" the sound of his name shouldn't have been a surprise, or the solidness of Abby's voice or the full-blown tackle of her hug, arms locking around him and it still took Gibbs' hand at his back to stop them from toppling.
"Welcome home!" she continued, in the same cheerful voice. "Or not really home, because this is Gibbs' house, but it's not the hospital, so that's practically the same thing."
He managed to half-lift one arm, but didn't get to hug her back. She was as tall as he, in her boots, and pinning both his arms to his body.
"Hi, Abbs," he managed after a moment.
It was another moment, and then she let go and took a step back, except for one open hand against his upper arm and the way she looked at him. He almost looked down at the floor again, but her hand on his arm was just there.
"Do you want to sit down?" she said.
Like it was a question. He huffed, but his lungs and he were too burnt out for it to be laughter.
They were still standing there when Gibbs came down the stairs. "There's a perfectly good couch," he said, like it didn't matter, the same way his eyes scanned across them as if that didn't matter, either.
Gibbs' living room was decked out in full Abby glory, with glittery banners hanging off the ceiling and balloons floating next to it, and the air decidedly smelled like food. It was nice, really, except Tony's knees were about to give. He wasn't going to get to sit down until he said something, though.
"Yeah," he said, "okay," but his eyes slid to the wall as he said that and tried to move in the general direction of the couch. Abby walked him there, made sure he didn't fall, and Gibbs had the pillows arranged in a nice big pile when Tony finally sat down, trying to not just collapse in a heap of bones.
"Are you hungry?" Abby asked. Her voice blurred into everything else. "I baked a cake. I know it's still morning, but it wouldn't really be a party without cake, would it?"
It took Tony another moment to realize that Abby was standing in front of him, and the hand on his arm was Gibbs', now.
"Cake," he repeated. He only noticed that he was trying to look at her because his gaze keep skidding away. "Yeah."
He's supposed to feel happy, but it just feels like drowning.
Abby had thought things would be better once Tony was out of Bethesda - Tony hated hospitals - but everything was still All Wrong. Instead of being happy, Tony was hunched in and scared like she'd never seen him, as if he was being punished, somehow. She put up banners and balloons and made a triple-layer Swiss Chocolate Cake, knowing how much Tony loved her mini-parties and trying to make up for the rest of the team not being there, but if Tony noticed any of it, he hadn't said a word.
Lunch was just as awkward. Gibbs had heated up some soup and Abby had provided the Goldfish crackers to go with it. Tony ate unprompted, and seemed to be doing okay with moving, but he kept his eyes downcast, barely said a word, kept being Not Tony.
Abby was worried, and she was scared. Ducky had finally given up the after-effects of that horrible drug cocktail; between that, Tim reporting that Tony had somehow lost - that Ziva had made him lose - all his memories about the Somalia op and Tony's behavior, Abby was only getting more frightened with every moment.
Gibbs left after that and Tony fell asleep on the couch - nearly face-planted into the empty bowl, and she'd had to ask if he wanted to nap and then he took so long answering - which left Abby to do the dishes and try to get over sniffling before joining Tony in the living room.
He was still lying on his side on the couch, head resting on the pile of pillows and blanket pulled up to his chin. It was kind of an amusing image, except he was still too pale and gaunt, and he was staring blankly into the distance again when Abby settled herself onto the chair next to the couch.
"Do you want to watch a movie?" Abby offered. "I brought my laptop and some DVDs." She bit her lip and waited for his response, trying not to count the seconds in her head to see how long it took him to reply.
"I dunno."
His tone was flat, exhausted even though he'd just taken a nap, and Tony never said no to a movie. This wasn't a no, exactly, but it was far enough from the yes that she had expected. "I brought a bunch of your favorites. The Godfather, The Fugitive, Dirty Harry..." She trailed off expectantly.
Tony's reply was almost prompt, this time, but still flat and still "I don't care."
"Do you not care what we watch, or do you not care if we watch something at all?" she asked.
"Yes."
She tried not to scowl in frustration. She didn't think Tony was being deliberately antagonistic, but he certainly wasn't being very cooperative. "I'll just get the DVDs then and you can see what I brought and decide if there's anything you want to watch. How's that sound?"
Long delay, again, and then all Tony said was: "Whatever."
This time, the frustration did get the better of her. "If you don't want to watch a movie, just say so, Tony."
Surprisingly, that got her a full sentence. "What do you want me to say?" he asked. The flatness got brittle, some sort of emotion rolling under it. "I don't know."
"How can you not know?" she asked, frustration still dripping from every word. "It's just a simple question."
"Well, surprise," Tony said. That emotion was getting closer to the surface, but exhaustion was still masking everything. He pushed himself up on one elbow, trying to sit. "I fail at everything. What'd you expect?" He collapsed against the backrest, pulling the blanket up with him.
Abby stared at him, shocked by his statement. Did he really think that about himself? "You don't fail at everything," she argued. "You're funny and you fight crime and you're, like... one of the best agents in NCIS. And you dress stylish," she added, because that was also true.
