Too Late - 4b: Inevitable
Author's Note: This is a fic I wrote a while back, a little before "Bounce" aired that was reflecting my dislike about the direction the show was taking in regards to Tony and Ziva. It is pure angst in four parts, though there is definitely a ray of sunlight at the end.
This final chapter was an experiment in a different style, one that I've seen a number of times before and always wanted to emulate. It is exclusively Tony POV, but has hints of 3rd Person Omniscient in it. And it turned out a lot better than I'd expected it too. I am extremely happy with this chapter. Because of the length of this chapter, I had to split it up into two parts.
And this is quite obviously AU.
A year passed.
His forty-second birthday passed while they were on a stakeout, and Tony didn’t even realize it until three days after the fact. When he caught sight of the calendar and realized what day it was, he merely shrugged and returned his attention to the evidence they’d amassed against a Marine first sergeant working for gunrunners with ties to Hamas. The empty ache that always accompanied thoughts of Israel mixed with the special hate he’d developed for arms dealers, leaving him angry and exhausted at the same time.
He received two commendations for his team’s work over the last year, which almost made up for the FBI botching the Vazquez arrest and letting him escape to Mexico where he promptly disappeared. To his surprise, Fornell contacted him personally with the news and then calmly informed Tony that heads would roll; two days later, a pair of FBI special agents assigned to the Dallas/Fort Worth area were arrested for accepting bribes and sentenced to a very long time in prison.
At some point between the Vazquez investigation and his forty-second birthday, Tony became NCIS’ unofficial expert on illegal arms dealers. He wasn’t sure if it was the universe’s idea of a joke - the images of Rene Benoit’s lifeless corpse always came to mind - or just some sort of odd coincidence, but suddenly, he was receiving phone calls from NCIS agents across the globe for his advice about their investigations when they had ties to gunrunning. Even Central Intelligence began returning his calls - no one was more surprised about that than Tony himself - and he managed to build a surprisingly decent relationship with the CIA’s own expert in illegal arms dealers, despite their mutually … antagonistic past. Tony compared his unlikely friendship with Trent Kort to that of the relationship between Gibbs and Fornell. Across the nation, federal law enforcement agencies began to use the name DiNozzo in the same tone as Gibbs, and new words like ‘driven,’ and ‘unrelenting,’ and ‘resourceful’ were being used to describe him in those circles.
It was almost enough to make him forget a dark-haired woman with soulful brown eyes who he couldn’t quite forget but could never have. Almost, but not quite.
His team, too, was starting to earn the accolades they deserved. Johnson was in the running for agent of the year after a string of heroic acts that actually sounded like something out of Probie’s books. Keating was actually getting serious about the girl he had started dating several months earlier, and Nikki was slowly getting over the whole germ phobia with a little bit of help from Dwayne - or D.J. everyone was beginning to call him. All three of them had gelled into the crack investigative team he’d hoped they could become, and were visibly enjoying their jobs. Even if his personal life was utter crap and was likely to remain that way, Tony was happy for his team.
Naturally, it didn’t last.
*
A month after his birthday, the universe imploded around him. It was Wednesday.
Keating was the first. He was at a football game with his girlfriend - fiancée, really - when a car bomb exploded, killing them both instantly. Four civilians were critically injured in the blast, two of whom eventually died from their wounds, and over a dozen others were hit by flying debris and glass. It was over so quickly that Polly never knew what hit him.
Barely an hour later, before the team even knew they had been targeted, Nikki was killed in a shooting meant to look like a drive-by. To her credit, she went down fighting - investigators found six spent casings from her sidearm and two bodies with matching slugs from her weapon would later turn up in the San Diego Zoo where they had been dumped. Jardine died outside a movie theater, in agonizing pain. Her last action on this planet was to hit speed dial number one on her cell phone in a desperate attempt to warn D.J.
As it turned out, Dwayne wasn’t able to pick up the phone because he was already involved in a gunfight with the hit squad sent after him. Unlike the other members of his team, though, Johnson wasn’t alone - he was on a date with one of San Diego’s finest, and they had gone to a local cop bar for beers and pretzels. Dwayne was grazed twice, but remained otherwise uninjured. One of the cops took a round to the thigh, but forensics would later prove that the bullet came from his drunken partner’s pistol, not from any of the six masked foreigners armed with submachine guns.
