keep it upstairs {ncis - tony, ziva}
Title: Keep It Upstairs
Fandom: NCIS
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Ziva (implied ship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,532
Author's Note: I pretty much never write in this fandom, no matter how religiously I watch. This is, therefore, a fluke. I hope it's a good one.
Summary: Post "Rule Fifty-One". His return is met with relative indifference from across the bullpen; it probably doesn’t help that he forgets all about why.
my head is a three-star hotel, oh no,
I might be missing something
these are the kinds of things we should worry about
(the national; keep it upstairs)
-
His return is met with relative indifference from across the bullpen.
It probably doesn’t help that Tony forgets all about why, despite the multitude of hints that McGee drops for the first half hour. He’s got images of busy Mexican streets and narrow alleys, the way the air had smelt vaguely spicy and his chest had felt unreasonably tight.
It probably doesn’t help that the murder of Jackson Gibbs, in cold blood in the middle of his store, sets off the week-long vendetta from hell that only ends with at least a dozen dead in his wake, after Gibbs was through; even then they still never found Reynosa. Tony ended up with him in Pennsylvania, and Ziva followed him straight to Mexico, and between phone records and customs checks and the six different times Vance needed answers now their personal lives didn’t even rate.
They just don’t deal with it.
And then one day, when it’s all over and Gibbs is at a funeral that he won’t let them go to, Tony comes into work and finds his partner won’t give him more than the most cursory of glances and the shortest of sentences.
-
“She’s pretty mad isn’t she?” Palmer kind of smiles when he says it, but more like he’s on the edge of nervous laughter than anything close to joy. Ziva hadn’t held the elevator heading out of autopsy - hell, she hadn’t even held the door. The tension is no longer just palpable, it’s glaringly so.
It’s been three days.
“What, uh,” he lets go of the door, drops his voice and jockeys himself around the unoccupied table to stand closer to Jimmy and, therefore, farther out of Ducky’s earshot, “what makes you say that?”
“You missed her citizenship ceremony. You and Gibbs - ” he looks down, which is good because it saves Tony from having to cover the slow realization that, yeah, this isn’t some petty fight that they’re having, “although I guess he had a pretty good reason for that.”
“So did I,” he replies, even if Ziva doesn’t know that and Jimmy definitely doesn’t know that, nor is he the one who needs any sort of explanation out of him.
“Did you try telling her that?”
Tony fixes him with a hard look that is really undeserved when you consider his intentions; his awareness of that fact doesn’t exactly stop it from happening. Nor does it stop his next words from being, “Back to work, autopsy gremlin.”
He thinks the nod at the end, as he’s walking out, probably saves Jimmy from feeling offended or being mad at him. He’s already got enough of that to deal with as is.
-
He corners her in the bathroom.
It’s a stupid idea.
He’s fairly sure claiming innocence under the pretense of ‘she started it’ also falls under the umbrella of stupid.
“I wasn’t there because I was under orders from the director,” he says, six inches separating them, their reflections in the expanse of the mirror above the sinks. Her eyes are hard and she turns the water off with a quick flick of her wrist that sends water droplets flying along the bottom of the mirror, one landing on her shirt and turning a small dot of fabric a shade of blue so dark it’s nearly black.
There’s a second where he considers resting a hand on her arm, on her shoulder, the ease of just reaching out and reconnecting, at least physically, but she turns, misjudging the distance and her hips end up backed up against the edge of the sink to preserve the space between them.
She swallows and all traces of anger in her expression are replaced by nothing but neutrality. That’s almost worse.
“Yes,” she nods, short and unbelieving, “you do always seem to be.”
He has no question as to what he did wrong there, as the door swings on its hinges before settling back into place, with her on the other side of it.
The ghosts of Jenny and Jeanne Benoit are there to keep him company anyway.
-
Things stay cold between them, against all odds.
