"We'll always have..." NCIS vignettes. They're fun to write.
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE…
NCIS story… I seriously don’t own this. I mean, you’re not paying me for it. I might have to pay you to read it. It’s been so long since I wrote ANYTHING. Seminary really sucked the “write for fun” out of me. And yet… here I am.
1
Paris
“I do not know why coming to this city again was so important to you. We could have met in Washington, Tel Aviv, Outer Mongolia.” Her back was turned, but he could somehow see her lips purse.
“The hotel would have been much less expensive.”
“Because the line is ‘we’ll always have Paris,’ Ziva, not ‘we’ll always have Washington, Tel Aviv or Outer Mongolia.” He thought about it a second. “Outer Mongolia could be cool. Interesting. But that’s just not the way things are. Sort of like the line is ‘play it, Sam,’ not ‘play it again, Sam.’”
She did swivel her head towards him this time, brow creased above melted chocolate eyes with unrelenting, inescapable depths. “Who is Sam? What is he playing?”
“Oh, seriously.” Tony laughs and claps his hands behind his head. “I am not rising to the bait. You have known me for ten years, Miss David. You don’t get to tell me you don’t know who Sam, Rick and Ilsa are.”
She put on the face he called “thoughtful Ziva,” which could shift at any instant into “snarky” or “snappish” Ziva, depending on how the wind blew. They were all pretty severely cute. “I know that you recently, briefly had a cat named Rick Blaine. He could not stand your company and fled. It was very tragic.”
He turned and buried his face in the, she was right, all too expensive silk pillowcase. “You’re killing me! I spend a decade of my life, my prime years of manhood, trying to teach you about the beauty of American film and six months back in the desert strip away all my hard work.”
“I cannot hear you with your mouth full of pillow feathers.” She contradicted herself, an instant later. “And Tel Aviv is not a desert. It is a beautiful city, much prettier than Washington, Philadelphia or Baltimore.” She wrinkled her nose. “I had forgotten how much nicer cinnamon and cardamom in a market smelled instead of diesel and cheesesteak.”
“None of them have anything on this place.” He looked away from the pillow to regard a slender, olive toned tongue of flame in soft wool sleep pants and a baby-blue Cooke Monster pajama top, one bare, delicate foot propped up on the bed revealing five toes cleaner and cuter than he thought that he, a man without a foot fetish, could ever be capable of appreciating. “And not a one of them has anything on a you, schweetheart.”
“Are you having a stroke?”
“What?”
“Your voice went all funny for a moment. I was worried that it might be nonological.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You know…” she tapped her palm against the bedspread. “Having to do with your nerves. Or brain, probably, in your case.”
“Oh. Neurological.” He laughed. “It’s funny how much I miss having to deal with a partner that’s got aphasia. The new one just sits on desks and climbs walls.”
“Is she a gargoyle?”
“Nah, just… her own little brand of NSA crazy. We’re keeping her, though. We like her. Sort of like a… weird pet.”
“You changed the subject. You still haven’t told me what happened to your voice.”
“I was doing my Bogey, Ziva. You should feel honored. I don’t pull out my Bogey for everybody.”
“I am certain this is why you are not yet in prison, Tony.” She giggled. “It’s okay. I’m glad that you save your Bogey for me, even if I don’t know what it is.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “You. Are. Killing. Me.”
She nodded, smiled, and leaned over, face now inches from his. He felt her breath whisper against his cheeks and lips. It smelled sort of like that cinnamon and cardamom she was talking about earlier, maybe just a little hint of sandalwood underneath. “I could, you know. There are many excellent improvised weapons in this room.”
“You know you’re not going to, no matter how much I aggravate you.” He drew her close to his side. She nestled under his arm, let her head rest against his shoulder. The nest of shimmering, nearly black curls obscured her face but did nothing to hide its almost ethereal beauty.
“And just how,” she said into his chest, “are you so certain of that, Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo?”
“Because if you killed me you’d have to cuddle with a corpse, and you’re not into that. Jimmy, sure. But not you.”
“You know, he has worked with you for over ten years, now. When are you going to stop picking on poor Jimmy so much?”
“As soon as I stop making fun of McGiggles?”
“Never, then.” She traced a finger around the outline of his jaw. “I think that teasing is the way you show affection, since you are pretty emotionally stunted otherwise.” She smiled; it lit the whole more than morning could ever hope. “Thus McGee is ‘Elf Lord,’ your new partner is a weird pet who climbs, you make fun of my little accidentalies and Jimmy is…” she wrinkled her nose, “a necrophiliac gremlin, I suppose.”
“That wife of his though… whoa…” Tony mimed whisking the air around his face. “She is definitely not losing any body heat… unless you can be zombie hot, that is.”
