time leaves dust on my scars {ncis - tony, ziva}
Title: Time Leaves Dust On My Scars
Fandom: NCIS
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Ziva (implied ship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,542
Author's Note: 7x14 - "Masquerade" is pretty much required viewing for this. Also, the finale.
Summary: Post "Rule Fifty-One". His hands are on the steering wheel but they are going nowhere fast.
rewind
-
“You never talk about it,” he says, and his hands flex at his sides; hers curl tight around the flashlight, her gun.
The soft upturn of her lips, makeshift smile, fails in conjunction with her name on his. Patient, tinged with concern, almost intimate.
Ziva can’t stop thinking he is too close.
Two steps back and there would be nowhere else to go; she was taught to always gain ground, not give it.
It makes no sense, anyway, the need for distance. For all the times she has draped herself along his shoulders to get a better look, and for all the times he has done the same, boundaries have never been much of an issue.
She holds her ground.
“What Saleem did was bad enough; becoming like him would be worse.”
When she walks away, he takes a second too long to follow.
-
In the car there is the click of her seatbelt, the sound of the engine coming alive, and nothing else.
He has his hands on the steering wheel but they are going nowhere fast.
“Tony,” she is careful not to let her eyes linger in his general direction; the long scratch that peeks out from the underside of the dashboard becomes her focal point, as she tries to determine its origins (she imagines stiletto heels scraping along it, fits it in nicely with the owner’s tendencies, and blinks too hard and too long), “Gibbs will be expecting us back soon.”
“Ziva,” he breathes, same tone. She fights the urge to turn on the radio, drown out the sound of his voice, his breathing, her heartbeat.
“Tony,” she says again and he drops it and drives.
He left his fight back in Somalia, along with hers, and at least there’s some small part of them that’s managed to get on the same page.
-
play
-
The morning after the citizenship ceremony, she breaks into a run almost before she exits her apartment building, her body singing with energy even at five thirty in the morning.
That she hadn’t slept more than a few hours doesn’t seem to be much of a factor.
Her feet don’t stop moving but for the car in the parking lot upon her return.
The license plate is easily recognizable, never mind the make and model or the silhouette of the driver from her vantage point behind them. Those are familiar too.
She steadies her breathing, brushes a sweaty curl out of her face, and approaches the driver side.
When she taps on the window, McGee has his phone pressed to one ear; he jumps at the sound, at her sudden presence. Sometimes she forgets her training, forgets that careful, quiet movements no longer require thought, only instinct (sneaky, like a cat, Tony would say, has said); she does not mean to startle him but it isn’t something that can be helped.
“Ziva,” he says, a fumbling mess as he ends the call and lets the phone drop into a slot in the console next to him, near the cupholders, the automatic window whirring downwards all the while. There are two cups of coffee and no passenger.
Her fingers curl around the frame where the window used to be and her stomach drops preemptively. This is not routine and therein lies danger. “Are you waiting for someone?”
It’s spoken as a joke; neither of them treats it as such.
“Gibbs is in Mexico,” he tells her.
“And Tony?”
He nods.
She shoves her keys back in her pocket and gets in the passenger side.
-
She changes into the spare set of clothes she keeps at her desk when they get there.
Abby is scared, McGee is worried, and Ducky is calm.
Ziva is simply tired, all her energy expended and lost not along the hour-long run but instead on the drive in.
Gibbs is in Mexico, Tony too, at least in theory. Vance broke the news and cell phones aren’t being answered.
Lunchtime rolls around and no one eats. McGee tries Gibbs for the fiftieth time, Abby on the edge of his desk and the bottoms of her boots don’t touch the ground. Ziva stopped calling Tony after the third try.
She is familiar with unanswered phone calls and him. More so, she is familiar with being unable to answer them.
Her gut says that Vance knows more than he is letting on; he always seems to and, if there’s anything she has learned from Gibbs, trusting your gut is just as important as always carrying a knife.
When McGee appears to be contemplating going for number fifty-one, she shakes her head. “Chances are they have burn phones. Or cannot talk.”
He will grasp at straws, it seems. Abby stops looking to him and starts looking at her across the bullpen.
