NCIS: Purple Chiffon and Coin Bracelets
Title: Purple Chiffon and Coin Bracelets
Author: vegawriters
Fandom: NCIS
Pairing: Mentions of Ziva/Michael Rivkin
Rating: T
Timeframe: Post Good Cop, Bad Cop
A/N: Part of the Mockingbird Universe
Disclaimer: I keep falling in love with beautiful characters already written by other people. If CBS is looking for a young, up and coming writer who will devote herself wholeheartedly to the process, I’m the right girl. Otherwise, I make no money from this. NCIS, Ziva, Jenny, and the team belong to other people. I’m just walking with them for a while.
Summary: Leaving the tea to steep on the counter, Ziva walked back into her bedroom, knelt, and pulled a small cedar box from under her bed. It was hand carved, old, passed down from mother to mother in her family.
Breaking mirrors of these patterns of ours
Blaming your father for who you really are
Placing ads for heroes cause you can’t save yourself
Lennon Murphy: Just One
There are some things about America she will never understand. She will never understand why they call football soccer and rugby football. She will never understand why they did not build their power lines underground, why the electric grids for civilians are so susceptible to sabotage, why they demand that homosexuals be segregated from their societal norms, and why they have such passionate attitudes about different foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Her personal favorite breakfast was rice and vegetables. It stems from her time in the military, from her time with Mossad, from her time as she sat in her room, feeling Nadia do gymnastics off of her internal organs. Rice and vegetables were simple, traveled well, and proved filling at any time.
Once, when she was home in Israel those months after Jenny died, she woke to hear Michael and Nadia giggling. Stumbling into the kitchen she found a host of breakfast foods, some not even kosher (she blamed Michael), and her staple of rice and vegetables.
“Mama! Come look!” Nadia bounced over, every step jingling. Michael had brought her coin bracelets and anklets from his trip to Turkey and now she was determined to be a belly dancer. “We made breakfast!”
Standing alone in her kitchen, staring at an empty table, Ziva fought down the bile that rose in her throat while the memories of a family danced around her.
“I see!” She laughed, lifting her daughter to her hip even though she was far too tall for it to be comfortable. They spun, Nadia jingling. “Oh thank you. I am hungry.” She placed her daughter on the floor and looked her up and down. She was dressed in a long skirt and loose shirt with a bright blue scarf wound round her dark curls. An idea hit her and she sank into a chair, taking the tea Michael prepared for her. “Nadia, there is a wooden box under your mother’s bed. Go get it.” Michael shot her a look. “Not the one with the lock!” She called quickly, “The other one!”
In her refrigerator were three containers of leftover rice and vegetables. Breakfasts for the week; chilled and flavored with different curry powders and ready to eat when she returned from her morning runs. A comfort food in the midst of her new life. She had lived in America for years, but this was new. This was permanent. She was not going home. No. America was her new home. She had to get used to it. This was her life, a life she’d dreamed of starting with her daughter. She wanted her to play in the parks and go to school with the dreams of all young American girls. She wanted her to have a choice about serving in the army or even joining Mossad.
Despite her desire to begin her life anew in America, she had yet to finish unpacking her few belongings. Most of what she owned had been destroyed in the explosion and she had not had time to reestablish a life in Israel. What she did possess, she had not cared to send for once she was safely rescued from Somalia save for photographs of Nadia, books she wanted to save, her religious items she had inherited from her grandmother, and a small box of some of the pieces she used to wear while dancing. She had intended to give all of them to Nadia as she grew into them.
Wrapping herself tighter in her big blue shawl, Ziva put on water for tea. It was a now common pattern. Her daughter would dance into her dreams, begging her to come and see her, and then an explosion would rip her from sleep and Nadia would again be lost to a wreck of tangled metal set aflame by the man she had not been able to kill. Sleep would elude her for the rest of the night.
Jingling echoed in the apartment. Nadia ran, her bare feet scuffing against floors while the coins draped over her clinked together. A dark purple chiffon veil trailed out behind her as she danced to the music Ziva had chosen for the morning. Her long legs, a gift from Ziva’s genetics, were lanky rather than gangly. She would be a beautiful dancer.
