Silent and Grey (complete), gen, T, by Hagar
Title: Silent and Grey last part
Pairing: gen
Rating: teen
Content Advisory: aftermath of violence, some post-trauma, hospital setting, memorial service
Summary: When a US Navy lieutenant goes missing, Team Gibbs must travel to Israel to find her. The investigation into what appears to be a terrorist act is complicated by prickly Shin-Beit operatives, a curious lack of helpful intel and the impending shadow of Memorial Day.
AO3 | DW | below:
“Wordlessly we have carried thee, oh Friendship,
Stubborn, silent and grey as thou are.
From the many and great nights of horror
Thou alone remained bright as a star.”
Friendship, Haim Gouri
Standing by the curtain railing that separated Dana Weissman’s bed from the others in the ER, Gibbs thought that she looked the part of the rescued hostage. Her complexion was the pallor of trauma and exhaustion; a mash of bruises on her cheek; dirt matted in her hair and on her clothes; and where her hands emerged from the thin hospital blanket he could see the bandages wrapped around her wrists, where - the nurses had told him - she was lucky not to have torn her veins open by struggling to break free. Her forearms were red and swollen halfway to her elbows, what with the untreated infection. There was more than one kind of an antibiotic in her IV.
Her eyes were closed when he pulled her curtain aside. She opened them at about five seconds.
“If you were a nurse,” she said, “you would’ve moved by now.”
“Agent Gibbs,” he said. Her pupils dilated in surprise. “NCIS.”
“Oh,” she said.
There were no chairs in the ER outside of the pre-triage waiting area. “May I?” he asked, indicating the short distance between the curtain rail and her bed. He knew a palm print when he saw it on someone’s flesh.
“Yes,” she said after a moment.
He moved slowly, careful to keep his hands where she could see them. “How are you feeling?” he asked as he approached, closing the curtain behind him for an illusion of privacy.
She tried for a smile. “Better now.”
“That’s good,” he said, carefully. She’d know and be angry if he used the little-kids voice with her, but he wanted her to know she did not need to put up a front. He offered her a half-smile of his own. “Otherwise?”
She thought about it a while. “Ask me in a week? Or tomorrow,” she amended, correctly interpreting his expression.
“Okay,” he said, keeping his voice in the same register as before. “I’d like for you to tell me what happened, but that can wait, too. The important thing is that we got you, now. Everything else can wait.”
Moments passed. Eventually, she sighed: “Isaiah.”
“Your brother?” he prompted.
“Yes,” she said. “He and his friends. I - something seemed wrong. I looked around. I listened. I understand more Hebrew than they realized. Wednesday morning - today is Sunday, right?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“The medic told me, and I asked the nurses, but I wasn’t sure -” Her hand twitched, and her face clouded.
“Hey,” he said, gently. “You’re not being silly.”
She huffed a little. That motion might’ve been her jutting her chin, if she was standing up. “Easier said,” she replied.
He let all of his sincerity into his voice as he said, “I know.” After a moment, he prompted: “Wednesday morning?”
“I was supposed to leave early. I delayed, to let Naomi take Dror and Moriyah to school. They didn’t need to be there for it. Then I confronted Isaiah, told him I knew what they’re up to. He - I -” Her face contorted; he could tell it was a struggle to not close her eyes. “I didn’t expect him to hit me,” she said in a low monotone. “He hit me - two, three times. The next thing I remember, I was there.”
By protocol, he should ask her where ‘there’ was. He didn’t. It wasn’t that urgent. “Thank you,” he told her.
She shook her head against her pillow. “Thank you.”
He could tell her that he’d done nothing, but that was not what she needed to hear. “Just doing our job,” he said, simply.
“Are they your people?” she asked. “Who were there today?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
She didn’t say it, but he could read it in her face, in the parting of her lips before she spoke: funny way to go about a rescue. “Thank them too, for me?” she asked.
“They’ll be here in a short while,” he told her. “You can tell them yourself.”
She nodded a little. “Will you stay with me until then?” Her open palm sank a little into the mattress - a tacit invitation.
“Yeah,” he said, carefully sitting down on the edge of her hospital bed. “Of course.”
In retrospect, Tim should have known better than to let the hospital staff close the curtain separating Tony’s and Ziva’s beds. No; he should have known better than to let the staff sit those two on separate beds, given the way Tony had been clinging to Ziva’s hand when they came off that military ambulance, Tony on a stretcher and her walking next to it. Tim wasn’t Gibbs and he wasn’t Ducky, though, and it didn’t occur to him how Tony would react to not having a direct line of sight on Ziva until it had already happened, and Tim had to push his way through what seemed to be a sudden congregation of all the ER staff to get to his teammates.
“It’s all right!” he shouted at everyone as he pulled at the curtain on instinct. “It’s all right! No, you do not need to that,” he added at the nurse who approached Tony with a syringe. “Tony!” he grabbed the man by his shoulders, careful to not block his line of sight on Ziva. “It’s all right, damn it! We’re in the hospital, they were just trying to be nice.”
Because talking sense to Tony was ever not completely futile.
Thankfully, that was when Ziva finally noticed what was going on. “Tony!” she snapped. “You’re causing a scene.”
Tony inhaled deeply, and then all but collapsed against Tim. “Ziva?”
“You’re an idiot,” she informed him.
Tim eased Tony back onto the bed and caught the eye of the nurse who seemed to be in charge. “Do not close that curtain again,” he told her.
She nodded once and said, wryly, “Duly noted.”