Gibbs doesn’t send anybody out alone these days, no matter how mundane the task. Ziva goes with Tony everywhere, and Gibbs goes with McGee. There’s never much diverging from that pattern and it’s not that Tony wants there to be, it just makes for mostly quiet car rides, depending on who’s driving. With her, they’ve still got the screeching tires and occasional blaring horn.
At first, he reads Ziva’s constant accompaniment as a sign that Gibbs has more faith in her abilities than Tony’s. It takes a while for that feeling to go away.
-
Specifically, it takes an accident that would’ve been labeled as ridiculous under any other set of circumstances. They do some snooping around for their latest case, absent a warrant, and make it out of the suspect’s apartment and around the corner just in time for the guy to put his key in the lock.
And then they walk into the wrong action movie and end up tied to chairs while two semi-freaked out twenty-something year olds alternate between threatening them with their guns and panicking when they figure out who they work for. They appear to have been planning to rob the convenience store one street over, probably doomed to be taken down by a brave civilian or the clerk behind the counter with a gun - because, let’s face it, there are nicer, safer parts of D.C. than this - at least until Tony and Ziva came a little too close to where they were holed up and spooked them.
They had the element of surprise going for them and nothing else. Well, that and the fact that he wasn’t overly concerned with their situation enough to really give it his all to try and get out of it. Tony had enough time to send a quick text to McGee, something that would alert him to the fact that all had not gone as planned, before these guys even thought to check for phones.
It made Tony laugh. Ziva remained oddly silent and, with their position back-to-back, he couldn’t exactly see her face to figure out if she was as amused as he was at their predicament. He was willing to bet not. It kept him talking, shifting their attention to him and him only.
The whole thing lasted a little over half an hour before Gibbs and McGee were busting down the door and the guys ended up in the back of some local LEO’s car in handcuffs when all was said and done.
He could’ve blown it off if Ziva hadn’t answered the last three people who asked her if she was alright with “I’ll be fine”.
It was the future tense mixed with the unsteady tone that bothered him.
-
Later, Gibbs substitutes the usual slap to the back of the head for a passing pat on the shoulder and a very pointed “good work, DiNozzo.”
He doesn’t really hear that a lot.
Then again, Ziva isn’t usually one to take situations like this sitting down. She’s usually the one to beat the shit of people and save herself and, occasionally, him in the process.
It’s then that he figures out that pairing them together full time now has nothing to do with a question of competence and everything to do with the balance that opposite skill-sets, and the overwhelming shared desire for one to protect the other at all costs, provided. They were just plain safer together than apart, fighting or not.
“Thanks, Boss,” he manages, but Gibbs has already gone.
-
They leave in the same elevator, her car parked two rows down from his. He listens to the beep that sounds when he presses the button to unlock it, echoes in the fairly empty garage, and his nod is met with a weak smile - it’s the only goodbye they’ve known for some weeks now.
He stops with his hand on the car door, palm folded over the sharp corner, keys loosely held in the other. “Ziva.”
When she turns, he’s hoping for vulnerability. It would make everything that much easier.
Ziva doesn’t do vulnerability. Three months in Somalia and death seconds from banging down the door got her defiance, sadness, and emptiness. Those were things he’d seen before. Even the terror that lingered on the edges was tinged with familiarity.
There wasn’t vulnerability in Somalia and there isn’t going to be any here.
“Yes?”
He’s never been very good at it either. “Have a good night.”
It’s the world’s biggest copout, but they both do a great job of pretending that it isn’t.
-
He ends up outside of her apartment within a few short hours.
It wasn’t where he meant to go. He meant to go home. He meant to get a drink. He meant to go see what McGee was doing tonight.
He meant to be at that ceremony but he ended up in Mexico instead. His good intentions don’t usually pan out.
The bad ones - well, he’s never had much of a problem with those.
She lets him in without a word, nothing more than a quick glance, resignation on her features. Maybe this has been coming for awhile.
They certainly can’t stay this way.
This can be fixed, with a combination of the right words and the right actions, a dance they’ve never been able to nail down.