The hit squad died to a man.
Which left only Tony.
*
DiNozzo received the call about Keating fifty-three minutes after the explosion, and was out the door of his apartment a mere five minutes later, gun and phone in hand. He tried to contact Dwayne first, but the call went straight to voicemail. Next was Jardine, and Tony’s blood ran cold when she didn’t pick it up either. In that moment, he knew.
Halfway to his car, his gut began twisting and snarling, forcing his steps to falter as he glanced around to find the source of his unease. He saw the threat a heartbeat later - a man sitting on the roof of one of the buildings next to his apartment with a bulky, cylindrical tube on his shoulder. DiNozzo recognized it once: FGM-148 Javelin, a man-portable anti-tank guided missile used by both the Army and the Marines. More importantly, he recognized the man.
Javier Vazquez.
Seconds later, the world exploded around him and the fist of God slammed into his body. Oblivion, blessed oblivion, swallowed him.
*
wooo - hiss
Beep.
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“What the hell happened, Johnson?”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Somebody came after us.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“They got Nikki and Polly.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“And DiNozzo?”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Anti-tank missile hit his car.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“The doctors said he crashed three times on the table.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Who the hell did this?!”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Calm down, Ziva.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“I don’t want to calm down!”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“I want to kill someone!”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“McGee, get the director on the phone.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Tell him I’m taking over this investigation.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“On it, Boss.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Johnson, take Ziva to DiNozzo’s apartment.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“It’s a crime scene now and I want the whole place swept.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Gibbs…”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“I’ll be here watching him, Ziver.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“If they want him, they’ll have to go through me first.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“That wasn’t a request, Agent David.”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
wooo - hiss
Beep.
wooo - hiss
Beep.
“Damn, Tony. You just can’t do things the easy way, can you?”
wooo - hiss
Beep.
*
Awareness slowly returned. He was asleep but not, conscious but still insensate. It was like floating through a featureless fog that he couldn’t quite see. Or taste. Or touch. He had sensation but no feeling, a clear indication that he was doped up on the good stuff. Or he was dead and just hadn’t figured that out yet.
Voices filled the air around him, muted but distinctive, and as he crept closer to waking, he began assigning identities to them. His memory was shot through with holes - he could remember faces, but not names - and he desperately hoped it was only because of the drugs coursing through his veins.
“His apartment was clean, Gibbs,” a female voice declared. It was tinged with an accent he couldn’t quite place - at times, it seemed almost Hispanic, but at others it sounded Middle Eastern. She sounded stressed, tense and very worried. In his mind’s eye, he could see black hair, brown eyes and a torn left earlobe.
“Something else, Ziva?” an older, masculine voice asked. This man sounded stern and powerful, as if he were a living embodiment of authority and justice. He would have silver hair, this man, and would be uncompromising.
“Not really,” the woman named Ziva replied though it was obvious she wasn’t telling the truth. When the silence stretched out, broken only by the hiss of the respirator and the steady beep of the heart monitor, she abruptly sighed. “His apartment barely looks lived in,” she said.
“He isn’t there much,” a third person stated. His voice was very familiar, and Tony - that was his name, right? - had sudden memories of sitting at a bar alongside the younger man, drowning their respective sorrows with cheap alcohol. “He spends most of his time at the office and only goes home to change or shower.”
“Sounds like you, Boss,” a fourth voice remarked.
“Do you have something add, McGee?” Gibbs demanded. He sounded angry and dismayed, sad and resigned, all at the same time.
“Director Vance wants you to call him,” McGee said. “And Agent Fornell is outside with his team.”
“What the hell for?”
“We’re here to help, Jethro.” A new voice announced. “The FBI let Special Agent DiNotzo down with Vazquez once before, and I’m here to make that right.”
“It was Vazquez?” the third person - Dwayne something? - asked. He sounded furious, as if he were on the brink of spontaneously exploding.