It surprised Gibbs none at all to find Tony and Ziva on the same narrow hospital bed. They had the curtain drawn open, which afforded them no privacy but allowed them to see around. Tony was sitting, leaning against the head of the bed with pillows stacked under his swollen ankles. Ziva had somehow maneuvered both of them so that she leaned against Tony to the left of Tony’s torso, her feet dangling off the side of the bed. She was holding a blue balled-up something - a sweatshirt, perhaps - close to her abdomen.
“Hi, Boss,” Tony said as Gibbs approached them.
“Hi,” Gibbs replied, putting the two orange juices on the bedside bureau, next to the white slab of something that just might be food. He reached for one of Tony’s gauze-wrapped hands. “How bad?”
“Left hand’s got some stitches,” Tony said. “Just a flesh wound, Boss.”
Gibbs said nothing. He pushed up the short sleeve of Tony’s shirt an inch or so, revealing the bruising underneath. There’d be the same under Tony’s pants, he knew, but neither Tony or he said anything.
Nor, for that matter, did Ziva. She kept her eyes on the wall or on the floor, anywhere but at another person.
Gibbs picked up one of the OJs. “Can you hold that?” he asked Tony, carefully arranging the man’s fingers around the plastic cup.
“Seriously, Boss,” Tony protested.
He still needed both his hands to hold the cup. Gibbs helped him get his arm around Ziva so that he could do so comfortably, but said nothing. He left the other cup on the bureau and sat on the edge of the bed, on Ziva’s other side.
“Hey,” he said carefully, in his softest voice. He reached with his right to tap her shoulder lightly. “Ziva.”
“I am fine,” she said, gaze still cast down. “I have no bruises or lacerations.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, irritably. “She didn’t try to get out of the zip ties.”
That told Gibbs all he needed to know. “Hey,” he said again. He pulled in his right and used his left instead, to pull her towards him. “C’mere.” Sounds that meant nothing, really, just enough for her to know that he was there, and not angry.
She moved with him, so it wasn’t completely like rearranging a particularly heavy doll. But she did not lean into him, either.
“Don’t say it was nothing,” he told her, trying to get her to cradle against him. “It wasn’t to me. This is not all right, Ziva,” he added; at least she laid her head on his shoulder on her own, even if the gingerly motion screamed of caution. “This is not all right,” he whispered into her hair.
Her hand let go of the balled-up something suddenly, blue fabric spilling across her lap, revealing the white-printed cursive Hebrew. Gibbs had never seen that hoodie before. Not knowing where it came from but understanding that it was of importance, now, he only straightened it to see that it didn’t fall, but otherwise left it in place.
It was the right thing to do, because finally she let go, letting her weight rest against him. He heard her swallow, heard the catch in each breath.
He tightened his hold. “Oh, Ziva,” he whispered into her hair. Oh, daughter, he formed the words, barely even a breath.
Each of her own breaths came quicker, now; but that was healthy tension in her body.
It wasn’t all right, not at all. It had been worse, though, and one day - one day - it would be all right.
Not knowing what drug had been used to knock them out, and having reason to suspect that it still hasn’t cleared from their system, the ER doctor who’d seen them for all of sixty seconds had prescribed NSAIDs. Some NSAIDs, Tony discovered, were no less effective than the Good Drugs, messed with one’s head none at all (for which he was grateful) and were actually supposed to do something for bruised and inflamed tissues. NSAIDs still had side effects, though, and a bad interaction between what they were prescribed and the knock-out drug had sent Ziva sprinting to the bathroom.
That was how Tony was on his own when Yael came.
“I hate you,” he told her. His voice sounded flat, monotone, but he was too tired and too pissed to care.
“I figured you’d say that,” she said as she sat down on the bed that was supposed to be Ziva’s.
“You knew,” he accused.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“You knew,” he repeated. “You hoped we’d get kidnapped, didn’t you? You set us up.”
“I didn’t share what I knew,” she agreed. “It allowed the quickest and safest way of rescuing your lieutenant, as well as effective means to incriminate the entire Ben-Ezra group in a single strike.”
He nearly repeated that he hated her, but thought better of it. “You know,” he said, conversationally, “I used to be a cop. You remind me of some husbands and fathers I ran into, then.”
“The ones who bring their wives and children flowers or chocolate after beating them up, and say they’re sorry,” she said without blinking. “But you genuinely needed the sugar, and I am not sorry.”
“I’m surprised you’re not trying it anyway,” he said. “Obviously you don’t mind lying.”
She smiled. “You’re not going to trust me, no matter what I do,” she began.
“Damn right I won’t,” he interrupted.
“You were never going to trust me, no matter what I did,” she continued, “if for no other reason then because Ziva would have told you to, and because your boss is too smart for that. So I decided I wasn’t even going to try. I might as well be comfortable.”
“Yeah? And how are you comfortable?” he challenged.
“Contradictory,” she said simply. “I lie, most of the time. I say the truth when I care enough for it. Ziva and I used to be best friends, since we were little and until her work with Mossad took her out of her country for months and years at a time. I want what’s best for her, whether either of you believe me or not. And right now, you guys are what’s best for her.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. “If you wanted what’s best for her, you would never -” His throat closed up. The scents of sweat, blood and stale Caf-Pow suffocated him, desert sunlight somehow in his eyes in the fluorescent-lit room.
“Do you think she didn’t know?” Yael asked, oddly gentle. “She knew, Tony, before she ever set foot in that house. She knew enough to understand my game plan. She knew enough to understand the risk. She went ahead with it anyway. And as for everything else,” she continued, while Tony still struggled with a too-tight throat, “that’s why she’s with you, and that’s why she’s better off that way.” She shrugged, deliberately. “I am what I am; I’m no less angry than anyone else. But alive on the other side of the world, that’s still alive. I no longer ask for more.”