His hands clenched around the corners of the blanket. "Yeah. Whatever you say, Abby."
The words and the way he said them made her skin crawl. "Tony!" she protested, blinking quickly. She didn't ask What's wrong with you? Instead she leaned forward and held out her hands for him. "Don't say that," she said, earnest. "You're going to get through this, I promise."
Tony didn't take her hands. Instead he demonstratively pulled his blanket up, and looked away, jaw suddenly clenched.
"Tony?" she asked tentatively when it'd been a long moment and he still hadn't moved.
"Get through this, right." The anger was totally out of left field. His let go of the blanket with his right hand. He lifted it, but about halfway up something crossed his face and his fist closed convulsively, so hard she could see the shock running up his arm. "Right," he repeated, forcing his arm down. The movement of his neck as he turned to look at her seemed forced, too. "Let it go, Abby. Let -" He looked away again, swallowing noticeably. He was breathing hard.
Abby had to swallow her own growing feeling of dread before she could ask: "Let what?"
A muscle in Tony's cheek spasmed. It was a too-long moment before he bit out, still looking sideways: "You should've let me die."
"Don't you dare say that, Anthony DiNozzo!"
His head snapped around and he met her gaze for the first time that day. "What? That you should've all left me to die in peace? I should just go on living on your say-so, is that it?"
Hot tears tracked down her cheeks. "Don't say that, Tony." Her tone turned soft, begging. "We care about you."
"You don't want me," he snapped, definitive. "I don't know what you want, but I'm not it. Stop trying -" His hands clenched in the blanket again, gaze dropping, and for a second his anger seemed to tamper down, but then his eyes snapped up again and he shouted at her: "Just let me die!"
If she hadn't already been crying, she certainly would be now. Pressing a hand to her mouth, Abby got to her feet and fled the room.
He'd been curled up on the couch with his back to the room for a while. He'd stared at the stairs for some time, after he'd yelled Abby away, until it fully connected that he'd made Abby cry, had made her run away in tears. He hadn't gone after her: too pathetic, too scared, too busy coughing. Abby hadn't come down again, and eventually Tony curled on his side and pretended to sleep.
The pretence had to have near become true, because when the door opened Tony wasn't sure if it was real or some weird dream. He hadn't heard Abby come downstairs, but there was Abby's voice and maybe another person's, but the second voice - if it was real - spoke too softly and said too little for Tony to be sure he'd heard it, even in a dream. Then the door sounded again, and Abby's voice was gone.
There might have been footsteps, but Tony didn't bother to listen too closely. A moment later, though, someone sat down on the end of the couch. Cassie or Yael, Tony thought: whoever it was didn't seem to weigh enough to be Gibbs, Tim or Ducky. A faint hum, a beep and then a series of clicks revealed that whoever it was, they'd brought a laptop.
A hand settled on Tony's ankle: small hand - definitely a woman's - and cold. He would've frozen if he wasn't already paralyzed with half-sleep.
He was dreaming. He was definitely dreaming, because he knew that melody, that whoever-it-was was humming: Ziva would hum it for herself, over and over again, on days she was the kind of upset she refused to admit to anyone. Tony had once timed it at about forty seconds, before it started repeating. Short.
Then the woman started singing, and the illusion of Ziva was broken. Ziva's voice was rich and a little low; this woman's voice was glass-like and much higher. The Hebrew was accent-less, indicating that it was Yael.
Her hand on his ankle didn't move. The keyboard-clicks came at working-intervals. She repeated that song twice, and then continued to others. Same kind of melody, though: folksy, halfway between sad and comforting. All the lovely Israeli songs are sad, Ziva said once, which seemed odd considering the hip hop she usually listened to. If this was what other Israeli music sounded like, though, then Tony thought he maybe finally understood.
He'd never heard Ziva sing in Hebrew.
Eventually, he rolled onto his back. Yael's hand adjusted as he moved, not leaving his leg for more than a split-second, but her eyes stayed on the ridiculously rugged - probably classified - laptop, and she kept singing.
"Nice voice," he said in the lull between songs.
She glanced at him. "Thanks," she said.
"Ziva likes that song," he said. His heartbeat picked up. She's not our problem, Gibbs had said and eventually Tony had stopped asking, but it was just Yael and him.
Another glance, slightly longer. "Really? I don't recall Riki Gal being a favorite of hers."
"No, I mean - the first one." He tried humming the first few notes at her.
This time, her eyes stayed on him. "Yeah," she agreed and, a beat later: "It's a prayer."
He shifted against the pillows, trying to push himself up a little. "I didn't know Ziva prayed."
Yael's lips twitched, a little. "It's not a canonical prayer." Pause. "The woman who wrote it," she continued before Tony was through debating whether to ask, "she went into the fire. She didn't know if she'd come back. It's a prayer, for prayer to never end."
He was still trying to figure that one out when she said, out of nowhere: "I wasn't with her when Tali was killed."