“We have good intel that he re-entered the country two nights ago on a forged visa,” the voice that must have been Fornell stated. “Your team cost him a lot of money-”
“Almost a billion dollars, to be precise,” another voice said. This man sounded British.
“What the hell are you doing here, Kort?” Gibbs growled.
“Glad you could make it, Trent,” Dwayne said at the same time.
A second later, everyone was talking or shouting, and Tony grimaced. His ears hurt.
“Shut up!” Ziva snapped. The conversations ended as quickly as they began. “Take it outside! Now!”
Despite himself, Tony couldn’t help but to smile. A moment later, however, his drug induced fog swept consciousness away once more
*
“I’m fine,” Tony said several days later though everyone knew it was a lie.
He had finally woken to find half of his old team - McGee and Ziva - firmly ensconced in his hospital room, both openly wearing their bulletproof vests and watching every person that tried to enter with dangerous scowls that sent the nurses scurrying away as quickly as possible. Gibbs visited twice over the next day and a half, once to drop Dwayne off to replace McGee and then later to switch the two younger agents out once more. The silver-haired senior agent was fairly close-lipped about the state of the Vazquez investigation, which prompted Tony to suspect it wasn’t going as well as Gibbs would like.
At no time, however, did anyone even suggest Ziva leave and DiNozzo didn’t know what to make of that. So instead, he pretended to sleep and discreetly watched as she prowled the hospital room like a guard dog or dozed in an uncomfortable-looking visitor’s chair. They didn’t talk much - Tony was generally too doped up to carry on anything resembling a coherent conversation, and she seemed more focused on making sure the resident physician wasn’t actually an assassin in disguise - and as a result, an atmosphere of thick tension descended upon the room.
Nearly two weeks passed before the doctors began slowly weaning him off of the high-end painkillers, and Tony spent most of the time he was awake tallying up the significance of the injures he’d sustained thanks to the anti-tank missile and his exploding car. Both of his legs were broken, his right knee was screwed up even more than it had been before (an actual knee replacement looked to be on his horizon rather than an ACL or MCL reconstruction), his right arm was fractured in three places, more ribs than he cared to think about were broken, and the hearing in his right ear came and went.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Though the doctors tried to pretend that he could make a full recovery in time, DiNozzo could already see his active field agent status circling the drain. Physical therapy would take time, perhaps years, and he was already in his forties so his body didn’t heal quite as quickly as it used to. His poor diet over the last year had consisted of coffee, stress and Chinese takeout when he actually remembered to eat, and that certainly hadn’t helped. As much as he didn’t want to think about it, he knew that his time on a major crimes unit was now rapidly dwindling.
The loss of two agents hit him hard, and he couldn’t help but to start second-guessing himself. Was there something he could have done differently that wouldn’t have resulted in Nikki and Polly - Daniel, he reminded himself sharply. Keating’s name was Daniel - on a slab in the morgue? Dwayne seemed to recognize his foul mood and brought the case files with him the next time he visited, despite Ziva’s clear displeasure.
With nothing to do but brood or sleep, Tony studied the case reports with an intensity that focused on obsession. That it gave him something else to focus on apart from how Ziva’s hips swayed as she walked was an added bonus. Plus, it meant he didn’t have to talk which was a good thing.
The feel of her eyes on him caused Tony to glance up from the Vazquez’s bank statements - both foreign and domestic - and catch her watching him. She flushed slightly before frowning tightly and dragging the chair to the side of his bed. He couldn’t help but to notice that she had chosen his left side, and wondered if she knew about the problems he was having with his right ear.
Of course she knows, you idiot, he told himself. His chart was right there at the foot of his bed and he had vague memories of her in conversation with someone who sounded like Ducky. Maybe it was Ducky. Tony’s brain still felt like Swiss cheese at times.
“Gibbs is very impressed with how well you trained Agent Johnson,” Ziva said without preamble. She didn’t look at him, kept her eyes locked on the closed door of the private hospital room, but there was … something about the way she was sitting that caused Tony’s stomach to twist.
“Dwayne’s a good kid,” he replied without thought. After a moment, he continued. “Better than I was at his age. More focused, more intense, fewer issues.” He smiled tightly. “Give him a couple of years,” Tony said, “and he’s going to be running his own team.”