“Why should I believe you?” he asked.
Very plainly, she replied: “I don’t know.”
Gibbs was with Dana - again - and Tim sat on the bed that theoretically was Ziva’s and tried hard to not fidget.
Then Ziva untangled herself and stood up. Tony, of course, grabbed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Tim sat a little straighter at the edge of panic in Tony’s voice.
“Standing,” Ziva snapped. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.”
Eight - “The siren,” Tim blurted, standing up himself.
Ziva was already walking towards the aisle, where - Tim could see - everyone who could stand on their feet were gathering, forming a solid line of sight with each other throughout the entire ER.
“Damn,” Tony muttered, carefully pushing himself up. “Tim -”
Tim helped Tony up, supporting part of his weight, before Tony could say the words help me. Together they walked to Ziva’s side. She glanced at them once, but that was all. She even ignored Tony’s hand.
The room was tense; Tim could feel it. Maybe the tension had been there all along, slowly building up since the morning, but Tim had been too preoccupied with worry for his team to notice. The stillness of waiting rattled him enough that he wished for the siren to come.
Until it did.
He didn’t expect Anat to wait for them at the hotel lobby but there she was, the only person in a lobby as deserted as the streets outside. Gibbs gave her a piercing look and Tim a bewildered one, both of which she purposefully ignored as she hefted her Disney-printed carrier bag and caught up with them.
No one said a word through the elevator ride, the walk down the hall and as they filed in. Anat unloaded her bag while Tony carefully lowered himself onto the couch. The large juice bottles and noodle cups Tony understood; the saran wrap, too, once he gave it a second thought. This was not his first injury. Then she produced a stack of white t-shirts and a few rectangular stickers with red flowers over a blue-to-white gradient.
“What’re these?” he asked.
“For tomorrow,” she said, even as she extracted a folding plastic stool from her bag. “I didn’t know if you had any.” She sounded oddly apologetic.
Ziva raised her eyes from the shirts and stickers to meet Anat’s. Anat nodded at her.
“If I thanked you right now,” Tim asked Anat, “you’ll tell me I’m an idiot, right?”
“I like that about you,” she said, and - to Tim’s surprise too, by the looks of it - rose on tiptoe to hug him.
“Hey,” Tony said automatically, “don’t I get a hug?”
He didn’t expect her to come over, when she’d let go of Tim, bend down and hug him, too.
When she straightened up again she looked at Ziva and gestured with her hand. Ziva looked down at her shirt, pulled at it, and then looked back up at Anat and nodded.
Of course, Tony realized, watching the two women turn to the bathroom and even as he himself pretended that Gibbs did not just say Let me just get Tony’s things. His own injuries were the result of his own stubbornness and panic, but Ziva’s joints still carried mementos of Somalia. Ziva was young and fit, and a year and a half later these injuries only made themselves known on bad days, but being hogtied for six hours more than counted as such. Ziva may need help getting in and out of her shirts for a while.
“Tony.” Gibbs touched his shoulder, shaking him out of his guilty reverie. He held the saran wrap in one hand and Tony’s oversized toiletry bag in the other. “Come on. You’ll feel better after.”
“I’d really -” Tony began.
Gibbs shook his head and then tilted it towards the other bathroom, where the stool was already situated in the bathtub. “That what that’s for, Tony,” he said.
“Oh,” Tony said, a little blankly.
Gibbs transferred the bag to the same hand that held the saran wrap, and then did something entirely too careful to be called hefting Tony to his feet. “Come on,” he repeated.
“There’ll be delicious gourmet dinner ready when you’re done,” Tim said wryly, indicated the noodle cups and the hotel electric kettle.
And maybe the world was tilting back into shape already, because Tony actually smiled as he said, mock-threateningly, “I’ll hold you to it, McChef.”
They’d talked about it. Tony was sure of that as he sat up - minding the stitches on his one hand - and then gingerly tested his feet on the floor. They’d talked about this morning, as evident by his alarm clock being set. They were going and he knew that, too, even before he looked up and saw the white shirt laid on top of his jeans; he was yet to understand how that was the Memorial Day dress code. Whoever had arranged his clothes - Gibbs, more than likely - had also dug through his bag for short socks that would not be a problem with his tennis-ball ankles. Tony put on his shoes, placed the sticker over the left breast of his shirt, and hobbled out of the room.
Tim was sitting on the couch, thumbing through the news on his smartphone with one hand and absentmindedly sipping from the coffee he had in the other. The paper cup, like the bags on the table, were Aroma. That explained the scent of breakfast, and Tim’s green shirt answered another question that Tony would rather not ask.
The room was flooded with light, the drapes to the balcony having been thrown wide open. Gibbs and Ziva were out by the railing with their coffees. Ziva, too, wore a white T and blue jeans, but Gibbs was in NCIS grey.
Tony wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
“Good morning,” Tim said.
Tony tore his gaze back to him. “Morning,” he said.
“Opted to sleep in, I see,” Tim continued.
“I guess.”
“Your cab will be here any minute,” Tim told him. “Go brush your hair; price of sleeping in is breakfast on the go.”
“Don’t begrudge a man his beauty sleep,” Tony said, automatically, and then asked: “Is he still being Nice Gibbs?”
Tim half-shook his head. “Back to normal with me,” he said, “still careful with Ziva. But frankly, I’d be more worried if he wasn’t. Go the bathroom, Tony, seriously.”
The protest was automatic, too: “It’s just quarter past nine. The siren’s not until eleven.”
“Memorial Day traffic, Tony,” Tim sighed, picking up his smartphone again. “Memorial Day traffic.”