“One of them will check in soon; I’m sure they are fine.”
She is sure of nothing except her ability to put on a brave face and hold it in place.
-
In Somalia, she had imagined her own funeral, distant and drug-fueled.
She hadn’t thought Tony would come.
(The irony of that still hasn’t sunk in fully.
She tries not to think too much on these things.)
-
Seven o’clock in the evening rolls around and it’s just her and McGee now.
The phones do not ring. Vance doesn’t talk.
But there is paperwork to be done and she does her own, and then some of Tony’s, just for the distraction.
Her earlier anger at him for missing the citizenship ceremony has dissipated with the knowledge that, by then, he was in Mexico.
It is not his fault.
She had not been let down by him.
Or by Gibbs.
(But then with Gibbs it had never really been a question.)
“You should go home,” she says. “I am sure we will know more in the morning.”
“Are you going home?”
There is no point in lying. “No.”
McGee says nothing more but she knows he isn’t going anywhere either.
She checks her email; he pulls up both Gibbs and Tony’s cell phone records, in a moment of genius.
No outgoing calls have been made since the day before.
-
The vibrating of her cell phone next to her head wakes her up just past two in the morning.
She had fallen asleep with her head on the desk, the lights in the bullpen dimmed to the point where there are only a few lamps and the glow of their computers to bounce off the walls. McGee is passed out on his desk too, one hand on the mouse.
The phone catches her attention again.
1 message received
It registers as anonymous but Ziva pays no attention to that.
Sorry, it reads, without any context.
That it’s Tony isn’t even a question.
She wants to ask what he is sorry for but the brevity of the message keeps her from doing so.
It does not keep her from worrying.
-
In the morning, she splashes cold water on her face in the bathroom, breathes in and holds it while she tries to add up the total hours she’s slept in the past two days.
The number remains in the single digits.
Five. Six. Seven.
She isn’t sure.
The water slows to a trickle when the door swings open.
“McGee.” She can hear the click of heels against tile from the other inhabitant, in the stalls. “This is the ladies’ room, is it not?”
Her hypocrisy with regards to that statement goes unnoticed.
Tony wouldn’t have let it.
“Vance just got off the phone with Gibbs,” and he catches her eye, something bright behind his own and in his smile.
She thinks it’s relief.
Vaguely, she can feel it spread through her chest, even as she reminds herself that any news does not necessarily signify good news.
She follows him out anyways.
-
Gibbs is not in Mexico but Tony is.
Alejandro Rivera is dead but not by either of their hands.
They didn’t lose anyone but there are injuries to account for, the severity unknown.
There is always a but.
-
They take two cars to the airport, and she runs a red light along the way to Dulles.
Tony’s already off the plane by the time they get there and Abby rushes him outside of baggage claim, wrapping her arms around him with his name said on a worried exhale.
He locks eyes with her over Abby’s shoulder, cut-up and bruised, and it all rings familiar in a sickening way.
-
She takes him home and he forgets to complain about her driving skills.
In the parking lot outside of his apartment, she lets the car idle, hand loose on the steering wheel.
“Well, Mexico was a lot more fun during Spring Break.”
When he smiles, to accompany the comment, his lips stretch and he winces. The lower one is split, she notes, adds that to the tally with the bruise along his cheekbone, a faint yellow-purple that doesn’t seem to have come in all the way yet. She hasn’t found any others and nothing appears to be broken or stitched close but she’s only seen what his clothes don’t cover.
She doesn’t try to touch him, to trace the outline of the bruise. She doesn’t turn his hand over in hers and look for bruised or bloody knuckles. Instead, she keeps her hands to herself, like he did with her.
The line they won’t cross is in view but she won’t be the one to make that first step.
Neither will he.
“I should be getting back to the office,” she tells him, “I do not want to leave McGee alone.”
If his expression is any indication, this is the first time he’s noticed that it isn’t after hours. Or maybe the first time it’s clicked. “Why am I being sent home?”
“You were just on a flight for several hours, not to mention,” she wrinkles her nose for effect, “you could use a shower.”