“There you go doing it again,” she said. “Whenever someone comes close to something that is important to the core of you it gets derailed into something silly… or gross. Or both.” She considered it a moment and then nodded. “Yes, usually both.”
“That is so totally the opposite of what is true. I mean…” He waved his hands around, “You are such a crazy lady, talking crazy talk, that you if the truth was on the North Pole then you’d be a little penguin, swimming around.” He mimed it.
She couldn’t help but giggle. “Penguins live at the South Pole, Very Special Agent.”
“That was the point, Ziva.”
“That was also my point. Or, if you will let me explain,” she put a finger to his lips, when he started to protest and shifted her weight, holding him fast against the mattress with long, lithe muscles that bore hidden strength, “when we first met you were avoiding grief by fantasizing about your recently deceased friend and co-worker dressed as a naughty Catholic school girl.” She paused and considered, before continuing. “I mean that she was dressed as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl in your fantasy, not that you were fantasizing about her while dressed as one. I do not wish to be unclear. When I caught you at it, you pretended that you were having phone sex. In the middle of the afternoon, in a crowded office. While you were engaged in a manhunt for that very co-worker’s murderer.” She shook her head. “If that is not classic avoidant behavior-and that is correct, I asked Ducky about it once-then I am surely a goat.”
Tony wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his mental health had become such fodder water cooler discussion among his companions. “So, uh, what are we doing tonight?”
“Well,” she said, “we could keep talking about this, which is uncomfortable and not a lot of fun for either of us, even if it might be important. Or we could lie here and catch up, and then go eat a very expensive dinner which you will let me pay for since you bought the tickets for the trip, and then we will come back here and I will kiss you very soundly and you will enjoy it very much.”
“I kind of like that idea.” He enfolded her in his arms again, enjoying how their hearts were falling into a singular rhythm, one like they had seemed to beat in for years. “I’m a simple guy, Ziva, simple things make me happy.”
Her lips curled in a wicked little smirk. “Considering how happy you make me, Tony, then I must be a very simple girl indeed.”
“I don’t know if that was an insult wrapped in a compliment, the other way around or just a result of the fact that English is, like, your thirtieth language.”
“Hey, hey,” she slapped playfully at his chest. It still stung. “It is not my thirtieth language, it is my twenty-seventh language at the most.”
“What’s gonna be your thirtieth?”
She paused to mime considering it carefully. “I think that I will take up Klingon. McGee is always going on about how he and Abby can use it to communicate in secret. I would love to know what those two talk about.”
“Bats, skulls, coffins, rocket-belts and Elf Lords, I’ll bet.”
“I do not doubt.” She sighed. “What are we going to be, Tony? After this vacation, I mean… when you go back to Baltimore and I return to Tel Aviv.”
“I don’t know, Ziva, I really don’t.” He pressed a kiss through the top of her dark, massed curls. “I know what I want, but…”
“I do sometimes, but sometimes, Tony…” she exhaled, sharply. “Sometimes I just do not, or even who I am, anymore.”
“You’re Ziva David, my bona fide badass ninja assassin, and I wouldn’t have you any other way. Just as long as you’re not just a green dot on Facebook, anymore… that silent, awful, staring green dot.”
She offered him a weak smile. “I am going to have to stop leaving my chat open while I go and microwave popcorn, I think.”
He chuckled. She felt in his throat, deep in his chest. “Well, you’ll always have a snack, at least… and we’ll always have Paris.”
“You are right… no one can take that from us.”
“I could probably steal your popcorn away.”
“Only if you no longer valued your life, limbs or genitals.”
“Well in that case, I’ll just have to taste it secondhand.” He let his mouth cover hers for a long, slow, sweltering moment. They didn’t talk for a while.
2
Bewitched
She snuggled into the crook of his arm on the couch, long legs crossed under her. A light coating of butter gleamed on her fingers in the television’s pale, flickering firelight. “I do not know why this is so important. It is just one show from when you were a little boy. There are hundreds of shows and movies that you love that I have not seen.”
“This is Bewitched, Ziva.” He let his fingers twine in the tousled ponytail draped over his bicep.
“Everything I know about romance probably comes from this. Everything I know about cool…” He paused to consider. “Well, my idea of cool is closer to Mad Men, but at least it sort of fits.”
“Mad men? There are insane people in this?”
“Well, yeah, but I mean Madison Avenue.” He grinned, gestured towards the ceiling with his free hand.
“Y’know, the advertising giants of the nineteen sixties. Don Draper. Christina Hendricks in a way too tight dress.”
She pinched the little bit of flesh she could access on his hard, muscular flank.
“Ow! Hey…”
“Your mind is wandering.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But, y’know… Mad Men. Emmy award winning. You’ve got to hear me talking about it with McGeek.”