The driver was content enough to hold a conversation with himself. That was good as neither of them was too talkative, Ziva staring out the window and Tony as well, except for when he was sneaking glances at her.
It was sunny and bright, but the temperatures were still in the low 70s, practically cold for Memorial Day, according to the driver. Tony had no objections; he remembered his sunglasses, barely, but he had no hat. Another reason why Israelis defaulted to white rather than black, he figured. It just made more sense when 60F was as cold as it got during daytime.
He’d seen the traffic, on the road, but he still didn’t quite realize there would be so many cars when they got to the town’s cemetery. The small parking lot was full to capacity - including one bus - and wherever Tony looked he could not see pavement under the parked cars. They arrived at quarter-to and, eyeing the rising slope to the cemetery, Tony thought that they would need that time. At least they weren’t quite the last ones, even if they were the last vehicle: people were still coming in by foot.
He didn’t quite expect Ziva to insert herself under his arm as he got out of the car, shouldering part his weight.
“Ziva,” he protested. He’d seen her move: her shoulders and hips still had enough trouble with her own weight.
She gave him an unreadable look, but said nothing.
Some people gave them no more notice than anyone else, as they climbed up the path, but yet others gave them a second look and a third, eyes going first to Ziva and then to him. Ziva put on her best oblivious act but Tony returned a small, polite smile to each.
Some smiled back; some even augmented the gesture with a nod.
The tension had been building for a while, nearly imperceptible to him on Thursday and quite palpable by Saturday night. He could only remember snapshots of the day before, but this - he’d been to funerals and he’d been to memorials, and this -
More than anything, it reminded him of his team in the week before the anniversary of Kate’s death, and of Ari’s: flinching as if waiting for some hammer of ill news to fall and knowing, simultaneously, that the worst had already happened and all that was left to fear was going on.
It was one thing to be one of four people in a room of forty flinching that way and another to stand in a crowd of over a hundred and imagine a state the size of New Jersey drawn to a halt, similarly waiting.
The siren came sudden and predictable like grief itself, cutting through the air more ferociously than he’d heard it the night before, shielded by the hospital walls. Some people straightened their backs, others looked down; Tony knew that all of those people had to have served, though only the honour guard were uniformed, but to his eyes they remained a mismatched bunch of civilians.
Ziva, who had unloaded him from her shoulder when they reached the military section and mingled with the crowd, put her hand in his.
When the siren came it had been harsh, but expected somehow; it felt jarring for it to ebb away. There was a strange kind of comfort in the deafening noise, in the safe space it granted for those memories that were brighter and sharper than waking life.
Ziva’s hand remained in his through the recitative rhythm of one prayer, and the heart-stopping cry of another. Her grip tightened when a man stepped forward from the crowd to make a speech, and Tony supposed that had to be someone she knew.
Only when the crowd stirred at the end of the service did it occur to Tony that they had forgotten the pebbles. No; Ziva’s right hand was closed over something. She must have picked them up before he got out of the car.
Ziva pulled them forward, weaving through the crowd with ease. She stopped abruptly at a few feet from the grave. The pebbles Yael and Tony had placed four days before were still there. Watching Ziva’s body language, Tony wondered if it was anything like visiting a grave at which you were long overdue, and discovering that someone else had recently left flowers.
She looked up at him, eyes soft with sorrow, for once, instead of frozen with it.
He nodded.
She let go of his hand to kneel by the grave.
Two plots down, a couple rose from having having bent down to the gravestone. That grave belonged to a classmates of Ziva’s and Yael’s, and the couple seemed about the right age to be of the same school year. They’d stood across from Tony and Ziva during the service; it was unlikely they hadn’t noticed Ziva. Tony tried to keep his expression neutral as the couple approached them.
The woman touched Ziva’s shoulder and said her name. Ziva rose, turned.
“Sivan?” she said. Her gaze flicked behind the woman - Sivan - to her husband. “Yishai.”
To Tony’s surprise - and by the looks of it, Ziva’s - both kissed her hello, once on each cheek.
Tony took half a step forward, but it was unnecessary: Ziva had already turned towards him as well. Sivan rose on tiptoe to hug him briefly hello, upon Ziva’s introduction - just “Tony,” no explanations - but Yishai thankfully limited himself to a handshake.
They were the only ones there from Ziva’s year, Tony thought. At least, they were the only ones there who allowed themselves that familiarity with Ziva, with the exception of the bereaved parents, both the couple who approached her and the two that she had approached. The bereaved parents, it seemed to him, hugged and kissed on the cheek all the younger people who approached them or who they approached, Tony himself included.
Tony had wondered how, by that day’s night, those people would watch the fireworks of Independence Day. Watching them, exchanging “hello”s and “I’m with Ziva”s and - oddly - the most “Toda”s he had ever heard, Tony thought he understood.
The drive to Ben Gurion was a blur; Tony’s mind was elsewhere. One moment they were driving down the hill, and the next airport security was at the cab’s open window, and he and Ziva had to account for their sidearms.
To Tony’s relief, their ride to the tarmac was already waiting for them at the gate of the international terminal. He’d stood in direct sunlight enough for one day. Really, after nearly five days in Israeli sunlight, he was more than ready to return to the May rains in DC.
Gibbs was waiting for them at the plane’s ramp. Inside, Tony could see the shadows of McGee and Lt. Weissman already strapped in for takeoff, as well as all their luggage.
“How are we doing?” Gibbs asked. The tone of his voice was the one reserved for Ziva, halfway between the one for Marines who were in trouble,and the one for Abby.
Standing at Tony’s shoulder, Ziva expelled a very long breath, and said: “Ready to go home.”