His heart rate spiked again and, predictably, he coughed. Ziva had only ever mentioned Tali once. All he knew was that Ziva had been sixteen and that Tali had been killed in an attack. No, he knew one other thing: She was the best of us, Ziva had said, she had compassion.
"It wouldn't have mattered," Yael continued, rubbing her hand slowly, absently, where it was still against his foot. "She was killed on the spot. Ziva managed to stem their grandmother's bleeding, but that didn't matter either. She died within a year. Her husband followed not a month later."
"Why -" he tried to ask between bouts of cough.
She bent forward, put the laptop on the coffee table and then turned with her back to the armrest, knees drawn up, their feet touching under the blanket. She had socks on, thick and fuzzy. Tony's toes closed around the texture instinctively. Yael smiled a little, but the smile came a beat too late, as if she'd had to think about it.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked, once the cough subsided.
"Because the names keep piling up," she told him. "My dead, her dead, yours, my parents', Gibbs'." She shrugged. "Saving people only works on average. If you can't save the ones you love it's not because you're a failure, it's because nobody can."
The anger was back, heavy like a headache. Tony was too exhausted, really, but the anger swelled up anyway. He would've snapped at Yael, but all his words collapsed in the face of the one statement: I wasn't with her when Tali was killed.
"I hate you," he said finally. It seemed generic enough.
"Get in line," she shot back.
He almost gave her a foul look, but he didn't really want to push her into leaving. Everybody left, eventually. It was enough that he'd made Abby cry.
"So why bother trying?" he asked after a moment.
She shifted a little. Her eyes were like physical pressure, again, but she seemed smaller somehow and when she spoke her voice had lost the hard edge and gained something else. "Because whether or not I know someone has no bearing on their being worth saving."
There was something in her voice that Tony couldn't quite name. "Then what does?" he asked.
Her only answer came as a smile, so slow and asymmetrical it was more of a grimace. It held the same emotion that her voice just did.
No, he wanted to tell her, but his throat locked. She kept doing that to him, pinning him in place, but this was the first time he felt afraid at all. The fear was ridiculous: she was a lean woman curled in a ball at the end of the couch, her hands invisible inside the sleeves of the most conservative sweater he's ever seen and wearing socks so fuzzy they had to be pink or purple or something else that ridiculous. She sang the same song that Ziva did -
It's a prayer for prayer to never end.
Oh. He screwed his eyes shut, trying to not ball his hands in the blanket. He wouldn't cry. Not in front of Yael. Not in front of a woman who had this figured out when she was sixteen. He wouldn't.
Yael put her hand on his knee when she shifted her weight, so he knew she hadn't left. Rather than get up she fitted herself between him and the backrest, somehow, and then under his arm. It was instinctive, to hold her.
On his next breath, he stopped fighting the tears.
A/N: The poem Walking to Caesaria by Hannah Szenes has been set to music and canonized. (Link goes to an Ophra Chaza performance - her studio version is extremely popular. Hagar is also fond of the studio version by Shuli Natan and Kibutz Messilot’s women’s choir.) The poem goes: "My God, my God/Let it never end:/The sand and the ocean/Water’s whisper/Sky’s brightness/Human prayer."
Authors: Hagar and Sailor Sol
Category: gen
Rating: overall M for captivity elements and intense emotional content
Summary: Goes AU after Aliyah. When Tony disappears two days before the Saleem op is a go, the team scrambles to find him - and to understand what an associate of La Grenouille and Israeli domestic intelligence have to do with it.
Chapter Title: Deliverance
Chapter Rating: M for intense emotional content, including depictions of depression and PTSD
Chapter Summary: Prayer is, ultimately, for those who pray.
AO3 | DW | LJ Below:
Warnings: intense depictions of psychological debris including depression, PTSD and associated mindsets
The clink of the glass seemed startlingly loud in the dark house, but Abby - asleep on the couch not ten feet away from the kitchen - didn't react at all. Gibbs paused partway and considered her over the rim of the glass. She hadn't meant to stay the night, and so was wearing a fraying NIS shirt and a pair of sweats that was entirely too wide for her, if not too long. There was a perfectly good - if somewhat disused - guest room upstairs, but Abby said she preferred the couch and Gibbs refrained from mentioning how often he slept there himself, instead of in his own bed.
She'd showed up at eleven, straight from the hospital and so distraught that Gibbs had nearly called the hospital to demand answers instead of getting the story from her, except that it was Ducky's shift that night and Ducky would have called him if anything urgent was the matter with Tony. So Gibbs held Abby and rubbed circles against her back and tried to reign in the too-many scenarios running through his head, until Abby calmed down enough to tell him what had happened.
"He just looked at the glass, Gibbs," she said. "He just sat there and looked at it and he couldn't even tell me anything, just," and there her words broke into tears and hiccups again. "What happened, Gibbs?" she asked when she calmed down enough to talk again. "What happened to him? Because I read up on captivity and PTSD and all that and this is really really over the top, like - what did Ziva do?"