Ziva stared at her, tears welling in her eyes, praying that Nadia’s love of dance would not be perverted, turned into an ability to seduce the mark, to bring them close, to kill in the most intimate moments.
She’d been within a fingernail of her revenge before he rolled, knocking her off balance, nearly breaking her arm in the process. Ziva could defend herself against more than one attacker, but ten men with machine guns were too much. His guards had dragged her to a cell, thrown her to the ground, and she found herself praying for the death she had given herself up to. That was the truth of torture - that when you had given yourself up to God, the Devil would keep you alive.
It was not right that a mother outlive her child.
Gibbs’ words echoed in her mind, words she wished she could believe. “Nadia would be proud of her mother,” he’d whispered to her before setting her free from the interrogation room. Before letting her start her life anew with McGee and Abby and Ducky and Tony. Even Tony.
The kettle whistled and she poured the water over the leaves, waiting for the drink to steep.
“Let me do it, Mama!”Shaking hands poured the boiling water into the ceramic cup. “Papa! Come see! I’m making tea!”
Her eyes met Michael’s over Nadia’s head. They left for Morocco in the morning, but for a perfect moment, it was as if they were a family. He reached out and touched her cheek and she remembered why she’d fallen in love with him as a girl and why she was still in love with him now.
Ziva stared into the liquid, too tired and drained to curse the fortunes of fate, but not drained enough to not cry. Nadia was avenged. Saleem was dead. But she had failed in her mission. Tony and McGee could have been killed. Gibbs had made the kill shot, not her, and worse, she still lived.
At least it was Gibbs. He understood. He knew what it meant to stand over too small a coffin and feel that the world was spinning out of control. She recognized the look in her eyes; he carried the same weight. He still wondered what he could have done to save Kelly even though logic told him there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
A word a parent never wanted to hear.
Everything she had done had been for Nadia, to give her a better life, to break the family links to Mossad. But instead, Nadia had been used only as part of a greater plan to keep the violence going. Now she was a mother without a daughter and a daughter without a father. For all she had, there was more she had lost and she did not know where to start. NCIS would save her, but she had no idea how she would live again.
This was why wars were fought. Not for territory or for God, but for the mistaken belief that they could make life better for the children.
Leaving the tea to steep on the counter, Ziva walked back into her bedroom, knelt, and pulled a small cedar box from under her bed. It was hand carved, old, passed down from mother to mother in her family. A place for keepsakes of the children. Still kneeling, she opened the lid, staring down at the photograph in the stained wood frame that rested on top of the pile. Taken on Nadia’s first day of dance class, she was wrapped in a purple chiffon veil, coin belts and bracelets draped over her. She was posed perfectly, unintentionally, her long hair cascading down over her shoulders, her fingers touching lightly on outstretched hands.
“Am I as pretty as you, Mama?”
Ziva gently brushed her daughter’s unruly curls back into a high ponytail. The traditional dress changed for tights, a leotard, and a light skirt. “You are prettier, my ray of hope.”
“Do girls get to dance in America too?”
“Of course!”
“I want to go there with you next time you go.”
She turned her daughter in her arms and crushed her tightly to her. “I want that too. And if we can make it happen, we will go back. I have an apartment in a beautiful area and there is a dance school nearby.” She covered her tears by pressing a kiss to Nadia's temple.
Tears dripped precariously close to the photograph. She rose, her shoulders trembling, and moved back to the kitchen to retrieve her tea. The tea was cold and stewing, but she did not care. The strength of the flavor was what she needed. The chill of desert nights in dusty cells still had not left her bones. Sitting in her dim kitchen, she pulled out the photographs one by one, the purple veil Nadia had loved more than anything, and the one remaining coin bracelet. Everything else had been destroyed in the explosion. She had wanted nothing else from the apartment in Tel Aviv. What would she do with children’s clothing? Or Michael’s shirts?
“Why do you have to go? Why? Why can’t I go with you? Why can’t I go to America too? You said I could! Why do you want to go? Why don’t you want to be with me?”