“Then let’s go,” Gibbs replied.
Pairing: gen
Rating: teen
Content Advisory: aftermath of violence, some post-trauma, hospital setting, memorial service
Summary: When a US Navy lieutenant goes missing, Team Gibbs must travel to Israel to find her. The investigation into what appears to be a terrorist act is complicated by prickly Shin-Beit operatives, a curious lack of helpful intel and the impending shadow of Memorial Day.
AO3 | DW | below:
“Wordlessly we have carried thee, oh Friendship,
Stubborn, silent and grey as thou are.
From the many and great nights of horror
Thou alone remained bright as a star.”
Friendship, Haim Gouri
Standing by the curtain railing that separated Dana Weissman’s bed from the others in the ER, Gibbs thought that she looked the part of the rescued hostage. Her complexion was the pallor of trauma and exhaustion; a mash of bruises on her cheek; dirt matted in her hair and on her clothes; and where her hands emerged from the thin hospital blanket he could see the bandages wrapped around her wrists, where - the nurses had told him - she was lucky not to have torn her veins open by struggling to break free. Her forearms were red and swollen halfway to her elbows, what with the untreated infection. There was more than one kind of an antibiotic in her IV.
Her eyes were closed when he pulled her curtain aside. She opened them at about five seconds.
“If you were a nurse,” she said, “you would’ve moved by now.”
“Agent Gibbs,” he said. Her pupils dilated in surprise. “NCIS.”
“Oh,” she said.
There were no chairs in the ER outside of the pre-triage waiting area. “May I?” he asked, indicating the short distance between the curtain rail and her bed. He knew a palm print when he saw it on someone’s flesh.
“Yes,” she said after a moment.
He moved slowly, careful to keep his hands where she could see them. “How are you feeling?” he asked as he approached, closing the curtain behind him for an illusion of privacy.
She tried for a smile. “Better now.”
“That’s good,” he said, carefully. She’d know and be angry if he used the little-kids voice with her, but he wanted her to know she did not need to put up a front. He offered her a half-smile of his own. “Otherwise?”
She thought about it a while. “Ask me in a week? Or tomorrow,” she amended, correctly interpreting his expression.
“Okay,” he said, keeping his voice in the same register as before. “I’d like for you to tell me what happened, but that can wait, too. The important thing is that we got you, now. Everything else can wait.”
Moments passed. Eventually, she sighed: “Isaiah.”
“Your brother?” he prompted.
“Yes,” she said. “He and his friends. I - something seemed wrong. I looked around. I listened. I understand more Hebrew than they realized. Wednesday morning - today is Sunday, right?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“The medic told me, and I asked the nurses, but I wasn’t sure -” Her hand twitched, and her face clouded.
“Hey,” he said, gently. “You’re not being silly.”
She huffed a little. That motion might’ve been her jutting her chin, if she was standing up. “Easier said,” she replied.
He let all of his sincerity into his voice as he said, “I know.” After a moment, he prompted: “Wednesday morning?”
“I was supposed to leave early. I delayed, to let Naomi take Dror and Moriyah to school. They didn’t need to be there for it. Then I confronted Isaiah, told him I knew what they’re up to. He - I -” Her face contorted; he could tell it was a struggle to not close her eyes. “I didn’t expect him to hit me,” she said in a low monotone. “He hit me - two, three times. The next thing I remember, I was there.”
By protocol, he should ask her where ‘there’ was. He didn’t. It wasn’t that urgent. “Thank you,” he told her.
She shook her head against her pillow. “Thank you.”
He could tell her that he’d done nothing, but that was not what she needed to hear. “Just doing our job,” he said, simply.
“Are they your people?” she asked. “Who were there today?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
She didn’t say it, but he could read it in her face, in the parting of her lips before she spoke: funny way to go about a rescue. “Thank them too, for me?” she asked.
“They’ll be here in a short while,” he told her. “You can tell them yourself.”
She nodded a little. “Will you stay with me until then?” Her open palm sank a little into the mattress - a tacit invitation.
“Yeah,” he said, carefully sitting down on the edge of her hospital bed. “Of course.”
In retrospect, Tim should have known better than to let the hospital staff close the curtain separating Tony’s and Ziva’s beds. No; he should have known better than to let the staff sit those two on separate beds, given the way Tony had been clinging to Ziva’s hand when they came off that military ambulance, Tony on a stretcher and her walking next to it. Tim wasn’t Gibbs and he wasn’t Ducky, though, and it didn’t occur to him how Tony would react to not having a direct line of sight on Ziva until it had already happened, and Tim had to push his way through what seemed to be a sudden congregation of all the ER staff to get to his teammates.
“It’s all right!” he shouted at everyone as he pulled at the curtain on instinct. “It’s all right! No, you do not need to that,” he added at the nurse who approached Tony with a syringe. “Tony!” he grabbed the man by his shoulders, careful to not block his line of sight on Ziva. “It’s all right, damn it! We’re in the hospital, they were just trying to be nice.”
Because talking sense to Tony was ever not completely futile.
Thankfully, that was when Ziva finally noticed what was going on. “Tony!” she snapped. “You’re causing a scene.”
Tony inhaled deeply, and then all but collapsed against Tim. “Ziva?”
“You’re an idiot,” she informed him.
Tim eased Tony back onto the bed and caught the eye of the nurse who seemed to be in charge. “Do not close that curtain again,” he told her.
She nodded once and said, wryly, “Duly noted.”