“I get a bear hug from Abby, a ‘welcome back’ from McGee, and a ‘you need a shower’ from you,” he grumbles. His tone isn’t joking. It’s straddling the line between ironic and something else.
“And?”
He won’t stop looking at her.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, loud, enhanced by the silence.
“I should be getting back,” she repeats.
“Yeah.”
And his gaze drops.
-
“Everything alright?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Tony?”
“How is Gibbs?”
Abby’s eyes dart between the two of them; Vance finds his way down the stairs.
-
Gibbs is back in the office before the day is over.
He was in Pennsylvania, beat Paloma Reynosa to the punch. Specifically, he beat her to Stillwater and to his father.
She is not dead but instead will most likely be calling an 8x10 cell home for a while.
“You both sleep here last night?”
It is worth noting that Gibbs is unharmed.
“No, boss.”
He stares McGee down, hard.
The other man wilts fairly easily. “Yes, boss.”
“Go home.” Gibbs eyes find her, even if she keeps hers on the keyboard in front of her, the screen; her inbox is blissfully empty and she’s reorganized both that and her hard drive in the past day and a half or so. “You too, Ziva.”
She doesn’t put up a fight.
-
Sometime in the next two hours, she drives home, showers, and changes. It’s the first time that she’s been home since five in the morning the day before, though she’d rinsed off in the gym shower when she first got to work.
She contemplates her phone, afterwards, the text message that she hasn’t yet deleted. One word. A whole host of uses for it.
And then she starts driving.
-
“You never talk about it,” he’d said, and her hand curled tight around her gun.
And, you know, she never did again.
-
“Tony,” she breathes against the door, two solid knocks; her voice seems to get his attention because that’s when the shuffle of footsteps starts towards the door.
He’s facing her a moment later. “Hey.”
“Hello.” She walks past him, before he can invite her in, and he closes the door without protest. There is a half-empty beer on the coffee table in front of the couch, no coaster, and the television is on mute, the remote control at an angle on the table like it was hastily set down.
When she looks back at him, she can’t find anything to say, except:
“Gibbs is back. A few hours ago.”
“You drove out here to tell me that? Because,” he digs his phone out of the pocket of his jeans, “I have a phone.”
“You appear to have several,” she replies, without much thought. Her tone is neutral, but not nearly enough so that he doesn’t read into it.
“You got my message.”
“I did.”
This is where the phone is supposed to ring. This is where someone is supposed to have to leave.
This is where the music abruptly stops playing and people trip over their feet to stop dancing with it.
It doesn’t; they hold each other’s gaze and his body is between her and her only exit.
There is nowhere to else to go.
“I meant it.”
“For?”
“You know.”
Tony never stops talking until it actually matters. As the years go by, he rubs off on her more and more.
This is not an exception.
“You could’ve called. Before.”
“I could’ve.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I was on a plane an hour after I knew.”
She sighs.
These conversations always turn out differently in her head.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Tony is wary of getting off too easily. They used to fight with so much more fire before; now it’s quiet, biting, raw.
He is wary of not seeing it coming and so is she.
“Yes.”
When she closes the space between them, covers the precious few feet to press a kiss to one bruised cheek, it feels like déjà vu. She is open-palmed along his bicep, cotton and skin underneath her fingers, and he smells of aftershave. His hand falls on the small of her back.
The loss of contact when she steps back is striking.
“I am not like Abby,” she tells him, as if he wasn’t already aware, “I am not prone to public displays of emotion, I - I am not like her.”
“That’s not what I meant when I said - ”
“Regardless.” Because it is what he meant in the car, earlier, whether he wants to fess up to it or not. The lack of warmth in her reaction to his return was obvious, when compared to Abby and McGee. And he is her partner. “I am glad you’re back. And mostly unharmed.”
“What this?” He motions to his face, and she decides his cavalier attitude means it looks worse than it is. Or he’s playing it off. Tony was never very good at that. “Franks lost a finger. And still has better aim than I do.”
She smiles, maybe a hint of a laugh there.
He doesn’t quite mirror her expression, but it’s close. Mostly he appears to be studying her. It makes her nervous but so does he, some days.