Ziva had given Tony a truth serum of sorts, Werth had said; Dunski had told them what it was made of, and Ducky had confirmed what she'd said of its likely after-effects. Gibbs hadn't asked for more information than that, because the subject made Ducky's lips turn into thin white lines and Gibbs did not really want to push this topic unless they had to.
It seemed they had to. He noticed Tony being too still, but ascribed that to trauma and sickness on top of plain emotional exhaustion; Dunski had claimed there was more to it, and Abby confirmed that claim.
Gibbs downed half the bourbon in a gulp. This would be his last for the night, as it was morning more than night even if the sky was still dark.
The thought of the damn woman and that tone of voice of hers, that look on her face, made him clutch the glass too hard and so he made himself put it down and turn his attention to Abby instead. Her lashes were short and her cheeks rosy, without the makeup, and the darkness preserved the youthful illusion, for all that she was nearly Tony's age. They fit into the empty places in each other's lives easily, and if it didn't ease the pain then at least it stemmed the bleeding.
He picked up the glass and took another swallow without taking his eyes off of her. He'd been a father more than an agent these past few days, since Cassie had said Tony has pneumonia. In the dark quiet of his own home, with a safe sleeping child and the drink blanketing the shrapnel inside his head, Gibbs knew that he'd do better by his people by summoning up the agent over the father, anguish be damned.
That held for all of them, he thought ruefully as he took another swallow of the bourbon. He and Ducky needed to have this conversation, even if neither of them wanted to and even if - he suspected - they were both going to hate the conclusions.
With nothing to do but wait and drink and watch, Gibbs wouldn't mind if sunrise got going with it, already.
Gibbs hadn't even tried to talk since he arrived, which was fine by Tony. Ducky kept trying to get him to talk during the night, and Tony still had no words - which seemed to have become the normal state of him - and no idea how to explain the new development other than Well, apparently I'm fucked up, but I think we already knew that.
He wondered whether he'd be able to stand up - if he wasn't so pathetically weak - but the thought gave him the same small, helpless feeling that trying to reach for the glass did, so probably not. At least he could still turn his head, so he could pretend to stare out the window instead of having to look at Gibbs, who was still pretending to not be disappointed to death with him.
Gibbs said something, a word, but Tony wasn't paying attention. The next second, though, someone else spoke, the flat inflection and short vowels of her Israeli accent getting through: "How much do you remember of being drugged?"
The bluntness of the question blindsided him, made him turn his head. Ziva's handler - what was her name? - stood by his bed, regarding him with an expression that was almost amused. Mocking seemed more likely, really. Behind her, sitting, Gibbs was most definitely frowning.
"What do you know about that?" he asked. At least he managed a full sentence, even if his voice still sounded like sandpaper.
She sat down. "That it happened," she said, matter-of-factly. "And what that drug is, and what it does." Her amusement disappeared so fast Tony wondered if it'd really been there. "And that Ziva forgets to think when she's angry."
She paused after that declaration. Tony opened his mouth, but it seemed all he could do was wet his lips.
"This drug makes thing stick," Ziva's handler continued, still factual. "Anything she did, anything she said, like ‘don't move'. That it got stuck is not your fault, just like whiplash when you get rear-ended." Her gaze sharpened. "This is what happened. And if you insist on thinking it's because you're weak, then your boss here should slap you upside the head."
"The woman's got a point, DiNozzo," Gibbs said, his tone dry.
No, Tony nearly said, but that would get him head-slapped, and he was in no particular hurry to have that happen.
The woman's eyes were still sharp, intense, expression otherwise unreadable. Then she leaned forward abruptly. He didn't realize what was going on until she already had his hand between hers. The feeling was as odd as Abby's hands on his face, shaving him the day before, or her laying next to him on her first shift. He almost missed her turning his palm face-up, and caught up - sort of - when she pressed her thumb to it, rubbing lines. The pressure and the feel of her skin - dry, a little rough - went straight to his head. Her words barely registered through the feeling. "None of this is your fault. It's hard to believe because this is how you're injured, not because it's false."
He tried to come up with an acceptable answer but she was still massaging warmth into his palm and looking at him with spotlight eyes, and what tumbled out was: "What's your name, again?"
She smiled. It was an odd, slow kind of smile, and it didn't disturb the way her attention was locked on him even one bit.
"Yael," she said. "It's Yael."
Ducky's after-shift report that morning had been as gloomy as Abby's tales of the afternoon, once Tim remembered to compensate for the difference in delivery. It was hard to not let it get him down, but Tim reminded himself that it'd barely been four days, and that recovering from the kind of ordeal Tony had been through could easily be months even before one accounted for what Tony had been like over the summer.
Tony had not been planning on coming back from Somalia. He'd seemed almost relieved at the thought. Tim remembered that. He could deal with the warning of every trauma handbook and Ducky that Tony would probably never be quite the same, if it meant that Tony was going to live.
Or that was what Tim tried to tell himself as he walked across the hospital, laptop and DVDs in his backpack. Tim could lay out the movies he'd picked for Tony, and Tony could pick the one he wanted or push away the ones he didn't, and that was a way of talking to each other, too.