It surprised Gibbs none at all to find Tony and Ziva on the same narrow hospital bed. They had the curtain drawn open, which afforded them no privacy but allowed them to see around. Tony was sitting, leaning against the head of the bed with pillows stacked under his swollen ankles. Ziva had somehow maneuvered both of them so that she leaned against Tony to the left of Tony’s torso, her feet dangling off the side of the bed. She was holding a blue balled-up something - a sweatshirt, perhaps - close to her abdomen.
“Hi, Boss,” Tony said as Gibbs approached them.
“Hi,” Gibbs replied, putting the two orange juices on the bedside bureau, next to the white slab of something that just might be food. He reached for one of Tony’s gauze-wrapped hands. “How bad?”
“Left hand’s got some stitches,” Tony said. “Just a flesh wound, Boss.”
Gibbs said nothing. He pushed up the short sleeve of Tony’s shirt an inch or so, revealing the bruising underneath. There’d be the same under Tony’s pants, he knew, but neither Tony or he said anything.
Nor, for that matter, did Ziva. She kept her eyes on the wall or on the floor, anywhere but at another person.
Gibbs picked up one of the OJs. “Can you hold that?” he asked Tony, carefully arranging the man’s fingers around the plastic cup.
“Seriously, Boss,” Tony protested.
He still needed both his hands to hold the cup. Gibbs helped him get his arm around Ziva so that he could do so comfortably, but said nothing. He left the other cup on the bureau and sat on the edge of the bed, on Ziva’s other side.
“Hey,” he said carefully, in his softest voice. He reached with his right to tap her shoulder lightly. “Ziva.”
“I am fine,” she said, gaze still cast down. “I have no bruises or lacerations.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, irritably. “She didn’t try to get out of the zip ties.”
That told Gibbs all he needed to know. “Hey,” he said again. He pulled in his right and used his left instead, to pull her towards him. “C’mere.” Sounds that meant nothing, really, just enough for her to know that he was there, and not angry.
She moved with him, so it wasn’t completely like rearranging a particularly heavy doll. But she did not lean into him, either.
“Don’t say it was nothing,” he told her, trying to get her to cradle against him. “It wasn’t to me. This is not all right, Ziva,” he added; at least she laid her head on his shoulder on her own, even if the gingerly motion screamed of caution. “This is not all right,” he whispered into her hair.
Her hand let go of the balled-up something suddenly, blue fabric spilling across her lap, revealing the white-printed cursive Hebrew. Gibbs had never seen that hoodie before. Not knowing where it came from but understanding that it was of importance, now, he only straightened it to see that it didn’t fall, but otherwise left it in place.
It was the right thing to do, because finally she let go, letting her weight rest against him. He heard her swallow, heard the catch in each breath.
He tightened his hold. “Oh, Ziva,” he whispered into her hair. Oh, daughter, he formed the words, barely even a breath.
Each of her own breaths came quicker, now; but that was healthy tension in her body.
It wasn’t all right, not at all. It had been worse, though, and one day - one day - it would be all right.
Not knowing what drug had been used to knock them out, and having reason to suspect that it still hasn’t cleared from their system, the ER doctor who’d seen them for all of sixty seconds had prescribed NSAIDs. Some NSAIDs, Tony discovered, were no less effective than the Good Drugs, messed with one’s head none at all (for which he was grateful) and were actually supposed to do something for bruised and inflamed tissues. NSAIDs still had side effects, though, and a bad interaction between what they were prescribed and the knock-out drug had sent Ziva sprinting to the bathroom.
That was how Tony was on his own when Yael came.
“I hate you,” he told her. His voice sounded flat, monotone, but he was too tired and too pissed to care.
“I figured you’d say that,” she said as she sat down on the bed that was supposed to be Ziva’s.
“You knew,” he accused.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“You knew,” he repeated. “You hoped we’d get kidnapped, didn’t you? You set us up.”
“I didn’t share what I knew,” she agreed. “It allowed the quickest and safest way of rescuing your lieutenant, as well as effective means to incriminate the entire Ben-Ezra group in a single strike.”
He nearly repeated that he hated her, but thought better of it. “You know,” he said, conversationally, “I used to be a cop. You remind me of some husbands and fathers I ran into, then.”
“The ones who bring their wives and children flowers or chocolate after beating them up, and say they’re sorry,” she said without blinking. “But you genuinely needed the sugar, and I am not sorry.”
“I’m surprised you’re not trying it anyway,” he said. “Obviously you don’t mind lying.”
She smiled. “You’re not going to trust me, no matter what I do,” she began.
“Damn right I won’t,” he interrupted.
“You were never going to trust me, no matter what I did,” she continued, “if for no other reason then because Ziva would have told you to, and because your boss is too smart for that. So I decided I wasn’t even going to try. I might as well be comfortable.”
“Yeah? And how are you comfortable?” he challenged.
“Contradictory,” she said simply. “I lie, most of the time. I say the truth when I care enough for it. Ziva and I used to be best friends, since we were little and until her work with Mossad took her out of her country for months and years at a time. I want what’s best for her, whether either of you believe me or not. And right now, you guys are what’s best for her.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. “If you wanted what’s best for her, you would never -” His throat closed up. The scents of sweat, blood and stale Caf-Pow suffocated him, desert sunlight somehow in his eyes in the fluorescent-lit room.
“Do you think she didn’t know?” Yael asked, oddly gentle. “She knew, Tony, before she ever set foot in that house. She knew enough to understand my game plan. She knew enough to understand the risk. She went ahead with it anyway. And as for everything else,” she continued, while Tony still struggled with a too-tight throat, “that’s why she’s with you, and that’s why she’s better off that way.” She shrugged, deliberately. “I am what I am; I’m no less angry than anyone else. But alive on the other side of the world, that’s still alive. I no longer ask for more.”