“I think that McGee finds Game of Thrones much more interesting.”
“Of course he would; he’s an Elf Lord.”
“There are no elves on Game of Thrones.”
He laughed. “You are clueless about the greatest America drama since Toma but are apparently an expert in HBO’s gore-soaked incest festival.” He paused. “Incestival?”
She popped a piece of the Orville Redenbacher’s into her mouth with all too quick fingers and chewed a few second before answering. “I suppose, Tony, that Tim and I are just more interested in history than you are.”
“There are dragons, Ziva. That’s not history. It’s… dragons. And incest.”
“That is really bothering you, is it not?”
“Not as much as you having never seen Bewitched.”
She squirmed, seemed uncomfortable for an instant before it passed. “My childhood was not like yours, Tony.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re Israeli.” He gestured and held forth, as if addressing a congregation or theatre full of admirers. “It’s Bewitched, Ziva. Darin and Samantha. Endora, Aunt Clara, Uncle Arthur. Larry and Louise Tate, for God’s sake. It’s for the whole world.”
“I don’t mean because I am Israeli, Tony.”
“What do you mean, then?”
She counted on her fingers, slowly and deliberately for his benefit. “I mean that I have not seen my mother in almost a decade, my sister was exploded by a bomb when she was sixteen, my brother-who I killed, don’t forget-was a terrorist and my father was a cold, distant man who raised me to be, as you put it, a ‘ninja-assassin warrior chick.’” She sighed, unsure quite how to continue. The lighthearted banter about one of Tony’s old shows… well… this was not how it was supposed to turn out, right? Kissing would have been a better end, definitely. “My childhood was not like yours in America, but it wasn’t exactly a typical Israeli childhood, either. It was…” she struggled for a word. “I suppose that if you were charitable towards my father you would call it ‘strange.’ Abusive might be another term, if you did not feel such charity.”
“Wow…” He toyed idly with a dark curl, turning it over and over between his index and middle fingers.
“That got heavy.”
“Like a lead baboon.”
“I’m glad for one thing, at least.”
“What?”
He kissed the top of her head, sucked in the smells of sandalwood and cinnamon. “You’re my ninja-assassin warrior chick, at least.”
“Yes, sometimes I just wish I could be your something else.”
“How about my witch?”
She raised her eyebrow at him. “Have you gone crazy for Coco Puffs?”
Instead of answering he sang, in a cheesy, affected voice-or maybe that was just Tony’s singing voice-loudly enough that she had to cover her ears. “You witch, you witch, one thing is for sure… that stuff you pitch, just hasn’t got a cure.”
“Gah! If you stop singing I will be your whatever you need me to and watch whatever silly shows and movies you can dig up on DVD.” She nodded like a bobble head with huge, dark eyes. “I can live with anything that is not that racket you were making.”
“Okay, okay.” They settled against one another, again. He pressed the play button and theme soared out of the surround-sound speakers he was so, so proud of. Ziva almost recognized the tune as the same one that he had been butchering only moments before. This, she reflected ruefully, had the makings of a long night.
3
Each Other’s Backs
Abigail Borin seemed to be made up entirely of long, long legs, shiny black cowboy boots and a halo of blazing auburn hair. She popped up from her hiding spot beside Tony and unleashed a quick series of five shots from her service 9mm and blistering, north Virginia accented invective at the gentlemen who were, at present, doing their best to perforate the two agents. She dropped back into her crouch, while they returned the favor, and jammed another magazine into her pistol.
Tony took a view shots of his own while they reloaded, and then dropped before the terrorists in question could give him a really awful haircut. “Y’know all that swearing probably isn’t impressing our extremist friends out there.”
She rolled her mossy-green eyes. “Listen, DiNozzo; we’re slightly outnumbered, significantly outgunned and our only saving grace is that they don’t have a god-damned rocket launcher. I can either go out whimpering or swearing. I choose the later.”
He chuckled, didn’t really mean it. “That’s what the hardass sergeant would say in a war movie before whoosh! Boom!” He gesticulated, proffering a possibility of what might happen.
“Thank God we’re not in a movie.” She emptied another magazine, hoping against hope that a bullet would find flesh, at least suppressing their fire a moment. Tony growled deep in his throat. They were going to run out of ammo way before these clowns did. “We’ve already got to worry about their third man flanking us. He’s been suspiciously quiet for too long.”
“Maybe we hit him?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, DiNozzo, because I haven’t exactly done much better, but…” she shrugged. “We haven’t hit shit all day.” She glanced around one of the shipping containers they had taken cover behind, got lucky enough not to lose her head to a 7.62x39 round. “I think you oughta watch our backs. I mean, his plan is to pop out behind us, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I figure we’ve got a lot better chance of seeing tomorrow if we don’t let him do that.”