“He respects you,” Ziva said.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” DiNozzo snapped bitterly. “I’m not a total failure.”
“I did not mean …” She exhaled softly and looked away. “He is worried that you have given up,” she said after a long moment of silence. “Gibbs will not say it, but I believe he thinks this too.”
“Does it look like I’m giving up?” Tony retorted, gesturing with one of the casefiles as he spoke. Ziva pinned him with a look.
“Yes,” she whispered, “it does.” She glanced down. “Agent Johnson took me to your apartment,” she said with a frown, “and that was not the home of the man who used to be my partner. That was the home of a man who has only his work to live for.”
“I had to grow up sometime,” Tony replied. He tried to hide his discomfort with this entire conversation … and why the hell was she interested in having it now? Glancing at the door, he found himself desperately wishing for McGee to return from his coffee run.
“Tony, your apartment looked like Gibbs’ house.” Ziva gave him a look he couldn’t begin to decipher. DiNozzo grunted - which was a mistake as it turned out. Grunting hurt.
“Everybody’s been telling me since I joined NCIS how much I resemble him anyway.” He shrugged and that hurt too. “Guess I got tired of waiting. At least I didn’t need to lose a wife and daughter to realize that me and happiness don’t go well together.” Tony leaned back on his hospital bed and closed his eyes, hoping that she would get the hint and let it go.
But of course, she didn’t.
“I am worried about you, Tony,” Ziva said. “From what Agent Johnson has told me,” she continued, “it sounds as if you are burning the torch at both ends.” DiNozzo started to correct the error - burning the candle, Zee-vah. Not torch. - but he caught himself at the last minute. “You do not have a life outside of work and for a man who thrives on social contact like you do, that is quite troubling,” she said.
“I’m fine, Officer Rivkin,” he said tightly, hoping she didn’t see how much it hurt to use that name. To his surprise, she flinched and looked away.
“My name,” she retorted, “is David. And it is Agent now.” Tony blinked and fought the urge to ask the first question that sprang to mind.
“You’re not with Mossad anymore?” he asked.
“My … usefulness as a covert operative became rather limited,” Ziva remarked wryly, “after my face was plastered all over ZNN. The new director of Mossad terminated my employment once my father retired.” Her expression turned momentarily bitter. “I received a very nice severance package including U.S. citizenship and a diplomatically veiled request to stay out of Israel for at least the next ten years. Director Vance pulled some threads to get me special agent status.”
“Congratulations,” Tony said carefully. “How did the husband take that?” Ziva’s face closed up and she looked away.
“We are … not together,” she replied. “I am waiting to receive my get from Michael.” She must have interpreted his expression as one of confusion and rushed to explain. “It is a divorce document.”
“I know what it is,” DiNozzo replied. He gave silent thanks to the fact that he was no longer attached to a heart monitor. “What happened?” he asked cautiously. “If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
“We cheated on one another,” Ziva stated flatly. “He did so in body, I did so in mind.” She shrugged. “It is for the best,” she said, her words sounding so much like what he had been telling himself for over a year that Tony didn’t know how to respond. Instead, he looked at her, and she looked at him, and they said nothing.
And in that moment, when DiNozzo was about to ask Ziva something they would both regret, McGee returned.
*
With three different federal agencies in hot pursuit of him - the CIA, the FBI and of course, NCIS - and nationwide BOLO identifying him as a cop killer, it was only a matter of time before Javier Vazquez made a mistake. That error in judgment came two days later on a Thursday.
It was also the last mistake Vazquez would ever make.
In his defense, Vazquez wasn’t a fool: he somehow managed to sneak all the way into Tony’s room without being noticed by the three FBI agents, six LEOs, and two undercover CIA spooks assigned to protect one Anthony DiNozzo. He also managed to circumvent the three video cameras in the area - two covering the hallway and one inside the room itself - without alerting the two NCIS tech geeks watching the feeds.
Which left only one last line of defense standing between Tony and Vazquez in the form of a five foot seven brunette named Ziva.