He'd prepared himself to find Tony in a state much like Sunday, and Gibbs scowling in the chair. Gibbs was indeed scowling when Tim stepped into Tony's room, but the expression was directed at the game of Taki spread over the tray table, and Tony was sitting in bed without support and seemed reasonably attentive to the game, though he - like Gibbs and, surprise upon surprise, Dunski - looked up at Tim's entrance.
"Uh, hi," Tim said, trying to not wince at the stammer.
Gibbs, typically, grunted; Tony attempted to smile; Dunski frowned a little at the cards. "We can deal again," she said. "We just started this round anyway."
"You aren't dealing cards," Gibbs said shortly. "And Tim can have my hand."
"Aw, Boss," said Tony. It sounded almost like a protest, almost like something recognizably Tony. This was definitely not an improvement on Monday, but it wasn't all the way back to Sunday either.
He ended up taking Gibbs' hand, after some negotiations, and Gibbs hung around a little before leaving. Dunski stayed. Tim figured the movies could wait for after she left, but when she did - a couple hours later - Tim figured it could wait for when Tony got tired. In the meantime, Tony was still alert and relatively talkative, enough for Tim to try and get Tony interested in office gossip and - when Tony didn't immediately zone out - try and talk shop.
"So I've been thinking about the Somalia folder," he said, carefully gauging Tony's reaction. There was none. Odd. "I mean, the op is obviously going to be shelved, but the CIA probably won't mind a pile of analysed data, right?"
Tony was still giving him a blank, slightly puzzled look. "What op?" he asked.
"Tony," Tim said carefully, trying to not sound too exasperated, "this is your op."
"What op?" Tony repeated. There was nothing blank about his expression anymore, and he'd gone from puzzled to outright confused.
Tim stared at him. He couldn't be. And if he was, then Dunski was a miracle worker. "You're kidding me, right?" he said. "Ha ha, Tony. Very funny."
"Tim," Tony said. His voice was strained, and Tim knew that the distress had to be real because his name was followed by a short bout of cough. He poured a glass of water and handed it over to Tony.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Tony rasped once he stopped coughing.
Tim's blood froze cold. "Saleem Ulman," he said carefully. Not a flicker of recognition across Tony's face. "We were going to go to Somalia to kill him. It was your op. You spearheaded the whole thing, took it up with Vance..." His voice trailed off.
No. No way.
Tony slumped back against his pillows and summed it up: "Well, fuck my life. No, wait."
Tim buried his face in his hands because somehow, despite having somehow forgotten whole months of his life, it was the most Tony sounded like himself since they got him back.
She'd brought beers with the pizza. The 2J's steering committee refused to commit on the spot, of course, but the meeting had gone well and Ziva was confident that they would instruct the Southern California chapter to put Ziva and Oren in touch with their suppliers. Another day and, hopefully, they'd be going on a car trip down south.
So she'd brought a six pack with dinner to communicate her optimism, and Oren's eyes lit even if he bitched at the weather being too damn cold to enjoy their drinks on the porch, and Ziva called him a little girl, again, and they bickered like they hadn't in almost six days.
It was only when Oren left to throw out the trash - still grousing at the weather but refusing to sleep in a room that smelled like pizza - that Ziva realized she'd forgotten, for a few hours, that Oren had beaten a thirteen-year-old boy and left him for dead in the fields because the boy's grandmother had thrown acid in one of Oren's soldier's faces, and that boy - only nineteen himself - preferred to die rather than live blinded and disfigured.
It was a good thing that Ziva was alone in the room.
Yael was still maintaining the radio silence that Ziva had started the night she had decided to let Tony catch her, and Ziva was beginning to get stressed. The woman who pulled her off the suicidal Somalia op wasn't the girl Ziva had last truly known eight years before, when their paths separated at the end of basic training, but these many years in the field had only refined the Dunski in her; Ziva found it difficult to believe that Yael would do anything that had any chance of risking the op out of petty vindictiveness. It followed that Yael had to have a reason to risk Ziva thinking she'd been left out in the cold, and as much as she wracked her brain, Ziva couldn't imagine what that reason could possibly be.
Hours later, she still couldn't make sense of it. Ziva lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, half-wishing she hadn't had those beers. She was supposed to be going home this time, she thought. It'd been a nasty shock, when Vance had disbanded Gibbs' team a year before. She'd expected Israel - chaotic, restless Israel - to change, and had followed the news closely enough to have an idea of what she'd be returning to. She still hadn't expected the shock of it, and she certainly hadn't realized how much she'd changed - grown up, become infused with American - until she was among people and places she'd known and who had known her once. She couldn't deal with it; she threw herself into the first op that came her way just to give herself time to think.
She'd met Michael.
And when she was recalled to the US only a few months later, apprehensive at having to go back when she'd only just begun growing her roots again, she had Michael to keep her tethered.