“No kidding.” He shifted slightly to watch the rows of containers behind them, waiting for the shadows surrounding one to disgorge a furious Middle Eastern man with a Kalashnikov. “You gonna be okay to keep the other two busy all by yourself?”
She barked short, staccato laughter. It mingled with the gunfire ringing over their heads. “I figure I can’t do much worse than we already have, right? This hasn’t been a day of glory for NCIS or CGIS.”
He turned, pressed his back against the shipping container, and scanned the outlets and alleys around them. “Godspeed, Agent Borin.”
“Gah, when will you people learn there is room in the world for more than one Abby?” She sprang up and sent a few short, loud 9mm pops toward their enemies, and then dropped fast right as their AK-47s began stripping the air raw and naked. He saw her cap fly off, before the descent, and steeled himself for another Kate. Except this one was laughing like a loon. She reached down to the floor and picked it up, hooking her finger through the hole in its bill. “Shows you what I get for wearing my cap like a gangsta.”
“Jeez, woman… I know you and Gibbs have that crazy, Old West vibe going on, but could you tone it down for just a minute, please?”
She shook her head, waiting for the gunfire to subside before returning it. “You do have a point. Being in a rootin’, tootin’ cowboy shootout looks much more fun for John Wayne.”
“Well, that’s because he’s the Duke. He’s different from us.”
She popped up to shoot and cursed, to herself, this time. One of the men was up, too. She might hit him, yeah, but he was damn sure gonna hit her. Tony watched Agent Borin’s eyes widen, her life probably flashing before them, and swing towards the gunman. There wasn’t any way that either of them could get him in time. They both steeled for a string of chattering assault rifle fire.
It didn’t come, just the singular, lonely whip-crack of a high powered rifle. The terrorist looked puzzled for a second or two. It would have been comical, Tony thought, save the quarter sized red hole on his forehead. Yeah, he’s just puzzling and puzzling til his puzzler gets sore, he thought, and then felt almost kind of ashamed. The stupidest things hopped into your head, they really did.
The gunman crumpled, almost like a guy just sitting down to relax in his favorite recliner. Except for the blood pouring down his face, yeah, just like that. Everyone held still. Borin’s green eyes flickered from side to side. “What the hell is going on?”
“If we’re confused then I guess he is, too. Every Who down in Whoville.” Yep, apparently Dr. Seuss had taken his brain hostage, today.
The shadows they were watching for the third man-he was watching for the third man-disclosed Ziva David. She smiled and wriggled her fingers at Tony by way of greeting. “I think that it is pretty obvious what has happened.” She nodded towards the other woman. “Agent Borin. I hope that you are well.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough, I guess, for getting shot at. Passable. Now what the hell is going on?”
Tony laughed. They could hear the clatter of the last remaining terrorist dropping his gun and calling out his surrender in heavily accented English. “I think that it’s pretty obvious what has happened, Agent Abby. My dear ninja has somehow disposed of two men in a single gunshot.” He pursed his lips. “While not in the vicinity of one of those men. And not carrying a gun, apparently.”
“Agent Abby.” Borin shook her head. Wisps of auburn floated around her face. “I guess I’ll take it. And a rescue that doesn’t make any sense. Welcome all the same.”
“That is a good question, come to think of it.” Tony put his gun away and tented his fingers. “How, exactly, did you manage all that?”
Ziva rolled her eyes. “Because I did not kill both men. I apprehended the one trying to flank you with this.” She slipped what Tim called her d’ktagh-it was some kind of Klingon ceremonial dagger, he didn’t ask-out of a leather sheath on her belt and dangled it in front of them. It gleamed in the harsh interior lighting, clean as always, but her fingers bore telltale rusty stains. “He did not come quietly.” She thought a moment. “Well, he began to protest but became very quiet only seconds later.”
“And the guy we saw shot in the head by a .45 full metal jacket round?”
“I think it pretty obvious that Gibbs was above us, waiting in the wings like Bad Man.”
“Batman, Ziva. It’s Batman that swoops in and delivers justice.”
Borin tucked her hair under her cap. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure that the Bad Man protects Penelope Worth’s ranch.” She shook her head. “It’s been a John Wayne kinda day, I guess.”
“Well,” Ziva said, “the strange man that dresses up like Dracula that I hear McGee and Abby talking about seems like a pretty bad man to me.”
“Whatever. Soon as we get this paperwork handled we’re all going out for some beers.” She raised her hand up over their cover to wave and shouted, “Gibbs too!” She cracked her knuckles. Sometimes… well a lot of the time… almost dying could make you goofy, and nothing brought on those giggles, the kind that threatened to start and never stop, like a hole in the bill of your cap. “PBR, Guinness, hell, Nesher Malt, pick your poison. I’m buying.”
