Loyalty (G)

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Title: Loyalty
Author: Kylie Lee (kylielee1000)
Pairing: None (Jen Shepard and Ziva David friendship)
Rating: G
Spoilers: 3.01-3.02 "Kill Ari"
Summary: In the multitude of counselors there is safety.
Written for: thenewhope, with apologies for its lateness
Prompt: Ziva/Jen, either friendship, preslash, slash or postslash, preferably set now that Ziva is in the States, working with NCIS; the comfortable relationship between two women who like, respect, and trust each other.
AN: Set before the finale to Season 3. General Season 3 spoilers.

Loyalty

Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

—Proverbs 11:14

***

"It annoys me." Ziva viciously poked her chopsticks into the greasy white carton of her cheng du chicken, ostensibly fishing for a bit of meat. "Such rudeness. Such lack of respect. So I ask him."

"Ask him what?" Jen extended an elegant leg under the coffee table. "Do you want a plate?"

Ziva couldn't be deterred by such a simple ploy when she was working up such a nice sense of anger. "I ask him if respect is too much to ask for, and he says it is not. Yet he is...abrupt. Arbitrary. And as you know he has forbidden me to talk to you about cases."

She still remembered when Gibbs had hung up her phone when she was talking to the director, rudely disconnecting them. She was to have only one master, and it was him—that was his message. Ziva had become perhaps too used to autonomous fieldwork. She'd approached Jen Shepard the next day to apologize and explain, her heart full of trepidation, and to her relief, Jen had laughed and said, "I wouldn't expect anything less from Gibbs. You're not my spy, and he's your boss."

Jen pulled the cheng du chicken out of Ziva's fingers. "Save a little for me," she said mildly, peering into the half-full carton. "How about the cashew chicken? Some of that is left. You don't want the shrimp, I assume."

Ziva stared at Jen, chopsticks poised, ready to grasp food that was no longer there. She knew she was behaving like a petulant child, and the knowledge that Jen knew it made her eyes smolder.

"Of course," Jen rattled on, seemingly oblivious to Ziva's pique, "I have determined—and this observation is the result of years of work in the field for NCIS, which honed my investigative abilities—that you don't keep kosher. So maybe you do want the shrimp." She leaned against the sofa and gave the carton a little shake, loosening the contents, before she selected a bit of food. Ziva could read Jen's face: she was determined to pour oil onto Ziva's troubled waters.

"The cashew chicken is fine," Ziva said grudgingly, accepting the carton Jen handed over. She didn't want to be teased out of anger. She wanted to yell and rant. Actually, she wanted to get Gibbs in an elevator, stop it between floors, and show him that she wasn't a child. While it was true she wasn't yet an investigator, she could teach Gibbs a thing or two about interrogation skills. "And it is hard to stay kosher when one travels so much. It seems a luxury." She had recently purchased two sets of dishes from Crate and Barrel's Web site, plain white ones and plain red ones, to keep meat and dairy separate. She'd washed them by hand and placed them in the nearly empty kitchen cabinets of her apartment. She had yet to use them. "Yet I am very fond of shrimps," she admitted, giving in not to food that was supposed to be forbidden but to Jen's mood.

"Not kosher," Jen reminded her, shoving the carton of shrimp Szechuan over. "But my favorite."

"Not kosher," Ziva agreed, trading chicken for shrimp. She gestured with her chopsticks, encompassing the room. She didn't mention that chopsticks, being wood, weren't kosher either. "When you invited me to dine with you here at your apartment, I thought perhaps you would cook for me."

Jen laughed and shook her head ruefully. "I am—not domestic," she said, as if admitting a great fault.

Ziva considered her. This Jen was not the one she had worked with in the field. This one wore beautiful, expensive clothes and spent a lot of time on her short, trendy hair. She preferred the Jen who wore her long hair in a ponytail and lived in chinos and pretty tops, not this corporate executive. Yet she understood that Jen's hair and clothes were a kind of disguise, which enabled her to get her work done by sending a particular message to the men—and they were men—whom she worked with. Jen was undercover, Ziva thought, and then she thought perhaps she was wrong, and the other Jen had been undercover. She did not know which of the two was the real one.

To show she had been teased out of her mood, she said admiringly, "And such a lovely dining room table," daring to poke this Jen, in her cashmere sweater and fine gabardine trousers—yet this Jen sat on the floor and ate Chinese food from cartons. The dining room table was covered with mail and catalogs, Jen's closed laptop, stacks of files, and a scattering of uncapped pens.

Jen smiled. "Isn't it? Maybe I'll get all my work done someday and we can sit at it." She set down her carton, then leaned back against the sofa and spread her arms along the seat. "Ziva, it's all right," she added as Ziva picked a shrimp out of the carton and crunched it, tail and all, brine and spice exploding in her mouth. Jen had finally articulated the awkwardness that had been between them ever since Ziva had come in out of the rain with a bottle of red, ever since they'd kissed each other, first one cheek and then the other, in the European fashion, somehow awkward in a way they hadn't been when Ziva had first come to the States.

"Gibbs," Ziva said, as if it were an explanation, because in some way, it was. Her anger with him over today's implied insults and abrupt orders had dissipated. "To be loyal to him, I feel I must be disloyal to you, and to you I owe so much."

The biggest disloyalty of all—the truth about Ari's death—she could not say aloud, because that secret lay between her and Gibbs, the secret that bound them together just as the foiled assassination attempt in Cairo had bound together Ziva and Jen. It hung between them, perceptible to Ziva but unknown to Jen, because Gibbs had lied in his incident report. It would only grow, Ziva knew: her day-to-day dealings with Gibbs would bind them together in a web of shared experience, and Jen, her colleague—her friend—for so long would recede in the distance. Ziva could not stop it, much as she wished things would not change between them. That was not the way of the world. And yet she regretted it.