Somalia would've been death, but at least she would've died herself rather than an empty doll carved off the woman she'd once been. She would've died, except one of Yael's cousins was Kidon and happened to be in the country this time. Yael had pulled her off that op and moved Ziva from her father's apartment to Yael's spare room within two days. Ziva spent the whole of the first day sitting on the balcony and staring out at the sea, trying to get used to the feeling of being welcome.
She was supposed to be going home, this time. How did everything go wrong, again?
Wednesday, September 23
Gibbs kept sneaking looks at him. He probably thought Tony didn't notice, but Tony isn't that kind of mentally retarded. He doesn't bother correcting Gibbs or drawing attention to it in any way. If it mattered to Gibbs that Tony was cued to him this way, he would've noticed at some point in the last eight years. So Gibbs kept pretending he wasn't sneaking looks at Tony, and Tony kept pretending to stare out the side window.
He was supposed to be happy, he knows. Relieved, at least. Dr. Pitt discharged him from the hospital not an hour before, announced the fluid accumulation in his lungs to be sufficiently low and steadily decreasing, and said Tony should get out of the hospital before he catches something worse in the hallway.
There was expectation in the serve, for Tony to be glad for leaving. Tony hates hospitals, and he should be happy to be well enough to get out of this one, but for some reason it just felt like an itch. Gibbs' expectation is worse. Gibbs' disappointment, looking at Tony out the corner of his eye like that, is worse.
Tony kept his eyes on the ground on the way from the driveway to the front door. It wasn't even ten feet, and Tony was exhausted and nearly wheezing before he crossed half of that. Gibbs, of course, took his elbow and supported most of his weight. Tony still didn't look at him.
He almost turned back at the door. Almost, because it's never an option and he knows it. He stepped up to the door with Gibbs still holding his elbow mechanically, not showing at all the impulse to turn and run. The impulse didn't connect to his body at all, and Tony knew he should've expected it but there was still a numb shock to the realization.
Gibbs threw the door open and pushed Tony through, and then there was Abby.
"Tony!" the sound of his name shouldn't have been a surprise, or the solidness of Abby's voice or the full-blown tackle of her hug, arms locking around him and it still took Gibbs' hand at his back to stop them from toppling.
"Welcome home!" she continued, in the same cheerful voice. "Or not really home, because this is Gibbs' house, but it's not the hospital, so that's practically the same thing."
He managed to half-lift one arm, but didn't get to hug her back. She was as tall as he, in her boots, and pinning both his arms to his body.
"Hi, Abbs," he managed after a moment.
It was another moment, and then she let go and took a step back, except for one open hand against his upper arm and the way she looked at him. He almost looked down at the floor again, but her hand on his arm was just there.
"Do you want to sit down?" she said.
Like it was a question. He huffed, but his lungs and he were too burnt out for it to be laughter.
They were still standing there when Gibbs came down the stairs. "There's a perfectly good couch," he said, like it didn't matter, the same way his eyes scanned across them as if that didn't matter, either.
Gibbs' living room was decked out in full Abby glory, with glittery banners hanging off the ceiling and balloons floating next to it, and the air decidedly smelled like food. It was nice, really, except Tony's knees were about to give. He wasn't going to get to sit down until he said something, though.
"Yeah," he said, "okay," but his eyes slid to the wall as he said that and tried to move in the general direction of the couch. Abby walked him there, made sure he didn't fall, and Gibbs had the pillows arranged in a nice big pile when Tony finally sat down, trying to not just collapse in a heap of bones.
"Are you hungry?" Abby asked. Her voice blurred into everything else. "I baked a cake. I know it's still morning, but it wouldn't really be a party without cake, would it?"
It took Tony another moment to realize that Abby was standing in front of him, and the hand on his arm was Gibbs', now.
"Cake," he repeated. He only noticed that he was trying to look at her because his gaze keep skidding away. "Yeah."
He's supposed to feel happy, but it just feels like drowning.
Abby had thought things would be better once Tony was out of Bethesda - Tony hated hospitals - but everything was still All Wrong. Instead of being happy, Tony was hunched in and scared like she'd never seen him, as if he was being punished, somehow. She put up banners and balloons and made a triple-layer Swiss Chocolate Cake, knowing how much Tony loved her mini-parties and trying to make up for the rest of the team not being there, but if Tony noticed any of it, he hadn't said a word.
Lunch was just as awkward. Gibbs had heated up some soup and Abby had provided the Goldfish crackers to go with it. Tony ate unprompted, and seemed to be doing okay with moving, but he kept his eyes downcast, barely said a word, kept being Not Tony.
Abby was worried, and she was scared. Ducky had finally given up the after-effects of that horrible drug cocktail; between that, Tim reporting that Tony had somehow lost - that Ziva had made him lose - all his memories about the Somalia op and Tony's behavior, Abby was only getting more frightened with every moment.
Gibbs left after that and Tony fell asleep on the couch - nearly face-planted into the empty bowl, and she'd had to ask if he wanted to nap and then he took so long answering - which left Abby to do the dishes and try to get over sniffling before joining Tony in the living room.