Ziva’s disappeared into the kitchen, for what purpose he doesn’t know, and he closes the door behind him, starts talking before it’s clicked into place. His mouth always has worked faster than his brain. “I came here to apologize. Again. But, see, I don’t think I’m the only one who needs to.”
Correction, he thinks: could have been fixed.
-
The bottom of a glass knocks against the counter at an angle, doesn’t shatter, and there’s running water from the sink a moment later. She keeps her body turned away from him; he keeps his in the doorway to the kitchen.
“I know it was important to you. And you’ve got to know that I would’ve been there if I could; I meant what I said.”
“You say a lot of things, Tony,” she turns so she’s in profile, her hands braced on the counter, her eyes straight ahead and finding nothing but cream colored walls. “Many of them have involved waxing poetic on the failure of your government. Which am I supposed to believe?”
“Hey, waxing poetic, that’s another one,” he points out, before realizing that those instances where her idioms and phrases need correcting are becoming fewer and farther between. He misses those. He misses the playful frustration, the small smile she’d shoot at him when no one else was looking, silent thank you. Her face remains serious and he forces his into an approximation of the same emotion. “You knew I was joking. You had to know I was joking.”
“I find it is hard to tell anymore.”
“I want you here, Ziva. I would’ve thought you would’ve figured that out when we all hauled ass to Somalia to get you back.” The fact that they thought she was dead isn’t worth mentioning again, he thinks. Facts might not have been in his favor but there was still a part of Tony, a fast fading part, that had thought there was still a chance they’d find her. She had gone too silently.
She flinches, fingers curling and releasing, tension finding it’s way into her shoulders.
And there it is. The reason she’d been so quiet today, the reason she’d clammed up when they found themselves tied up and threatened in the back of some old warehouse. Memories, especially the bad ones, always get you in the end.
He’s been noticing that’s true for her more and more lately.
But that’s not what they’re talking about. They can’t go there until they’ve dealt with this.
“I was wrong to throw Jeanne back in your face;” there’s the tiniest flicker of hope in him, one that she effectively kills, as she finishes, “that is what you want me to say, yes?”
“Something like that.”
She absorbs this information, giving a nod to nothing in particular. That glass sits next to her, untouched and half-full, moisture beading along the sides of it. It’s warm in here; he just hadn’t noticed in the face of the annual heat wave that always seems to mark the changeover from July to August in D.C.
“I swear, if it was up to me I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” There is a sad smile on her lips, but it is a smile nonetheless. It serves as the last push he needs to reach out, a hand on her arm, turn her until it’s him she’s looking at instead of the walls. Her ponytail bobs when she nods again, and he restrains his hands to resting on her arms, keeps himself from pulling her into him.
Baby steps.
She’s been back for months and it’s all still baby steps.
“I am sorry for what I said. For bringing up Jeanne.” She wraps her fingers around his wrist, pulls his hand so that it lands flat on the counter, then covers it with her own. “I was wrong to do that.”
“And I was wrong not to tell you about Mexico sooner.”
She meets his eyes for the first time since he walked in the door and they’re never going to be exactly the way they were before Michael Rivkin got into the mix, or even before Jeanne did, but there’s a chance that different won’t be so bad.
He holds onto that.
He has to.
-
At work in the morning, he pulls up their suspect’s bank account records and she doesn’t wait until he puts them up on the screen to show Gibbs, instead half-draping herself over his shoulder in order to get a good look.
Like old times.
He breathes easier and she stays behind his desk, easy banter moving between them, for the better part of the next fifteen minutes while they wait for Gibbs to get back from Abby’s lab.
-
The next time he shows up to her apartment, he brings food.
She eyes the bag in his hands before taking it from him. “I’m surprised it’s not Chinese.”
Chinese or pizza had been their mainstays back in the day, where they did dinner on a regular basis; sometimes she cooked. “Well, you’re an American now. Figured bringing Chinese food to celebrate that would be sending mixed messages.”
“Celebrate?” She murmurs, moving towards the kitchen with him on her heels. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
He raises an eyebrow.