“Do you want some company?”
“Always.”
-
fin.
Fandom: NCIS
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Ziva (implied ship)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,542
Author's Note: 7x14 - "Masquerade" is pretty much required viewing for this. Also, the finale.
Summary: Post "Rule Fifty-One". His hands are on the steering wheel but they are going nowhere fast.
rewind
-
“You never talk about it,” he says, and his hands flex at his sides; hers curl tight around the flashlight, her gun.
The soft upturn of her lips, makeshift smile, fails in conjunction with her name on his. Patient, tinged with concern, almost intimate.
Ziva can’t stop thinking he is too close.
Two steps back and there would be nowhere else to go; she was taught to always gain ground, not give it.
It makes no sense, anyway, the need for distance. For all the times she has draped herself along his shoulders to get a better look, and for all the times he has done the same, boundaries have never been much of an issue.
She holds her ground.
“What Saleem did was bad enough; becoming like him would be worse.”
When she walks away, he takes a second too long to follow.
-
In the car there is the click of her seatbelt, the sound of the engine coming alive, and nothing else.
He has his hands on the steering wheel but they are going nowhere fast.
“Tony,” she is careful not to let her eyes linger in his general direction; the long scratch that peeks out from the underside of the dashboard becomes her focal point, as she tries to determine its origins (she imagines stiletto heels scraping along it, fits it in nicely with the owner’s tendencies, and blinks too hard and too long), “Gibbs will be expecting us back soon.”
“Ziva,” he breathes, same tone. She fights the urge to turn on the radio, drown out the sound of his voice, his breathing, her heartbeat.
“Tony,” she says again and he drops it and drives.
He left his fight back in Somalia, along with hers, and at least there’s some small part of them that’s managed to get on the same page.
-
play
-
The morning after the citizenship ceremony, she breaks into a run almost before she exits her apartment building, her body singing with energy even at five thirty in the morning.
That she hadn’t slept more than a few hours doesn’t seem to be much of a factor.
Her feet don’t stop moving but for the car in the parking lot upon her return.
The license plate is easily recognizable, never mind the make and model or the silhouette of the driver from her vantage point behind them. Those are familiar too.
She steadies her breathing, brushes a sweaty curl out of her face, and approaches the driver side.
When she taps on the window, McGee has his phone pressed to one ear; he jumps at the sound, at her sudden presence. Sometimes she forgets her training, forgets that careful, quiet movements no longer require thought, only instinct (sneaky, like a cat, Tony would say, has said); she does not mean to startle him but it isn’t something that can be helped.
“Ziva,” he says, a fumbling mess as he ends the call and lets the phone drop into a slot in the console next to him, near the cupholders, the automatic window whirring downwards all the while. There are two cups of coffee and no passenger.
Her fingers curl around the frame where the window used to be and her stomach drops preemptively. This is not routine and therein lies danger. “Are you waiting for someone?”
It’s spoken as a joke; neither of them treats it as such.
“Gibbs is in Mexico,” he tells her.
“And Tony?”
He nods.
She shoves her keys back in her pocket and gets in the passenger side.
-
She changes into the spare set of clothes she keeps at her desk when they get there.
Abby is scared, McGee is worried, and Ducky is calm.
Ziva is simply tired, all her energy expended and lost not along the hour-long run but instead on the drive in.
Gibbs is in Mexico, Tony too, at least in theory. Vance broke the news and cell phones aren’t being answered.
Lunchtime rolls around and no one eats. McGee tries Gibbs for the fiftieth time, Abby on the edge of his desk and the bottoms of her boots don’t touch the ground. Ziva stopped calling Tony after the third try.
She is familiar with unanswered phone calls and him. More so, she is familiar with being unable to answer them.
Her gut says that Vance knows more than he is letting on; he always seems to and, if there’s anything she has learned from Gibbs, trusting your gut is just as important as always carrying a knife.
When McGee appears to be contemplating going for number fifty-one, she shakes her head. “Chances are they have burn phones. Or cannot talk.”
He will grasp at straws, it seems. Abby stops looking to him and starts looking at her across the bullpen.