“Why should I believe you?” he asked.
Very plainly, she replied: “I don’t know.”
Gibbs was with Dana - again - and Tim sat on the bed that theoretically was Ziva’s and tried hard to not fidget.
Then Ziva untangled herself and stood up. Tony, of course, grabbed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Tim sat a little straighter at the edge of panic in Tony’s voice.
“Standing,” Ziva snapped. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.”
Eight - “The siren,” Tim blurted, standing up himself.
Ziva was already walking towards the aisle, where - Tim could see - everyone who could stand on their feet were gathering, forming a solid line of sight with each other throughout the entire ER.
“Damn,” Tony muttered, carefully pushing himself up. “Tim -”
Tim helped Tony up, supporting part of his weight, before Tony could say the words help me. Together they walked to Ziva’s side. She glanced at them once, but that was all. She even ignored Tony’s hand.
The room was tense; Tim could feel it. Maybe the tension had been there all along, slowly building up since the morning, but Tim had been too preoccupied with worry for his team to notice. The stillness of waiting rattled him enough that he wished for the siren to come.
Until it did.
He didn’t expect Anat to wait for them at the hotel lobby but there she was, the only person in a lobby as deserted as the streets outside. Gibbs gave her a piercing look and Tim a bewildered one, both of which she purposefully ignored as she hefted her Disney-printed carrier bag and caught up with them.
No one said a word through the elevator ride, the walk down the hall and as they filed in. Anat unloaded her bag while Tony carefully lowered himself onto the couch. The large juice bottles and noodle cups Tony understood; the saran wrap, too, once he gave it a second thought. This was not his first injury. Then she produced a stack of white t-shirts and a few rectangular stickers with red flowers over a blue-to-white gradient.
“What’re these?” he asked.
“For tomorrow,” she said, even as she extracted a folding plastic stool from her bag. “I didn’t know if you had any.” She sounded oddly apologetic.
Ziva raised her eyes from the shirts and stickers to meet Anat’s. Anat nodded at her.
“If I thanked you right now,” Tim asked Anat, “you’ll tell me I’m an idiot, right?”
“I like that about you,” she said, and - to Tim’s surprise too, by the looks of it - rose on tiptoe to hug him.
“Hey,” Tony said automatically, “don’t I get a hug?”
He didn’t expect her to come over, when she’d let go of Tim, bend down and hug him, too.
When she straightened up again she looked at Ziva and gestured with her hand. Ziva looked down at her shirt, pulled at it, and then looked back up at Anat and nodded.
Of course, Tony realized, watching the two women turn to the bathroom and even as he himself pretended that Gibbs did not just say Let me just get Tony’s things. His own injuries were the result of his own stubbornness and panic, but Ziva’s joints still carried mementos of Somalia. Ziva was young and fit, and a year and a half later these injuries only made themselves known on bad days, but being hogtied for six hours more than counted as such. Ziva may need help getting in and out of her shirts for a while.
“Tony.” Gibbs touched his shoulder, shaking him out of his guilty reverie. He held the saran wrap in one hand and Tony’s oversized toiletry bag in the other. “Come on. You’ll feel better after.”
“I’d really -” Tony began.
Gibbs shook his head and then tilted it towards the other bathroom, where the stool was already situated in the bathtub. “That what that’s for, Tony,” he said.
“Oh,” Tony said, a little blankly.
Gibbs transferred the bag to the same hand that held the saran wrap, and then did something entirely too careful to be called hefting Tony to his feet. “Come on,” he repeated.
“There’ll be delicious gourmet dinner ready when you’re done,” Tim said wryly, indicated the noodle cups and the hotel electric kettle.
And maybe the world was tilting back into shape already, because Tony actually smiled as he said, mock-threateningly, “I’ll hold you to it, McChef.”
They’d talked about it. Tony was sure of that as he sat up - minding the stitches on his one hand - and then gingerly tested his feet on the floor. They’d talked about this morning, as evident by his alarm clock being set. They were going and he knew that, too, even before he looked up and saw the white shirt laid on top of his jeans; he was yet to understand how that was the Memorial Day dress code. Whoever had arranged his clothes - Gibbs, more than likely - had also dug through his bag for short socks that would not be a problem with his tennis-ball ankles. Tony put on his shoes, placed the sticker over the left breast of his shirt, and hobbled out of the room.
Tim was sitting on the couch, thumbing through the news on his smartphone with one hand and absentmindedly sipping from the coffee he had in the other. The paper cup, like the bags on the table, were Aroma. That explained the scent of breakfast, and Tim’s green shirt answered another question that Tony would rather not ask.
The room was flooded with light, the drapes to the balcony having been thrown wide open. Gibbs and Ziva were out by the railing with their coffees. Ziva, too, wore a white T and blue jeans, but Gibbs was in NCIS grey.
Tony wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
“Good morning,” Tim said.
Tony tore his gaze back to him. “Morning,” he said.
“Opted to sleep in, I see,” Tim continued.
“I guess.”
“Your cab will be here any minute,” Tim told him. “Go brush your hair; price of sleeping in is breakfast on the go.”
“Don’t begrudge a man his beauty sleep,” Tony said, automatically, and then asked: “Is he still being Nice Gibbs?”
Tim half-shook his head. “Back to normal with me,” he said, “still careful with Ziva. But frankly, I’d be more worried if he wasn’t. Go the bathroom, Tony, seriously.”
The protest was automatic, too: “It’s just quarter past nine. The siren’s not until eleven.”
“Memorial Day traffic, Tony,” Tim sighed, picking up his smartphone again. “Memorial Day traffic.”