She hits him square in the chest with a stack of napkins.
Fandom: NCIS
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Ziva (implied ship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,532
Author's Note: I pretty much never write in this fandom, no matter how religiously I watch. This is, therefore, a fluke. I hope it's a good one.
Summary: Post "Rule Fifty-One". His return is met with relative indifference from across the bullpen; it probably doesn’t help that he forgets all about why.
my head is a three-star hotel, oh no,
I might be missing something
these are the kinds of things we should worry about
(the national; keep it upstairs)
-
His return is met with relative indifference from across the bullpen.
It probably doesn’t help that Tony forgets all about why, despite the multitude of hints that McGee drops for the first half hour. He’s got images of busy Mexican streets and narrow alleys, the way the air had smelt vaguely spicy and his chest had felt unreasonably tight.
It probably doesn’t help that the murder of Jackson Gibbs, in cold blood in the middle of his store, sets off the week-long vendetta from hell that only ends with at least a dozen dead in his wake, after Gibbs was through; even then they still never found Reynosa. Tony ended up with him in Pennsylvania, and Ziva followed him straight to Mexico, and between phone records and customs checks and the six different times Vance needed answers now their personal lives didn’t even rate.
They just don’t deal with it.
And then one day, when it’s all over and Gibbs is at a funeral that he won’t let them go to, Tony comes into work and finds his partner won’t give him more than the most cursory of glances and the shortest of sentences.
-
“She’s pretty mad isn’t she?” Palmer kind of smiles when he says it, but more like he’s on the edge of nervous laughter than anything close to joy. Ziva hadn’t held the elevator heading out of autopsy - hell, she hadn’t even held the door. The tension is no longer just palpable, it’s glaringly so.
It’s been three days.
“What, uh,” he lets go of the door, drops his voice and jockeys himself around the unoccupied table to stand closer to Jimmy and, therefore, farther out of Ducky’s earshot, “what makes you say that?”
“You missed her citizenship ceremony. You and Gibbs - ” he looks down, which is good because it saves Tony from having to cover the slow realization that, yeah, this isn’t some petty fight that they’re having, “although I guess he had a pretty good reason for that.”
“So did I,” he replies, even if Ziva doesn’t know that and Jimmy definitely doesn’t know that, nor is he the one who needs any sort of explanation out of him.
“Did you try telling her that?”
Tony fixes him with a hard look that is really undeserved when you consider his intentions; his awareness of that fact doesn’t exactly stop it from happening. Nor does it stop his next words from being, “Back to work, autopsy gremlin.”
He thinks the nod at the end, as he’s walking out, probably saves Jimmy from feeling offended or being mad at him. He’s already got enough of that to deal with as is.
-
He corners her in the bathroom.
It’s a stupid idea.
He’s fairly sure claiming innocence under the pretense of ‘she started it’ also falls under the umbrella of stupid.
“I wasn’t there because I was under orders from the director,” he says, six inches separating them, their reflections in the expanse of the mirror above the sinks. Her eyes are hard and she turns the water off with a quick flick of her wrist that sends water droplets flying along the bottom of the mirror, one landing on her shirt and turning a small dot of fabric a shade of blue so dark it’s nearly black.
There’s a second where he considers resting a hand on her arm, on her shoulder, the ease of just reaching out and reconnecting, at least physically, but she turns, misjudging the distance and her hips end up backed up against the edge of the sink to preserve the space between them.
She swallows and all traces of anger in her expression are replaced by nothing but neutrality. That’s almost worse.
“Yes,” she nods, short and unbelieving, “you do always seem to be.”
He has no question as to what he did wrong there, as the door swings on its hinges before settling back into place, with her on the other side of it.
The ghosts of Jenny and Jeanne Benoit are there to keep him company anyway.
-
Things stay cold between them, against all odds.
Gibbs doesn’t send anybody out alone these days, no matter how mundane the task. Ziva goes with Tony everywhere, and Gibbs goes with McGee. There’s never much diverging from that pattern and it’s not that Tony wants there to be, it just makes for mostly quiet car rides, depending on who’s driving. With her, they’ve still got the screeching tires and occasional blaring horn.