Tony woke to the sound of a fight and froze at the sight of Ziva ruthlessly beating the shit out of Vazquez. There wasn’t a hint of remorse or pity on her face as she drove the gunrunner back across the room, using every available hard surface as a weapon. Vazquez tried to say something - it was hard to tell whether it was a curse or a plea - but Ziva broke his jaw with a flurry of elbow smashes and knee strikes that were almost too fast to see. Her efficiency was beautiful in its brutality, an instant reminder of the training she’d received.
And then, it was over. Vazquez pulled a gun, Ziva twisted his hand, breaking the arm in the process, relieved him of the pistol, and shot him once in the head. He toppled, his face a bloody ruin, and she took a step back from the unmoving corpse, her face a mask of unconcern.
Exactly thirty seconds later, Gibbs exploded into the room, flanked by Dwayne Johnson, Tim McGee and two FBI agents Tony didn’t recognize. Their guns were drawn.
“All clear,” Ziva announced in a calm voice as she ejected magazine from the pistol and cleared the chamber. She offered the gun to McGee who wisely holstered his own sidearm and pulled on a pair of gloves before accepting the weapon. From where he was lying on the bed, Tony could see the expression on Gibbs’ face and knew what the older man was thinking: Vazquez never had a chance. This hadn’t been self-defense; it had been an execution.
And, thinking of Nikki Jardine and Daniel Keating, Tony realized he was okay with that.
*
The days flashed by after that. Dwayne was reassigned to D.C. - on Tony’s glowing recommendation and Gibbs’ specific request - and was now working for the major crimes unit, watching the older man’s six (and McGee’s) just as he’d covered DiNozzo’s. Ziva was taken off of active field service while the internal affairs investigation went through the motions of determining whether she had used excessive force against Vazquez or not. The wheels of bureaucracy ground along slowly, though, and Tony knew she had to be frustrated at being sidelined. They talked only intermittently, with lengthy, uncomfortable pauses littering their interactions as both of them seemed unable to start a conversation that could completely change their relationship, one way or the other.
For Tony, each day was an exercise in frustration. Between a painfully intense physical therapy regimen and mandatory counseling sessions with a shrink, he found himself dealing with almost perpetual agony, both physical and mental. He struggled with depression as his career prospects became decidedly grim: permanent nerve impairment in his right hand meant he likely couldn’t handle a pistol with any real accuracy, and the damage to his right knee meant he would probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life.
And then, three weeks after Vazquez’s death, he received an unexpected visitor who changed everything.
*
“I’ve been reviewing your progress,” Leon Vance told him once he entered Tony’s hospital room. If the director had anything to say about DiNozzo’s unkempt appearance, he kept the comments to himself. “Frankly,” Vance said, “it doesn’t look good.”
“No, sir,” Tony replied. He shifted awkwardly in the wheel chair that had become his principal mode of transportation in recent days. Not for the first time, DiNozzo lamented his lack of real relationships; he could have checked himself out of the hospital a week ago if there had been someone available to help him get around while his legs were still healing. Unfortunately, everyone he knew and trusted was across the country in D.C.
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to return to the field, Agent DiNozzo.” Vance didn’t look or sound happy about the fact, which Tony silently took to be a compliment. The director had never hidden his dislike of DiNozzo’s antics in D.C., and Tony still suspected Vance blamed him for Jenny’s death.
“I know,” Tony said after a moment. Unconsciously, he began glaring at his damaged hand.
“Have you given any thought to what you’ll do?” the director asked. He was watching DiNozzo with his arms crossed, as if he were studying a puzzle. Tony shook his head.
“Not really, sir. I’ve been focusing on PT and getting a clean bill of health from the shrink.”
“How’s that coming along, by the way?” Vance wondered. Tony gave him a slight frown.
“Evidently,” he quoted flatly, “I have extreme commitment issues stemming from the highly dysfunctional family environment I was exposed to during my formative years.” He glanced away, trying to ignore the flicker of amusement that washed across Vance’s face.
“Well,” the director said, “good luck with that.” He placed his briefcase on the small table, popped it open, and pulled a file out. “I may not be able to assign you to an active team, Agent DiNozzo,” he remarked as he placed the file before Tony, “but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to put you out to pasture just yet. Take a look at that and give me a call if you’re interested.”