The question haunted her. Then, she did not know the answer, had blamed American immigration and politics. Now it was clear. Her father had ordained it. Keeping her away from Nadia hardened her. Made her willing to kill, to hunt, to lose everything she could be and in doing so, she believed it was for Nadia. She knew. And while Saleem was responsible for planting the bomb that killed children while in their dance class, Nadia’s death had been her father’s godsend. It closed her off from everything. It turned her into the soulless killer her father expected her to be.
When Tali had been killed, Eli David’s face had changed. His eyes grew tight. His hand fell harder. Yet, Ziva still did not know if he hadn’t had some hand in his own daughter’s death. Or even his granddaughter’s. But for all her anger, she there is a small part of her that understood why he became the man he did.
Another photograph. Of Nadia at Hanukah when she was only three years old; Eli in the background. She paused, tracing her hand over the image of her father’s face. Nadia worshipped Michael like she worshipped her father and she cannot help but wonder if it is best that she died before she learned the truth, that her father was ruthless, vicious, and that he had possibly been under orders the night she had been conceived.
“Nadia would be proud of her mother,” Gibbs had whispered. Her whole life, Ziva had wanted her father’s praise and pride. Now, all she could do was hope that Nadia was proud. And safe.
“Mama! Come look!”
The one with her father went back in the box, hidden until she could look at her father’s face without cursing. She rose, taking the coin bracelet and the photograph of her daughter in the veil with her. They are placed on the mantle of her fireplace, next to the black dragon Abby gave her as a welcome home gift and the small menorah that was a gift from Michael on her eighteenth birthday. Next to the bracelet she places the photograph of Nadia in the veil. She is tired of hiding the truth. She could honor Nadia in death as she could not in life.
She’d walked her father’s path blindly, believing she was doing what was best for her daughter. Now she had to open her eyes and step forward onto a path of her own making. Maybe at the end of that road, she could be forgiven of transgressions.
Shedding her shawl onto the couch, Ziva turned and made her way back into the kitchen. She pulled a container of rice and vegetables out of the fridge, placed it and a bottle of water into a sack for her lunch, and went back into the bedroom to change for her morning run. Today, she would change her route.
Author: vegawriters
Fandom: NCIS
Pairing: Mentions of Ziva/Michael Rivkin
Rating: T
Timeframe: Post Good Cop, Bad Cop
A/N: Part of the Mockingbird Universe
Disclaimer: I keep falling in love with beautiful characters already written by other people. If CBS is looking for a young, up and coming writer who will devote herself wholeheartedly to the process, I’m the right girl. Otherwise, I make no money from this. NCIS, Ziva, Jenny, and the team belong to other people. I’m just walking with them for a while.
Summary: Leaving the tea to steep on the counter, Ziva walked back into her bedroom, knelt, and pulled a small cedar box from under her bed. It was hand carved, old, passed down from mother to mother in her family.
Breaking mirrors of these patterns of ours
Blaming your father for who you really are
Placing ads for heroes cause you can’t save yourself
Lennon Murphy: Just One
There are some things about America she will never understand. She will never understand why they call football soccer and rugby football. She will never understand why they did not build their power lines underground, why the electric grids for civilians are so susceptible to sabotage, why they demand that homosexuals be segregated from their societal norms, and why they have such passionate attitudes about different foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Her personal favorite breakfast was rice and vegetables. It stems from her time in the military, from her time with Mossad, from her time as she sat in her room, feeling Nadia do gymnastics off of her internal organs. Rice and vegetables were simple, traveled well, and proved filling at any time.
Once, when she was home in Israel those months after Jenny died, she woke to hear Michael and Nadia giggling. Stumbling into the kitchen she found a host of breakfast foods, some not even kosher (she blamed Michael), and her staple of rice and vegetables.
“Mama! Come look!” Nadia bounced over, every step jingling. Michael had brought her coin bracelets and anklets from his trip to Turkey and now she was determined to be a belly dancer. “We made breakfast!”
Standing alone in her kitchen, staring at an empty table, Ziva fought down the bile that rose in her throat while the memories of a family danced around her.