He was still lying on his side on the couch, head resting on the pile of pillows and blanket pulled up to his chin. It was kind of an amusing image, except he was still too pale and gaunt, and he was staring blankly into the distance again when Abby settled herself onto the chair next to the couch.
"Do you want to watch a movie?" Abby offered. "I brought my laptop and some DVDs." She bit her lip and waited for his response, trying not to count the seconds in her head to see how long it took him to reply.
"I dunno."
His tone was flat, exhausted even though he'd just taken a nap, and Tony never said no to a movie. This wasn't a no, exactly, but it was far enough from the yes that she had expected. "I brought a bunch of your favorites. The Godfather, The Fugitive, Dirty Harry..." She trailed off expectantly.
Tony's reply was almost prompt, this time, but still flat and still "I don't care."
"Do you not care what we watch, or do you not care if we watch something at all?" she asked.
"Yes."
She tried not to scowl in frustration. She didn't think Tony was being deliberately antagonistic, but he certainly wasn't being very cooperative. "I'll just get the DVDs then and you can see what I brought and decide if there's anything you want to watch. How's that sound?"
Long delay, again, and then all Tony said was: "Whatever."
This time, the frustration did get the better of her. "If you don't want to watch a movie, just say so, Tony."
Surprisingly, that got her a full sentence. "What do you want me to say?" he asked. The flatness got brittle, some sort of emotion rolling under it. "I don't know."
"How can you not know?" she asked, frustration still dripping from every word. "It's just a simple question."
"Well, surprise," Tony said. That emotion was getting closer to the surface, but exhaustion was still masking everything. He pushed himself up on one elbow, trying to sit. "I fail at everything. What'd you expect?" He collapsed against the backrest, pulling the blanket up with him.
Abby stared at him, shocked by his statement. Did he really think that about himself? "You don't fail at everything," she argued. "You're funny and you fight crime and you're, like... one of the best agents in NCIS. And you dress stylish," she added, because that was also true.
His hands clenched around the corners of the blanket. "Yeah. Whatever you say, Abby."
The words and the way he said them made her skin crawl. "Tony!" she protested, blinking quickly. She didn't ask What's wrong with you? Instead she leaned forward and held out her hands for him. "Don't say that," she said, earnest. "You're going to get through this, I promise."
Tony didn't take her hands. Instead he demonstratively pulled his blanket up, and looked away, jaw suddenly clenched.
"Tony?" she asked tentatively when it'd been a long moment and he still hadn't moved.
"Get through this, right." The anger was totally out of left field. His let go of the blanket with his right hand. He lifted it, but about halfway up something crossed his face and his fist closed convulsively, so hard she could see the shock running up his arm. "Right," he repeated, forcing his arm down. The movement of his neck as he turned to look at her seemed forced, too. "Let it go, Abby. Let -" He looked away again, swallowing noticeably. He was breathing hard.
Abby had to swallow her own growing feeling of dread before she could ask: "Let what?"
A muscle in Tony's cheek spasmed. It was a too-long moment before he bit out, still looking sideways: "You should've let me die."
"Don't you dare say that, Anthony DiNozzo!"
His head snapped around and he met her gaze for the first time that day. "What? That you should've all left me to die in peace? I should just go on living on your say-so, is that it?"
Hot tears tracked down her cheeks. "Don't say that, Tony." Her tone turned soft, begging. "We care about you."
"You don't want me," he snapped, definitive. "I don't know what you want, but I'm not it. Stop trying -" His hands clenched in the blanket again, gaze dropping, and for a second his anger seemed to tamper down, but then his eyes snapped up again and he shouted at her: "Just let me die!"
If she hadn't already been crying, she certainly would be now. Pressing a hand to her mouth, Abby got to her feet and fled the room.
He'd been curled up on the couch with his back to the room for a while. He'd stared at the stairs for some time, after he'd yelled Abby away, until it fully connected that he'd made Abby cry, had made her run away in tears. He hadn't gone after her: too pathetic, too scared, too busy coughing. Abby hadn't come down again, and eventually Tony curled on his side and pretended to sleep.
The pretence had to have near become true, because when the door opened Tony wasn't sure if it was real or some weird dream. He hadn't heard Abby come downstairs, but there was Abby's voice and maybe another person's, but the second voice - if it was real - spoke too softly and said too little for Tony to be sure he'd heard it, even in a dream. Then the door sounded again, and Abby's voice was gone.
There might have been footsteps, but Tony didn't bother to listen too closely. A moment later, though, someone sat down on the end of the couch. Cassie or Yael, Tony thought: whoever it was didn't seem to weigh enough to be Gibbs, Tim or Ducky. A faint hum, a beep and then a series of clicks revealed that whoever it was, they'd brought a laptop.
A hand settled on Tony's ankle: small hand - definitely a woman's - and cold. He would've frozen if he wasn't already paralyzed with half-sleep.
He was dreaming. He was definitely dreaming, because he knew that melody, that whoever-it-was was humming: Ziva would hum it for herself, over and over again, on days she was the kind of upset she refused to admit to anyone. Tony had once timed it at about forty seconds, before it started repeating. Short.