NCIS story… I seriously don’t own this. I mean, you’re not paying me for it. I might have to pay you to read it. It’s been so long since I wrote ANYTHING. Seminary really sucked the “write for fun” out of me. And yet… here I am.
1
Paris
“I do not know why coming to this city again was so important to you. We could have met in Washington, Tel Aviv, Outer Mongolia.” Her back was turned, but he could somehow see her lips purse.
“The hotel would have been much less expensive.”
“Because the line is ‘we’ll always have Paris,’ Ziva, not ‘we’ll always have Washington, Tel Aviv or Outer Mongolia.” He thought about it a second. “Outer Mongolia could be cool. Interesting. But that’s just not the way things are. Sort of like the line is ‘play it, Sam,’ not ‘play it again, Sam.’”
She did swivel her head towards him this time, brow creased above melted chocolate eyes with unrelenting, inescapable depths. “Who is Sam? What is he playing?”
“Oh, seriously.” Tony laughs and claps his hands behind his head. “I am not rising to the bait. You have known me for ten years, Miss David. You don’t get to tell me you don’t know who Sam, Rick and Ilsa are.”
She put on the face he called “thoughtful Ziva,” which could shift at any instant into “snarky” or “snappish” Ziva, depending on how the wind blew. They were all pretty severely cute. “I know that you recently, briefly had a cat named Rick Blaine. He could not stand your company and fled. It was very tragic.”
He turned and buried his face in the, she was right, all too expensive silk pillowcase. “You’re killing me! I spend a decade of my life, my prime years of manhood, trying to teach you about the beauty of American film and six months back in the desert strip away all my hard work.”
“I cannot hear you with your mouth full of pillow feathers.” She contradicted herself, an instant later. “And Tel Aviv is not a desert. It is a beautiful city, much prettier than Washington, Philadelphia or Baltimore.” She wrinkled her nose. “I had forgotten how much nicer cinnamon and cardamom in a market smelled instead of diesel and cheesesteak.”
“None of them have anything on this place.” He looked away from the pillow to regard a slender, olive toned tongue of flame in soft wool sleep pants and a baby-blue Cooke Monster pajama top, one bare, delicate foot propped up on the bed revealing five toes cleaner and cuter than he thought that he, a man without a foot fetish, could ever be capable of appreciating. “And not a one of them has anything on a you, schweetheart.”
“Are you having a stroke?”
“What?”
“Your voice went all funny for a moment. I was worried that it might be nonological.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You know…” she tapped her palm against the bedspread. “Having to do with your nerves. Or brain, probably, in your case.”
“Oh. Neurological.” He laughed. “It’s funny how much I miss having to deal with a partner that’s got aphasia. The new one just sits on desks and climbs walls.”
“Is she a gargoyle?”
“Nah, just… her own little brand of NSA crazy. We’re keeping her, though. We like her. Sort of like a… weird pet.”
“You changed the subject. You still haven’t told me what happened to your voice.”
“I was doing my Bogey, Ziva. You should feel honored. I don’t pull out my Bogey for everybody.”
“I am certain this is why you are not yet in prison, Tony.” She giggled. “It’s okay. I’m glad that you save your Bogey for me, even if I don’t know what it is.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “You. Are. Killing. Me.”
She nodded, smiled, and leaned over, face now inches from his. He felt her breath whisper against his cheeks and lips. It smelled sort of like that cinnamon and cardamom she was talking about earlier, maybe just a little hint of sandalwood underneath. “I could, you know. There are many excellent improvised weapons in this room.”
“You know you’re not going to, no matter how much I aggravate you.” He drew her close to his side. She nestled under his arm, let her head rest against his shoulder. The nest of shimmering, nearly black curls obscured her face but did nothing to hide its almost ethereal beauty.
“And just how,” she said into his chest, “are you so certain of that, Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo?”
“Because if you killed me you’d have to cuddle with a corpse, and you’re not into that. Jimmy, sure. But not you.”
“You know, he has worked with you for over ten years, now. When are you going to stop picking on poor Jimmy so much?”
“As soon as I stop making fun of McGiggles?”
“Never, then.” She traced a finger around the outline of his jaw. “I think that teasing is the way you show affection, since you are pretty emotionally stunted otherwise.” She smiled; it lit the whole more than morning could ever hope. “Thus McGee is ‘Elf Lord,’ your new partner is a weird pet who climbs, you make fun of my little accidentalies and Jimmy is…” she wrinkled her nose, “a necrophiliac gremlin, I suppose.”
“That wife of his though… whoa…” Tony mimed whisking the air around his face. “She is definitely not losing any body heat… unless you can be zombie hot, that is.”