The driver was content enough to hold a conversation with himself. That was good as neither of them was too talkative, Ziva staring out the window and Tony as well, except for when he was sneaking glances at her.
It was sunny and bright, but the temperatures were still in the low 70s, practically cold for Memorial Day, according to the driver. Tony had no objections; he remembered his sunglasses, barely, but he had no hat. Another reason why Israelis defaulted to white rather than black, he figured. It just made more sense when 60F was as cold as it got during daytime.
He’d seen the traffic, on the road, but he still didn’t quite realize there would be so many cars when they got to the town’s cemetery. The small parking lot was full to capacity - including one bus - and wherever Tony looked he could not see pavement under the parked cars. They arrived at quarter-to and, eyeing the rising slope to the cemetery, Tony thought that they would need that time. At least they weren’t quite the last ones, even if they were the last vehicle: people were still coming in by foot.
He didn’t quite expect Ziva to insert herself under his arm as he got out of the car, shouldering part his weight.
“Ziva,” he protested. He’d seen her move: her shoulders and hips still had enough trouble with her own weight.
She gave him an unreadable look, but said nothing.
Some people gave them no more notice than anyone else, as they climbed up the path, but yet others gave them a second look and a third, eyes going first to Ziva and then to him. Ziva put on her best oblivious act but Tony returned a small, polite smile to each.
Some smiled back; some even augmented the gesture with a nod.
The tension had been building for a while, nearly imperceptible to him on Thursday and quite palpable by Saturday night. He could only remember snapshots of the day before, but this - he’d been to funerals and he’d been to memorials, and this -
More than anything, it reminded him of his team in the week before the anniversary of Kate’s death, and of Ari’s: flinching as if waiting for some hammer of ill news to fall and knowing, simultaneously, that the worst had already happened and all that was left to fear was going on.
It was one thing to be one of four people in a room of forty flinching that way and another to stand in a crowd of over a hundred and imagine a state the size of New Jersey drawn to a halt, similarly waiting.
The siren came sudden and predictable like grief itself, cutting through the air more ferociously than he’d heard it the night before, shielded by the hospital walls. Some people straightened their backs, others looked down; Tony knew that all of those people had to have served, though only the honour guard were uniformed, but to his eyes they remained a mismatched bunch of civilians.
Ziva, who had unloaded him from her shoulder when they reached the military section and mingled with the crowd, put her hand in his.
When the siren came it had been harsh, but expected somehow; it felt jarring for it to ebb away. There was a strange kind of comfort in the deafening noise, in the safe space it granted for those memories that were brighter and sharper than waking life.
Ziva’s hand remained in his through the recitative rhythm of one prayer, and the heart-stopping cry of another. Her grip tightened when a man stepped forward from the crowd to make a speech, and Tony supposed that had to be someone she knew.
Only when the crowd stirred at the end of the service did it occur to Tony that they had forgotten the pebbles. No; Ziva’s right hand was closed over something. She must have picked them up before he got out of the car.
Ziva pulled them forward, weaving through the crowd with ease. She stopped abruptly at a few feet from the grave. The pebbles Yael and Tony had placed four days before were still there. Watching Ziva’s body language, Tony wondered if it was anything like visiting a grave at which you were long overdue, and discovering that someone else had recently left flowers.
She looked up at him, eyes soft with sorrow, for once, instead of frozen with it.
He nodded.
She let go of his hand to kneel by the grave.
Two plots down, a couple rose from having having bent down to the gravestone. That grave belonged to a classmates of Ziva’s and Yael’s, and the couple seemed about the right age to be of the same school year. They’d stood across from Tony and Ziva during the service; it was unlikely they hadn’t noticed Ziva. Tony tried to keep his expression neutral as the couple approached them.
The woman touched Ziva’s shoulder and said her name. Ziva rose, turned.
“Sivan?” she said. Her gaze flicked behind the woman - Sivan - to her husband. “Yishai.”
To Tony’s surprise - and by the looks of it, Ziva’s - both kissed her hello, once on each cheek.
Tony took half a step forward, but it was unnecessary: Ziva had already turned towards him as well. Sivan rose on tiptoe to hug him briefly hello, upon Ziva’s introduction - just “Tony,” no explanations - but Yishai thankfully limited himself to a handshake.
They were the only ones there from Ziva’s year, Tony thought. At least, they were the only ones there who allowed themselves that familiarity with Ziva, with the exception of the bereaved parents, both the couple who approached her and the two that she had approached. The bereaved parents, it seemed to him, hugged and kissed on the cheek all the younger people who approached them or who they approached, Tony himself included.
Tony had wondered how, by that day’s night, those people would watch the fireworks of Independence Day. Watching them, exchanging “hello”s and “I’m with Ziva”s and - oddly - the most “Toda”s he had ever heard, Tony thought he understood.
The drive to Ben Gurion was a blur; Tony’s mind was elsewhere. One moment they were driving down the hill, and the next airport security was at the cab’s open window, and he and Ziva had to account for their sidearms.
To Tony’s relief, their ride to the tarmac was already waiting for them at the gate of the international terminal. He’d stood in direct sunlight enough for one day. Really, after nearly five days in Israeli sunlight, he was more than ready to return to the May rains in DC.
Gibbs was waiting for them at the plane’s ramp. Inside, Tony could see the shadows of McGee and Lt. Weissman already strapped in for takeoff, as well as all their luggage.
“How are we doing?” Gibbs asked. The tone of his voice was the one reserved for Ziva, halfway between the one for Marines who were in trouble,and the one for Abby.
Standing at Tony’s shoulder, Ziva expelled a very long breath, and said: “Ready to go home.”
“Then let’s go,” Gibbs replied.