“I see!” She laughed, lifting her daughter to her hip even though she was far too tall for it to be comfortable. They spun, Nadia jingling. “Oh thank you. I am hungry.” She placed her daughter on the floor and looked her up and down. She was dressed in a long skirt and loose shirt with a bright blue scarf wound round her dark curls. An idea hit her and she sank into a chair, taking the tea Michael prepared for her. “Nadia, there is a wooden box under your mother’s bed. Go get it.” Michael shot her a look. “Not the one with the lock!” She called quickly, “The other one!”
In her refrigerator were three containers of leftover rice and vegetables. Breakfasts for the week; chilled and flavored with different curry powders and ready to eat when she returned from her morning runs. A comfort food in the midst of her new life. She had lived in America for years, but this was new. This was permanent. She was not going home. No. America was her new home. She had to get used to it. This was her life, a life she’d dreamed of starting with her daughter. She wanted her to play in the parks and go to school with the dreams of all young American girls. She wanted her to have a choice about serving in the army or even joining Mossad.
Despite her desire to begin her life anew in America, she had yet to finish unpacking her few belongings. Most of what she owned had been destroyed in the explosion and she had not had time to reestablish a life in Israel. What she did possess, she had not cared to send for once she was safely rescued from Somalia save for photographs of Nadia, books she wanted to save, her religious items she had inherited from her grandmother, and a small box of some of the pieces she used to wear while dancing. She had intended to give all of them to Nadia as she grew into them.
Wrapping herself tighter in her big blue shawl, Ziva put on water for tea. It was a now common pattern. Her daughter would dance into her dreams, begging her to come and see her, and then an explosion would rip her from sleep and Nadia would again be lost to a wreck of tangled metal set aflame by the man she had not been able to kill. Sleep would elude her for the rest of the night.
Jingling echoed in the apartment. Nadia ran, her bare feet scuffing against floors while the coins draped over her clinked together. A dark purple chiffon veil trailed out behind her as she danced to the music Ziva had chosen for the morning. Her long legs, a gift from Ziva’s genetics, were lanky rather than gangly. She would be a beautiful dancer.
Ziva stared at her, tears welling in her eyes, praying that Nadia’s love of dance would not be perverted, turned into an ability to seduce the mark, to bring them close, to kill in the most intimate moments.
She’d been within a fingernail of her revenge before he rolled, knocking her off balance, nearly breaking her arm in the process. Ziva could defend herself against more than one attacker, but ten men with machine guns were too much. His guards had dragged her to a cell, thrown her to the ground, and she found herself praying for the death she had given herself up to. That was the truth of torture - that when you had given yourself up to God, the Devil would keep you alive.
It was not right that a mother outlive her child.
Gibbs’ words echoed in her mind, words she wished she could believe. “Nadia would be proud of her mother,” he’d whispered to her before setting her free from the interrogation room. Before letting her start her life anew with McGee and Abby and Ducky and Tony. Even Tony.
The kettle whistled and she poured the water over the leaves, waiting for the drink to steep.
“Let me do it, Mama!”Shaking hands poured the boiling water into the ceramic cup. “Papa! Come see! I’m making tea!”
Her eyes met Michael’s over Nadia’s head. They left for Morocco in the morning, but for a perfect moment, it was as if they were a family. He reached out and touched her cheek and she remembered why she’d fallen in love with him as a girl and why she was still in love with him now.
Ziva stared into the liquid, too tired and drained to curse the fortunes of fate, but not drained enough to not cry. Nadia was avenged. Saleem was dead. But she had failed in her mission. Tony and McGee could have been killed. Gibbs had made the kill shot, not her, and worse, she still lived.
At least it was Gibbs. He understood. He knew what it meant to stand over too small a coffin and feel that the world was spinning out of control. She recognized the look in her eyes; he carried the same weight. He still wondered what he could have done to save Kelly even though logic told him there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
A word a parent never wanted to hear.
Everything she had done had been for Nadia, to give her a better life, to break the family links to Mossad. But instead, Nadia had been used only as part of a greater plan to keep the violence going. Now she was a mother without a daughter and a daughter without a father. For all she had, there was more she had lost and she did not know where to start. NCIS would save her, but she had no idea how she would live again.