“One of them will check in soon; I’m sure they are fine.”
She is sure of nothing except her ability to put on a brave face and hold it in place.
-
In Somalia, she had imagined her own funeral, distant and drug-fueled.
She hadn’t thought Tony would come.
(The irony of that still hasn’t sunk in fully.
She tries not to think too much on these things.)
-
Seven o’clock in the evening rolls around and it’s just her and McGee now.
The phones do not ring. Vance doesn’t talk.
But there is paperwork to be done and she does her own, and then some of Tony’s, just for the distraction.
Her earlier anger at him for missing the citizenship ceremony has dissipated with the knowledge that, by then, he was in Mexico.
It is not his fault.
She had not been let down by him.
Or by Gibbs.
(But then with Gibbs it had never really been a question.)
“You should go home,” she says. “I am sure we will know more in the morning.”
“Are you going home?”
There is no point in lying. “No.”
McGee says nothing more but she knows he isn’t going anywhere either.
She checks her email; he pulls up both Gibbs and Tony’s cell phone records, in a moment of genius.
No outgoing calls have been made since the day before.
-
The vibrating of her cell phone next to her head wakes her up just past two in the morning.
She had fallen asleep with her head on the desk, the lights in the bullpen dimmed to the point where there are only a few lamps and the glow of their computers to bounce off the walls. McGee is passed out on his desk too, one hand on the mouse.
The phone catches her attention again.
1 message received
It registers as anonymous but Ziva pays no attention to that.
Sorry, it reads, without any context.
That it’s Tony isn’t even a question.
She wants to ask what he is sorry for but the brevity of the message keeps her from doing so.
It does not keep her from worrying.
-
In the morning, she splashes cold water on her face in the bathroom, breathes in and holds it while she tries to add up the total hours she’s slept in the past two days.
The number remains in the single digits.
Five. Six. Seven.
She isn’t sure.
The water slows to a trickle when the door swings open.
“McGee.” She can hear the click of heels against tile from the other inhabitant, in the stalls. “This is the ladies’ room, is it not?”
Her hypocrisy with regards to that statement goes unnoticed.
Tony wouldn’t have let it.
“Vance just got off the phone with Gibbs,” and he catches her eye, something bright behind his own and in his smile.
She thinks it’s relief.
Vaguely, she can feel it spread through her chest, even as she reminds herself that any news does not necessarily signify good news.
She follows him out anyways.
-
Gibbs is not in Mexico but Tony is.
Alejandro Rivera is dead but not by either of their hands.
They didn’t lose anyone but there are injuries to account for, the severity unknown.
There is always a but.
-
They take two cars to the airport, and she runs a red light along the way to Dulles.
Tony’s already off the plane by the time they get there and Abby rushes him outside of baggage claim, wrapping her arms around him with his name said on a worried exhale.
He locks eyes with her over Abby’s shoulder, cut-up and bruised, and it all rings familiar in a sickening way.
-
She takes him home and he forgets to complain about her driving skills.
In the parking lot outside of his apartment, she lets the car idle, hand loose on the steering wheel.
“Well, Mexico was a lot more fun during Spring Break.”
When he smiles, to accompany the comment, his lips stretch and he winces. The lower one is split, she notes, adds that to the tally with the bruise along his cheekbone, a faint yellow-purple that doesn’t seem to have come in all the way yet. She hasn’t found any others and nothing appears to be broken or stitched close but she’s only seen what his clothes don’t cover.
She doesn’t try to touch him, to trace the outline of the bruise. She doesn’t turn his hand over in hers and look for bruised or bloody knuckles. Instead, she keeps her hands to herself, like he did with her.
The line they won’t cross is in view but she won’t be the one to make that first step.
Neither will he.
“I should be getting back to the office,” she tells him, “I do not want to leave McGee alone.”
If his expression is any indication, this is the first time he’s noticed that it isn’t after hours. Or maybe the first time it’s clicked. “Why am I being sent home?”
“You were just on a flight for several hours, not to mention,” she wrinkles her nose for effect, “you could use a shower.”