“There you go doing it again,” she said. “Whenever someone comes close to something that is important to the core of you it gets derailed into something silly… or gross. Or both.” She considered it a moment and then nodded. “Yes, usually both.”
“That is so totally the opposite of what is true. I mean…” He waved his hands around, “You are such a crazy lady, talking crazy talk, that you if the truth was on the North Pole then you’d be a little penguin, swimming around.” He mimed it.
She couldn’t help but giggle. “Penguins live at the South Pole, Very Special Agent.”
“That was the point, Ziva.”
“That was also my point. Or, if you will let me explain,” she put a finger to his lips, when he started to protest and shifted her weight, holding him fast against the mattress with long, lithe muscles that bore hidden strength, “when we first met you were avoiding grief by fantasizing about your recently deceased friend and co-worker dressed as a naughty Catholic school girl.” She paused and considered, before continuing. “I mean that she was dressed as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl in your fantasy, not that you were fantasizing about her while dressed as one. I do not wish to be unclear. When I caught you at it, you pretended that you were having phone sex. In the middle of the afternoon, in a crowded office. While you were engaged in a manhunt for that very co-worker’s murderer.” She shook her head. “If that is not classic avoidant behavior-and that is correct, I asked Ducky about it once-then I am surely a goat.”
Tony wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his mental health had become such fodder water cooler discussion among his companions. “So, uh, what are we doing tonight?”
“Well,” she said, “we could keep talking about this, which is uncomfortable and not a lot of fun for either of us, even if it might be important. Or we could lie here and catch up, and then go eat a very expensive dinner which you will let me pay for since you bought the tickets for the trip, and then we will come back here and I will kiss you very soundly and you will enjoy it very much.”
“I kind of like that idea.” He enfolded her in his arms again, enjoying how their hearts were falling into a singular rhythm, one like they had seemed to beat in for years. “I’m a simple guy, Ziva, simple things make me happy.”
Her lips curled in a wicked little smirk. “Considering how happy you make me, Tony, then I must be a very simple girl indeed.”
“I don’t know if that was an insult wrapped in a compliment, the other way around or just a result of the fact that English is, like, your thirtieth language.”
“Hey, hey,” she slapped playfully at his chest. It still stung. “It is not my thirtieth language, it is my twenty-seventh language at the most.”
“What’s gonna be your thirtieth?”
She paused to mime considering it carefully. “I think that I will take up Klingon. McGee is always going on about how he and Abby can use it to communicate in secret. I would love to know what those two talk about.”
“Bats, skulls, coffins, rocket-belts and Elf Lords, I’ll bet.”
“I do not doubt.” She sighed. “What are we going to be, Tony? After this vacation, I mean… when you go back to Baltimore and I return to Tel Aviv.”
“I don’t know, Ziva, I really don’t.” He pressed a kiss through the top of her dark, massed curls. “I know what I want, but…”
“I do sometimes, but sometimes, Tony…” she exhaled, sharply. “Sometimes I just do not, or even who I am, anymore.”
“You’re Ziva David, my bona fide badass ninja assassin, and I wouldn’t have you any other way. Just as long as you’re not just a green dot on Facebook, anymore… that silent, awful, staring green dot.”
She offered him a weak smile. “I am going to have to stop leaving my chat open while I go and microwave popcorn, I think.”
He chuckled. She felt in his throat, deep in his chest. “Well, you’ll always have a snack, at least… and we’ll always have Paris.”
“You are right… no one can take that from us.”
“I could probably steal your popcorn away.”
“Only if you no longer valued your life, limbs or genitals.”
“Well in that case, I’ll just have to taste it secondhand.” He let his mouth cover hers for a long, slow, sweltering moment. They didn’t talk for a while.
2
Bewitched
She snuggled into the crook of his arm on the couch, long legs crossed under her. A light coating of butter gleamed on her fingers in the television’s pale, flickering firelight. “I do not know why this is so important. It is just one show from when you were a little boy. There are hundreds of shows and movies that you love that I have not seen.”
“This is Bewitched, Ziva.” He let his fingers twine in the tousled ponytail draped over his bicep.
“Everything I know about romance probably comes from this. Everything I know about cool…” He paused to consider. “Well, my idea of cool is closer to Mad Men, but at least it sort of fits.”
“Mad men? There are insane people in this?”
“Well, yeah, but I mean Madison Avenue.” He grinned, gestured towards the ceiling with his free hand.
“Y’know, the advertising giants of the nineteen sixties. Don Draper. Christina Hendricks in a way too tight dress.”
She pinched the little bit of flesh she could access on his hard, muscular flank.
“Ow! Hey…”
“Your mind is wandering.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But, y’know… Mad Men. Emmy award winning. You’ve got to hear me talking about it with McGeek.”
“I think that McGee finds Game of Thrones much more interesting.”