"Loyalty." Jen's soft voice made Ziva look up. There had been a silence, both of them thinking. "I understand that your loyalties can never be to America—that you remain Israeli, and Mossad. Our interests are congruent for now. But that could change."

"Yes," Ziva said simply. The sharp, warm smell of Chinese food hung in the air. She pushed the carton away and slid back, freeing her legs from underneath the glass-topped coffee table. Her behind hurt from sitting on the floor in the same position for too long. She moved to the sofa and curled up on it; Jen slid aside to give her room, but stayed on the floor, at Ziva's feet. "And I understand what you had to do to obtain my services for NCIS—I am Mossad, and Metsada." Metsada—the assassins, the experts in psychological warfare and sabotage. "My security clearance is...surprisingly high."

"You spy on NCIS for Mossad." Jen stated it like a fact.

"No," Ziva protested, then immediately amended herself. "Perhaps, yes, but they have not asked. We build relationships. Later we may wish to capitalize on them. That time has not yet come." She still wondered at Jen's motivation for making her move to NCIS possible. Was it Ziva's connections with her government? With her father? With access to the results of Mossad's formidable intelligence gathering? Sometimes she did not feel like a liaison between two governmental bodies, her ostensible job description. She felt like she worked for NCIS. She only visited the Israeli embassy to meet her Mossad superiors once a week, by standing appointment.

Jen rolled her head back, relaxed and seemingly at ease, but Ziva was not fooled. Jen's sharp eyes watched her every move, just as they'd watched her when they'd first met in Cairo, Ziva pretending to be a student waiting tables in the hotel's dining room, Jen pretending to be a tourist, both watching the other, each thinking the other was just what she seemed, only to discover that under that lie lay a truth that would bind them together—just as a truth and a lie bound together Ziva and Gibbs, Ziva realized. For a moment, she missed the directness of manipulating a detainee's mind: tell me what you know was the only truth, and trickery was an acceptable means to end. She did not want to trick Jen. And she didn't know what end she sought with the director. She only knew that her relationship with Jen was important to her, and Gibbs threatened that.

"Gibbs is the finest agent I've ever worked with." Jen took a sip of the wine Ziva had brought, a shiraz. Jen had had to dig through her cabinets to find wineglasses; the fine leaded crystal rang beautifully when the empty glasses knocked together. "But you can teach him a lot."

Ziva snorted. "I thought it was to be the other way around." She leaned over for her own wineglass.

"Mmm. That too." Jen ran her fingers through her short hair, ruffling it. "And of course it's convenient to have someone around who can bypass the chain of command. Or who can find out something through her own intelligence network." She reached one long arm out and gently squeezed Ziva's knee. The light from the lamp behind her made her hair glow in a nimbus around her head, and Ziva remembered, almost viscerally, the scent of the Nile, and Jen's long hair, down from its ponytail, blowing in the breeze, the sun behind her sparking the red and gold and brown. Jen left her hand there, warm and intimate, for a long moment before withdrawing it. "Give Gibbs a chance. God knows he's frustrating. I know it doesn't seem like it, but it's not about him. It's about the investigation."

"He withholds information," Ziva began, and once again, grievances welled up inside her. "He asks me to do things I am not good at. He is abrupt and disrespectful. He—" She cut herself off. "I can be an advocate of the devil," she said, to forestall Jen's response, and she frowned at Jen when Jen covered her mouth to stifle laughter. "He has his reasons to withhold information from his fellow investigators, only I do not know what they are, and I must learn to trust him. I will not become good at new things unless I do them. What? Why do you laugh?"

Jen uncovered her mouth. "Devil's advocate. Not advocate of the devil."

Another idiomatic phrase she had gotten wrong. Ziva shook her head. "It is the same," she insisted. "Devil's advocate—advocate of the devil." She dismissed the error with a flick of her fingers, but she smiled back at Jen. "It is loyalty I ponder."

"Mmm." Jen took another sip of wine, eyes bright in the lamplight. "Your loyalty must be the same as Gibbs's. You've got to be loyal to the investigation."

Ziva considered that. "I do not feel loyalty to...abstract thoughts," she said at last. "I feel loyalty to people."

"Do you trust Gibbs?" Jen persisted.

Ziva answered without hesitation. "I do."

"Do you trust me?"

"With my life." As she had, and her existence here was proof of it.

"And your Mossad colleagues?"

"Some...more than others." But she understood them, and she understood the shifting of loyalties there, because they were her own people. "The ones I served with in the Israel Defense Forces." Training and battle did not make friends; it made trust.

"There you go, then." Jen looked at her expectantly, as though she'd just made her point, and Ziva, confused, shook her head. "Oh—almost forgot." Jen picked up two fortune cookies, cracking in their cellophane wrappers, and hitched herself up onto the couch next to Ziva. "We'll start with yours." She pulled the cellophane off and cracked the cookie, handing the pieces to Ziva and retaining the slip of white paper inside. "It says..." Jen squinted, then turned the paper the other way around. "I don't have my glasses," she explained. "It says, 'Be-'éyn tahbūlōt yīpōl `ām; ū-teshū`āh be-rōv yo'éts.'" Her Hebrew accent was very good.

"Ah," Ziva said. She spoke the translation. "Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety." Mossad's motto. "I serve a multitude," she said, because too many people demanded her loyalty.

Jen shook her head. "You serve the truth. You serve justice. You serve the investigation." She let the slip of paper drop onto the coffee table. "The multitude will help you. In the end, you are loyal to yourself, and what you know is right."

"Such trust you have in me," Ziva murmured. She hardly felt she knew herself, but Jen bolstered her.

"Yes," Jen said simply.