Then the woman started singing, and the illusion of Ziva was broken. Ziva's voice was rich and a little low; this woman's voice was glass-like and much higher. The Hebrew was accent-less, indicating that it was Yael.
Her hand on his ankle didn't move. The keyboard-clicks came at working-intervals. She repeated that song twice, and then continued to others. Same kind of melody, though: folksy, halfway between sad and comforting. All the lovely Israeli songs are sad, Ziva said once, which seemed odd considering the hip hop she usually listened to. If this was what other Israeli music sounded like, though, then Tony thought he maybe finally understood.
He'd never heard Ziva sing in Hebrew.
Eventually, he rolled onto his back. Yael's hand adjusted as he moved, not leaving his leg for more than a split-second, but her eyes stayed on the ridiculously rugged - probably classified - laptop, and she kept singing.
"Nice voice," he said in the lull between songs.
She glanced at him. "Thanks," she said.
"Ziva likes that song," he said. His heartbeat picked up. She's not our problem, Gibbs had said and eventually Tony had stopped asking, but it was just Yael and him.
Another glance, slightly longer. "Really? I don't recall Riki Gal being a favorite of hers."
"No, I mean - the first one." He tried humming the first few notes at her.
This time, her eyes stayed on him. "Yeah," she agreed and, a beat later: "It's a prayer."
He shifted against the pillows, trying to push himself up a little. "I didn't know Ziva prayed."
Yael's lips twitched, a little. "It's not a canonical prayer." Pause. "The woman who wrote it," she continued before Tony was through debating whether to ask, "she went into the fire. She didn't know if she'd come back. It's a prayer, for prayer to never end."
He was still trying to figure that one out when she said, out of nowhere: "I wasn't with her when Tali was killed."
His heart rate spiked again and, predictably, he coughed. Ziva had only ever mentioned Tali once. All he knew was that Ziva had been sixteen and that Tali had been killed in an attack. No, he knew one other thing: She was the best of us, Ziva had said, she had compassion.
"It wouldn't have mattered," Yael continued, rubbing her hand slowly, absently, where it was still against his foot. "She was killed on the spot. Ziva managed to stem their grandmother's bleeding, but that didn't matter either. She died within a year. Her husband followed not a month later."
"Why -" he tried to ask between bouts of cough.
She bent forward, put the laptop on the coffee table and then turned with her back to the armrest, knees drawn up, their feet touching under the blanket. She had socks on, thick and fuzzy. Tony's toes closed around the texture instinctively. Yael smiled a little, but the smile came a beat too late, as if she'd had to think about it.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked, once the cough subsided.
"Because the names keep piling up," she told him. "My dead, her dead, yours, my parents', Gibbs'." She shrugged. "Saving people only works on average. If you can't save the ones you love it's not because you're a failure, it's because nobody can."
The anger was back, heavy like a headache. Tony was too exhausted, really, but the anger swelled up anyway. He would've snapped at Yael, but all his words collapsed in the face of the one statement: I wasn't with her when Tali was killed.
"I hate you," he said finally. It seemed generic enough.
"Get in line," she shot back.
He almost gave her a foul look, but he didn't really want to push her into leaving. Everybody left, eventually. It was enough that he'd made Abby cry.
"So why bother trying?" he asked after a moment.
She shifted a little. Her eyes were like physical pressure, again, but she seemed smaller somehow and when she spoke her voice had lost the hard edge and gained something else. "Because whether or not I know someone has no bearing on their being worth saving."
There was something in her voice that Tony couldn't quite name. "Then what does?" he asked.
Her only answer came as a smile, so slow and asymmetrical it was more of a grimace. It held the same emotion that her voice just did.
No, he wanted to tell her, but his throat locked. She kept doing that to him, pinning him in place, but this was the first time he felt afraid at all. The fear was ridiculous: she was a lean woman curled in a ball at the end of the couch, her hands invisible inside the sleeves of the most conservative sweater he's ever seen and wearing socks so fuzzy they had to be pink or purple or something else that ridiculous. She sang the same song that Ziva did -
It's a prayer for prayer to never end.
Oh. He screwed his eyes shut, trying to not ball his hands in the blanket. He wouldn't cry. Not in front of Yael. Not in front of a woman who had this figured out when she was sixteen. He wouldn't.
Yael put her hand on his knee when she shifted her weight, so he knew she hadn't left. Rather than get up she fitted herself between him and the backrest, somehow, and then under his arm. It was instinctive, to hold her.
On his next breath, he stopped fighting the tears.
A/N: The poem Walking to Caesaria by Hannah Szenes has been set to music and canonized. (Link goes to an Ophra Chaza performance - her studio version is extremely popular. Hagar is also fond of the studio version by Shuli Natan and Kibutz Messilot’s women’s choir.) The poem goes: "My God, my God/Let it never end:/The sand and the ocean/Water’s whisper/Sky’s brightness/Human prayer."