“Of course he would; he’s an Elf Lord.”
“There are no elves on Game of Thrones.”
He laughed. “You are clueless about the greatest America drama since Toma but are apparently an expert in HBO’s gore-soaked incest festival.” He paused. “Incestival?”
She popped a piece of the Orville Redenbacher’s into her mouth with all too quick fingers and chewed a few second before answering. “I suppose, Tony, that Tim and I are just more interested in history than you are.”
“There are dragons, Ziva. That’s not history. It’s… dragons. And incest.”
“That is really bothering you, is it not?”
“Not as much as you having never seen Bewitched.”
She squirmed, seemed uncomfortable for an instant before it passed. “My childhood was not like yours, Tony.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re Israeli.” He gestured and held forth, as if addressing a congregation or theatre full of admirers. “It’s Bewitched, Ziva. Darin and Samantha. Endora, Aunt Clara, Uncle Arthur. Larry and Louise Tate, for God’s sake. It’s for the whole world.”
“I don’t mean because I am Israeli, Tony.”
“What do you mean, then?”
She counted on her fingers, slowly and deliberately for his benefit. “I mean that I have not seen my mother in almost a decade, my sister was exploded by a bomb when she was sixteen, my brother-who I killed, don’t forget-was a terrorist and my father was a cold, distant man who raised me to be, as you put it, a ‘ninja-assassin warrior chick.’” She sighed, unsure quite how to continue. The lighthearted banter about one of Tony’s old shows… well… this was not how it was supposed to turn out, right? Kissing would have been a better end, definitely. “My childhood was not like yours in America, but it wasn’t exactly a typical Israeli childhood, either. It was…” she struggled for a word. “I suppose that if you were charitable towards my father you would call it ‘strange.’ Abusive might be another term, if you did not feel such charity.”
“Wow…” He toyed idly with a dark curl, turning it over and over between his index and middle fingers.
“That got heavy.”
“Like a lead baboon.”
“I’m glad for one thing, at least.”
“What?”
He kissed the top of her head, sucked in the smells of sandalwood and cinnamon. “You’re my ninja-assassin warrior chick, at least.”
“Yes, sometimes I just wish I could be your something else.”
“How about my witch?”
She raised her eyebrow at him. “Have you gone crazy for Coco Puffs?”
Instead of answering he sang, in a cheesy, affected voice-or maybe that was just Tony’s singing voice-loudly enough that she had to cover her ears. “You witch, you witch, one thing is for sure… that stuff you pitch, just hasn’t got a cure.”
“Gah! If you stop singing I will be your whatever you need me to and watch whatever silly shows and movies you can dig up on DVD.” She nodded like a bobble head with huge, dark eyes. “I can live with anything that is not that racket you were making.”
“Okay, okay.” They settled against one another, again. He pressed the play button and theme soared out of the surround-sound speakers he was so, so proud of. Ziva almost recognized the tune as the same one that he had been butchering only moments before. This, she reflected ruefully, had the makings of a long night.
3
Each Other’s Backs
Abigail Borin seemed to be made up entirely of long, long legs, shiny black cowboy boots and a halo of blazing auburn hair. She popped up from her hiding spot beside Tony and unleashed a quick series of five shots from her service 9mm and blistering, north Virginia accented invective at the gentlemen who were, at present, doing their best to perforate the two agents. She dropped back into her crouch, while they returned the favor, and jammed another magazine into her pistol.
Tony took a view shots of his own while they reloaded, and then dropped before the terrorists in question could give him a really awful haircut. “Y’know all that swearing probably isn’t impressing our extremist friends out there.”
She rolled her mossy-green eyes. “Listen, DiNozzo; we’re slightly outnumbered, significantly outgunned and our only saving grace is that they don’t have a god-damned rocket launcher. I can either go out whimpering or swearing. I choose the later.”
He chuckled, didn’t really mean it. “That’s what the hardass sergeant would say in a war movie before whoosh! Boom!” He gesticulated, proffering a possibility of what might happen.
“Thank God we’re not in a movie.” She emptied another magazine, hoping against hope that a bullet would find flesh, at least suppressing their fire a moment. Tony growled deep in his throat. They were going to run out of ammo way before these clowns did. “We’ve already got to worry about their third man flanking us. He’s been suspiciously quiet for too long.”
“Maybe we hit him?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, DiNozzo, because I haven’t exactly done much better, but…” she shrugged. “We haven’t hit shit all day.” She glanced around one of the shipping containers they had taken cover behind, got lucky enough not to lose her head to a 7.62x39 round. “I think you oughta watch our backs. I mean, his plan is to pop out behind us, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I figure we’ve got a lot better chance of seeing tomorrow if we don’t let him do that.”