“I get a bear hug from Abby, a ‘welcome back’ from McGee, and a ‘you need a shower’ from you,” he grumbles. His tone isn’t joking. It’s straddling the line between ironic and something else.
“And?”
He won’t stop looking at her.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, loud, enhanced by the silence.
“I should be getting back,” she repeats.
“Yeah.”
And his gaze drops.
-
“Everything alright?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Tony?”
“How is Gibbs?”
Abby’s eyes dart between the two of them; Vance finds his way down the stairs.
-
Gibbs is back in the office before the day is over.
He was in Pennsylvania, beat Paloma Reynosa to the punch. Specifically, he beat her to Stillwater and to his father.
She is not dead but instead will most likely be calling an 8x10 cell home for a while.
“You both sleep here last night?”
It is worth noting that Gibbs is unharmed.
“No, boss.”
He stares McGee down, hard.
The other man wilts fairly easily. “Yes, boss.”
“Go home.” Gibbs eyes find her, even if she keeps hers on the keyboard in front of her, the screen; her inbox is blissfully empty and she’s reorganized both that and her hard drive in the past day and a half or so. “You too, Ziva.”
She doesn’t put up a fight.
-
Sometime in the next two hours, she drives home, showers, and changes. It’s the first time that she’s been home since five in the morning the day before, though she’d rinsed off in the gym shower when she first got to work.
She contemplates her phone, afterwards, the text message that she hasn’t yet deleted. One word. A whole host of uses for it.
And then she starts driving.
-
“You never talk about it,” he’d said, and her hand curled tight around her gun.
And, you know, she never did again.
-
“Tony,” she breathes against the door, two solid knocks; her voice seems to get his attention because that’s when the shuffle of footsteps starts towards the door.
He’s facing her a moment later. “Hey.”
“Hello.” She walks past him, before he can invite her in, and he closes the door without protest. There is a half-empty beer on the coffee table in front of the couch, no coaster, and the television is on mute, the remote control at an angle on the table like it was hastily set down.
When she looks back at him, she can’t find anything to say, except:
“Gibbs is back. A few hours ago.”
“You drove out here to tell me that? Because,” he digs his phone out of the pocket of his jeans, “I have a phone.”
“You appear to have several,” she replies, without much thought. Her tone is neutral, but not nearly enough so that he doesn’t read into it.
“You got my message.”
“I did.”
This is where the phone is supposed to ring. This is where someone is supposed to have to leave.
This is where the music abruptly stops playing and people trip over their feet to stop dancing with it.
It doesn’t; they hold each other’s gaze and his body is between her and her only exit.
There is nowhere to else to go.
“I meant it.”
“For?”
“You know.”
Tony never stops talking until it actually matters. As the years go by, he rubs off on her more and more.
This is not an exception.
“You could’ve called. Before.”
“I could’ve.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I was on a plane an hour after I knew.”
She sighs.
These conversations always turn out differently in her head.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Tony is wary of getting off too easily. They used to fight with so much more fire before; now it’s quiet, biting, raw.
He is wary of not seeing it coming and so is she.
“Yes.”
When she closes the space between them, covers the precious few feet to press a kiss to one bruised cheek, it feels like déjà vu. She is open-palmed along his bicep, cotton and skin underneath her fingers, and he smells of aftershave. His hand falls on the small of her back.
The loss of contact when she steps back is striking.
“I am not like Abby,” she tells him, as if he wasn’t already aware, “I am not prone to public displays of emotion, I - I am not like her.”
“That’s not what I meant when I said - ”
“Regardless.” Because it is what he meant in the car, earlier, whether he wants to fess up to it or not. The lack of warmth in her reaction to his return was obvious, when compared to Abby and McGee. And he is her partner. “I am glad you’re back. And mostly unharmed.”
“What this?” He motions to his face, and she decides his cavalier attitude means it looks worse than it is. Or he’s playing it off. Tony was never very good at that. “Franks lost a finger. And still has better aim than I do.”
She smiles, maybe a hint of a laugh there.
He doesn’t quite mirror her expression, but it’s close. Mostly he appears to be studying her. It makes her nervous but so does he, some days.
“Do you want some company?”
“Always.”
-
fin.