At first, he reads Ziva’s constant accompaniment as a sign that Gibbs has more faith in her abilities than Tony’s. It takes a while for that feeling to go away.
-
Specifically, it takes an accident that would’ve been labeled as ridiculous under any other set of circumstances. They do some snooping around for their latest case, absent a warrant, and make it out of the suspect’s apartment and around the corner just in time for the guy to put his key in the lock.
And then they walk into the wrong action movie and end up tied to chairs while two semi-freaked out twenty-something year olds alternate between threatening them with their guns and panicking when they figure out who they work for. They appear to have been planning to rob the convenience store one street over, probably doomed to be taken down by a brave civilian or the clerk behind the counter with a gun - because, let’s face it, there are nicer, safer parts of D.C. than this - at least until Tony and Ziva came a little too close to where they were holed up and spooked them.
They had the element of surprise going for them and nothing else. Well, that and the fact that he wasn’t overly concerned with their situation enough to really give it his all to try and get out of it. Tony had enough time to send a quick text to McGee, something that would alert him to the fact that all had not gone as planned, before these guys even thought to check for phones.
It made Tony laugh. Ziva remained oddly silent and, with their position back-to-back, he couldn’t exactly see her face to figure out if she was as amused as he was at their predicament. He was willing to bet not. It kept him talking, shifting their attention to him and him only.
The whole thing lasted a little over half an hour before Gibbs and McGee were busting down the door and the guys ended up in the back of some local LEO’s car in handcuffs when all was said and done.
He could’ve blown it off if Ziva hadn’t answered the last three people who asked her if she was alright with “I’ll be fine”.
It was the future tense mixed with the unsteady tone that bothered him.
-
Later, Gibbs substitutes the usual slap to the back of the head for a passing pat on the shoulder and a very pointed “good work, DiNozzo.”
He doesn’t really hear that a lot.
Then again, Ziva isn’t usually one to take situations like this sitting down. She’s usually the one to beat the shit of people and save herself and, occasionally, him in the process.
It’s then that he figures out that pairing them together full time now has nothing to do with a question of competence and everything to do with the balance that opposite skill-sets, and the overwhelming shared desire for one to protect the other at all costs, provided. They were just plain safer together than apart, fighting or not.
“Thanks, Boss,” he manages, but Gibbs has already gone.
-
They leave in the same elevator, her car parked two rows down from his. He listens to the beep that sounds when he presses the button to unlock it, echoes in the fairly empty garage, and his nod is met with a weak smile - it’s the only goodbye they’ve known for some weeks now.
He stops with his hand on the car door, palm folded over the sharp corner, keys loosely held in the other. “Ziva.”
When she turns, he’s hoping for vulnerability. It would make everything that much easier.
Ziva doesn’t do vulnerability. Three months in Somalia and death seconds from banging down the door got her defiance, sadness, and emptiness. Those were things he’d seen before. Even the terror that lingered on the edges was tinged with familiarity.
There wasn’t vulnerability in Somalia and there isn’t going to be any here.
“Yes?”
He’s never been very good at it either. “Have a good night.”
It’s the world’s biggest copout, but they both do a great job of pretending that it isn’t.
-
He ends up outside of her apartment within a few short hours.
It wasn’t where he meant to go. He meant to go home. He meant to get a drink. He meant to go see what McGee was doing tonight.
He meant to be at that ceremony but he ended up in Mexico instead. His good intentions don’t usually pan out.
The bad ones - well, he’s never had much of a problem with those.
She lets him in without a word, nothing more than a quick glance, resignation on her features. Maybe this has been coming for awhile.
They certainly can’t stay this way.
This can be fixed, with a combination of the right words and the right actions, a dance they’ve never been able to nail down.