He was gone before DiNozzo could reply, so Tony flipped the file open. Instantly, his eyebrows shot up and he glanced at the open door leading out of his room.
Suddenly, things didn’t seem so bad.
*
The next several weeks flew by.
Having something to look forward to in terms of his career dramatically improved Tony’s mood, so much so that the shrink asked some leading questions implying concern over a drug habit. Once DiNozzo explained the job opportunity that had fallen into his lap, she visibly relaxed before once again starting in on Tony’s yet unresolved anger at Jenny for the mess she’d gotten him involved in with Jeanne.
Physical therapy remained difficult, though he pushed himself with as much intensity as he had after blowing out his knee in college. The therapist - a rail-thin woman with a hatchet nose who Tony strongly suspected to harbor Nazi sympathies; how else could he explain her … aggressiveness during the PT sessions? - was grimly pleased at his progress, though she seemed less likely than even Gibbs to offer a compliment. If anything, she started to push him even harder … hence his Nazi suspicions.
To his delight, Tony was finally released from the hospital and allowed to return home, which resulted in a whole new set of problems. Getting up and down the stairs leading to his second-story bedroom was a task in and of itself, and the urge to jump into the shower grew with each day, despite clear instructions to keep his casts dry. Packing up his belongings for a move was yet another challenge with his injuries, and he ultimately decided to put it off for a little while longer.
In the end, he didn’t have to do anything.
*
“So,” Gibbs said to him over the phone two weeks after his release from the hospital, “I hear you’re going to be moving again.”
“Back to D.C.,” Tony replied. He was glaring at his left leg and desperately wishing for a coat hanger or something to scratch the otherwise out of reach itch currently driving him insane. “Vance already tell you?”
“Officially, no.” Gibbs chuckled, and DiNozzo could hear the sounds of traffic. “Word is Doctor Pitt wants you to finish your physical therapy at Bethesda.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Brad doesn’t trust the docs out here, not with my past history.”
“Got a place lined up yet?”
“Nope.” Tony grinned. “Think I could crash at your house, Boss?”
“I’m not your boss anymore, DiNozzo,” Gibbs replied. He threw open the front of Tony’s apartment without warning, his unexpected appearance causing DiNozzo to jump in surprise. “But if you need to,” he finished, snapping the phone shut, “you can. For a little while.”
“Don’t do that to me!” Tony grumbled. He tried to slide his legs off the couch he was reclining on, but Gibbs gave him a glare before dropping into the recliner next to him. “A little warning next time, Boss? I didn’t know you were going to be in San Diego.”
“Neither did I,” Gibbs said. He glanced at the open door before whistling sharply. “Get your asses in here!” he snapped.
A moment later, the Team appeared, all bearing gifts. Dwayne was carrying pizza, Probie had several bags with the KFC logo stamped on them, Palmer struggled with a cooler that clinked and clanked, Ducky had a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, Abby had … an umbrella, and Ziva…
Well, Ziva brought herself, and that was enough.
Tony didn’t know how to react as they all began talking at once - well, except Gibbs and Ziva, of course. Those two just watched with fond half-smiles as everyone swarmed DiNozzo with well wishes and greetings. To his surprise, D.J. and Palmer seemed the most frenetic of the bunch, with the latter almost bouncing off the walls with his excitement. Abby, by way of contrast, seemed calm, collected, and surprisingly laid back. In fact, she reminded Tony of the way she used to be, back when Kate first joined the team and before Scuito started mainlining caffeine.
Everyone was full of news it seemed. Palmer had finally graduated medical school and would be taking over from Ducky in the summer when Doctor Mallard retired. McGee’s first book was going to be a movie - DiNozzo wasn’t sure about the casting decision for Special Agent Tommy; sure, he’d liked that Weatherly guy fine in the show with the lovely Ms. Alba, but could he really bring his ‘A Game’ for Deep Six? Abby admitted that she’d seriously cut back the number of Caf-Pows she drank on doctor’s orders - Ducky’s, as it turned out - and D.J. was nearly vibrating with pride that he’d been named Agent of the Year.