“No kidding.” He shifted slightly to watch the rows of containers behind them, waiting for the shadows surrounding one to disgorge a furious Middle Eastern man with a Kalashnikov. “You gonna be okay to keep the other two busy all by yourself?”
She barked short, staccato laughter. It mingled with the gunfire ringing over their heads. “I figure I can’t do much worse than we already have, right? This hasn’t been a day of glory for NCIS or CGIS.”
He turned, pressed his back against the shipping container, and scanned the outlets and alleys around them. “Godspeed, Agent Borin.”
“Gah, when will you people learn there is room in the world for more than one Abby?” She sprang up and sent a few short, loud 9mm pops toward their enemies, and then dropped fast right as their AK-47s began stripping the air raw and naked. He saw her cap fly off, before the descent, and steeled himself for another Kate. Except this one was laughing like a loon. She reached down to the floor and picked it up, hooking her finger through the hole in its bill. “Shows you what I get for wearing my cap like a gangsta.”
“Jeez, woman… I know you and Gibbs have that crazy, Old West vibe going on, but could you tone it down for just a minute, please?”
She shook her head, waiting for the gunfire to subside before returning it. “You do have a point. Being in a rootin’, tootin’ cowboy shootout looks much more fun for John Wayne.”
“Well, that’s because he’s the Duke. He’s different from us.”
She popped up to shoot and cursed, to herself, this time. One of the men was up, too. She might hit him, yeah, but he was damn sure gonna hit her. Tony watched Agent Borin’s eyes widen, her life probably flashing before them, and swing towards the gunman. There wasn’t any way that either of them could get him in time. They both steeled for a string of chattering assault rifle fire.
It didn’t come, just the singular, lonely whip-crack of a high powered rifle. The terrorist looked puzzled for a second or two. It would have been comical, Tony thought, save the quarter sized red hole on his forehead. Yeah, he’s just puzzling and puzzling til his puzzler gets sore, he thought, and then felt almost kind of ashamed. The stupidest things hopped into your head, they really did.
The gunman crumpled, almost like a guy just sitting down to relax in his favorite recliner. Except for the blood pouring down his face, yeah, just like that. Everyone held still. Borin’s green eyes flickered from side to side. “What the hell is going on?”
“If we’re confused then I guess he is, too. Every Who down in Whoville.” Yep, apparently Dr. Seuss had taken his brain hostage, today.
The shadows they were watching for the third man-he was watching for the third man-disclosed Ziva David. She smiled and wriggled her fingers at Tony by way of greeting. “I think that it is pretty obvious what has happened.” She nodded towards the other woman. “Agent Borin. I hope that you are well.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough, I guess, for getting shot at. Passable. Now what the hell is going on?”
Tony laughed. They could hear the clatter of the last remaining terrorist dropping his gun and calling out his surrender in heavily accented English. “I think that it’s pretty obvious what has happened, Agent Abby. My dear ninja has somehow disposed of two men in a single gunshot.” He pursed his lips. “While not in the vicinity of one of those men. And not carrying a gun, apparently.”
“Agent Abby.” Borin shook her head. Wisps of auburn floated around her face. “I guess I’ll take it. And a rescue that doesn’t make any sense. Welcome all the same.”
“That is a good question, come to think of it.” Tony put his gun away and tented his fingers. “How, exactly, did you manage all that?”
Ziva rolled her eyes. “Because I did not kill both men. I apprehended the one trying to flank you with this.” She slipped what Tim called her d’ktagh-it was some kind of Klingon ceremonial dagger, he didn’t ask-out of a leather sheath on her belt and dangled it in front of them. It gleamed in the harsh interior lighting, clean as always, but her fingers bore telltale rusty stains. “He did not come quietly.” She thought a moment. “Well, he began to protest but became very quiet only seconds later.”
“And the guy we saw shot in the head by a .45 full metal jacket round?”
“I think it pretty obvious that Gibbs was above us, waiting in the wings like Bad Man.”
“Batman, Ziva. It’s Batman that swoops in and delivers justice.”
Borin tucked her hair under her cap. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure that the Bad Man protects Penelope Worth’s ranch.” She shook her head. “It’s been a John Wayne kinda day, I guess.”
“Well,” Ziva said, “the strange man that dresses up like Dracula that I hear McGee and Abby talking about seems like a pretty bad man to me.”
“Whatever. Soon as we get this paperwork handled we’re all going out for some beers.” She raised her hand up over their cover to wave and shouted, “Gibbs too!” She cracked her knuckles. Sometimes… well a lot of the time… almost dying could make you goofy, and nothing brought on those giggles, the kind that threatened to start and never stop, like a hole in the bill of your cap. “PBR, Guinness, hell, Nesher Malt, pick your poison. I’m buying.”