This was why wars were fought. Not for territory or for God, but for the mistaken belief that they could make life better for the children.
Leaving the tea to steep on the counter, Ziva walked back into her bedroom, knelt, and pulled a small cedar box from under her bed. It was hand carved, old, passed down from mother to mother in her family. A place for keepsakes of the children. Still kneeling, she opened the lid, staring down at the photograph in the stained wood frame that rested on top of the pile. Taken on Nadia’s first day of dance class, she was wrapped in a purple chiffon veil, coin belts and bracelets draped over her. She was posed perfectly, unintentionally, her long hair cascading down over her shoulders, her fingers touching lightly on outstretched hands.
“Am I as pretty as you, Mama?”
Ziva gently brushed her daughter’s unruly curls back into a high ponytail. The traditional dress changed for tights, a leotard, and a light skirt. “You are prettier, my ray of hope.”
“Do girls get to dance in America too?”
“Of course!”
“I want to go there with you next time you go.”
She turned her daughter in her arms and crushed her tightly to her. “I want that too. And if we can make it happen, we will go back. I have an apartment in a beautiful area and there is a dance school nearby.” She covered her tears by pressing a kiss to Nadia's temple.
Tears dripped precariously close to the photograph. She rose, her shoulders trembling, and moved back to the kitchen to retrieve her tea. The tea was cold and stewing, but she did not care. The strength of the flavor was what she needed. The chill of desert nights in dusty cells still had not left her bones. Sitting in her dim kitchen, she pulled out the photographs one by one, the purple veil Nadia had loved more than anything, and the one remaining coin bracelet. Everything else had been destroyed in the explosion. She had wanted nothing else from the apartment in Tel Aviv. What would she do with children’s clothing? Or Michael’s shirts?
“Why do you have to go? Why? Why can’t I go with you? Why can’t I go to America too? You said I could! Why do you want to go? Why don’t you want to be with me?”
The question haunted her. Then, she did not know the answer, had blamed American immigration and politics. Now it was clear. Her father had ordained it. Keeping her away from Nadia hardened her. Made her willing to kill, to hunt, to lose everything she could be and in doing so, she believed it was for Nadia. She knew. And while Saleem was responsible for planting the bomb that killed children while in their dance class, Nadia’s death had been her father’s godsend. It closed her off from everything. It turned her into the soulless killer her father expected her to be.
When Tali had been killed, Eli David’s face had changed. His eyes grew tight. His hand fell harder. Yet, Ziva still did not know if he hadn’t had some hand in his own daughter’s death. Or even his granddaughter’s. But for all her anger, she there is a small part of her that understood why he became the man he did.
Another photograph. Of Nadia at Hanukah when she was only three years old; Eli in the background. She paused, tracing her hand over the image of her father’s face. Nadia worshipped Michael like she worshipped her father and she cannot help but wonder if it is best that she died before she learned the truth, that her father was ruthless, vicious, and that he had possibly been under orders the night she had been conceived.
“Nadia would be proud of her mother,” Gibbs had whispered. Her whole life, Ziva had wanted her father’s praise and pride. Now, all she could do was hope that Nadia was proud. And safe.
“Mama! Come look!”
The one with her father went back in the box, hidden until she could look at her father’s face without cursing. She rose, taking the coin bracelet and the photograph of her daughter in the veil with her. They are placed on the mantle of her fireplace, next to the black dragon Abby gave her as a welcome home gift and the small menorah that was a gift from Michael on her eighteenth birthday. Next to the bracelet she places the photograph of Nadia in the veil. She is tired of hiding the truth. She could honor Nadia in death as she could not in life.
She’d walked her father’s path blindly, believing she was doing what was best for her daughter. Now she had to open her eyes and step forward onto a path of her own making. Maybe at the end of that road, she could be forgiven of transgressions.
Shedding her shawl onto the couch, Ziva turned and made her way back into the kitchen. She pulled a container of rice and vegetables out of the fridge, placed it and a bottle of water into a sack for her lunch, and went back into the bedroom to change for her morning run. Today, she would change her route.