“Why are you really moving to D.C.?” Abby asked as she sipped from a wine cooler. “I don’t buy the whole ‘Doctor Pitt said so’ excuse.” She was studying him with a speculative look, and Tony gave her a grin.
“New job,” he revealed. Only Gibbs didn’t look surprised, and Tony continued. “Once I’m given the all-clear from the physical therapists,” he said, “I’ll be heading up a new FLETC program teaching rookies how to conduct investigations so they aren’t so … probie-like when they hit their new departments.”
As one, all eyes shifted to Ziva - she looked visibly surprised - and Tony started to frown. He shook the moment off, intent on keeping the atmosphere almost festive.
“So, tell me,” he said, “how is it that you’re all in California?” He pronounced like the Governator did, which caused McGee to roll his eyes.
“I told the director the team needed some time off,” Gibbs replied, sipping his coffee. “He made a few calls, arranged for us to bump a flight out here. Said it was the least he could do.”
“And,” D.J. interjected, “he told us we could help you move.”
“Those boxes aren’t getting packed by themselves,” Gibbs said, a tone of command in his voice. Three heavy sighs - Dwayne, Palmer and Probie - prefaced the junior agents (and new doctor) standing up. Tony smirked.
“Appreciate it, Boss,” he said before leveraging himself up as well. He accepted the crutches from Ziva. “But first,” Tony said, “I need to hit the bathroom.”
*
He had to cut through his bedroom to visit the john, and when he emerged, Tony was surprised to find Ziva standing on the other side of his bed. She was facing away from him, but he knew exactly what she was studying. Three small framed photos were resting atop the dresser. One was a group shot of the old MCRT team in D.C., taken about a week before that whole Y Pestis nightmare screwed everything up, the second was a team photo he’d taken himself (so he wasn’t in it) the night he returned from agent afloat status, and the third was a candid shot of his San Diego team from two or three weeks before the Vazquez affair ripped them apart.
“You still have these,” Ziva said with some surprise. Tony bit back a groan when he realized she’d found the bikini photos that he’d taken of her a few hours before Jenny died.
“Yeah,” he replied, limping to the bed and collapsing atop it. His still healing legs were beginning to complain and his right arm felt like it was on fire. He fumbled for the bottle of painkillers on the night stand and gave her a thankful nod when she took it from him. Tipping out two of the pills, she handed them to him and Tony swallowed them dry.
“Did you request the FLETC assignment?” she asked, her eyes boring into him and a strange look on her face.
“Director Vance offered,” Tony replied, “and since I don’t have a lot of options right now, I jumped at the chance.” He smiled. “It may not be exactly what I want, but at least this way I might be able to keep some probies from getting killed.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why are you so interested?” he asked hesitantly.
“Because I was wondering …” She trailed off, glanced away and bit her lower lip. “Internal Affairs decided I used excessive force on Vazquez,” she said. Tony glowered.
“Not from where I’m sitting,” he retorted, causing her to brighten slightly. Ziva gave him a shy, almost bashful look.
“The director had to pull me out of the field,” she revealed, “but he pulled some threads to keep me from being fired. I am transferring to FLETC in two weeks.” Tony’s eyes widened. “I will be teaching recruits how to survive in the field. They might even let me have some self-defense courses.”
“Pulled some strings, Zee-Vah,” Tony corrected without thinking. Her face lit up, though he wasn’t quite sure why. “You’ll be at the Maryland facility?” he asked. She nodded.
“Maybe I will see you around sometime,” Ziva said with a hopeful smile. He returned the grin.
“Maybe you will.” They were silent for a long moment as they stared at each other. A thick strand of her unruly hair fell into her face and Tony instinctively reached for it with his left hand, tucking it carefully behind her ear. He hesitated before cupping her face. When she leaned into his hand, DiNozzo felt his heart skip a beat. Maybe … maybe it wasn’t too late after all.
“Are you two done grab-assing yet?” Gibbs demanded. He was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his arms crossed but an amused glint in his eyes. Behind him, most of the team could be seen, comically trying to peer past him and see into the bedroom itself. Tony smiled but didn’t look away from Ziva’s brown eyes.
“No, Boss,” he replied. “I don’t think we are.”
END