Ziva’s disappeared into the kitchen, for what purpose he doesn’t know, and he closes the door behind him, starts talking before it’s clicked into place. His mouth always has worked faster than his brain. “I came here to apologize. Again. But, see, I don’t think I’m the only one who needs to.”
Correction, he thinks: could have been fixed.
-
The bottom of a glass knocks against the counter at an angle, doesn’t shatter, and there’s running water from the sink a moment later. She keeps her body turned away from him; he keeps his in the doorway to the kitchen.
“I know it was important to you. And you’ve got to know that I would’ve been there if I could; I meant what I said.”
“You say a lot of things, Tony,” she turns so she’s in profile, her hands braced on the counter, her eyes straight ahead and finding nothing but cream colored walls. “Many of them have involved waxing poetic on the failure of your government. Which am I supposed to believe?”
“Hey, waxing poetic, that’s another one,” he points out, before realizing that those instances where her idioms and phrases need correcting are becoming fewer and farther between. He misses those. He misses the playful frustration, the small smile she’d shoot at him when no one else was looking, silent thank you. Her face remains serious and he forces his into an approximation of the same emotion. “You knew I was joking. You had to know I was joking.”
“I find it is hard to tell anymore.”
“I want you here, Ziva. I would’ve thought you would’ve figured that out when we all hauled ass to Somalia to get you back.” The fact that they thought she was dead isn’t worth mentioning again, he thinks. Facts might not have been in his favor but there was still a part of Tony, a fast fading part, that had thought there was still a chance they’d find her. She had gone too silently.
She flinches, fingers curling and releasing, tension finding it’s way into her shoulders.
And there it is. The reason she’d been so quiet today, the reason she’d clammed up when they found themselves tied up and threatened in the back of some old warehouse. Memories, especially the bad ones, always get you in the end.
He’s been noticing that’s true for her more and more lately.
But that’s not what they’re talking about. They can’t go there until they’ve dealt with this.
“I was wrong to throw Jeanne back in your face;” there’s the tiniest flicker of hope in him, one that she effectively kills, as she finishes, “that is what you want me to say, yes?”
“Something like that.”
She absorbs this information, giving a nod to nothing in particular. That glass sits next to her, untouched and half-full, moisture beading along the sides of it. It’s warm in here; he just hadn’t noticed in the face of the annual heat wave that always seems to mark the changeover from July to August in D.C.
“I swear, if it was up to me I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” There is a sad smile on her lips, but it is a smile nonetheless. It serves as the last push he needs to reach out, a hand on her arm, turn her until it’s him she’s looking at instead of the walls. Her ponytail bobs when she nods again, and he restrains his hands to resting on her arms, keeps himself from pulling her into him.
Baby steps.
She’s been back for months and it’s all still baby steps.
“I am sorry for what I said. For bringing up Jeanne.” She wraps her fingers around his wrist, pulls his hand so that it lands flat on the counter, then covers it with her own. “I was wrong to do that.”
“And I was wrong not to tell you about Mexico sooner.”
She meets his eyes for the first time since he walked in the door and they’re never going to be exactly the way they were before Michael Rivkin got into the mix, or even before Jeanne did, but there’s a chance that different won’t be so bad.
He holds onto that.
He has to.
-
At work in the morning, he pulls up their suspect’s bank account records and she doesn’t wait until he puts them up on the screen to show Gibbs, instead half-draping herself over his shoulder in order to get a good look.
Like old times.
He breathes easier and she stays behind his desk, easy banter moving between them, for the better part of the next fifteen minutes while they wait for Gibbs to get back from Abby’s lab.
-
The next time he shows up to her apartment, he brings food.
She eyes the bag in his hands before taking it from him. “I’m surprised it’s not Chinese.”
Chinese or pizza had been their mainstays back in the day, where they did dinner on a regular basis; sometimes she cooked. “Well, you’re an American now. Figured bringing Chinese food to celebrate that would be sending mixed messages.”
“Celebrate?” She murmurs, moving towards the kitchen with him on her heels. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
He raises an eyebrow.
She hits him square in the chest with a stack of napkins.