ncisficathon | Fic: Defensive Wounds {Chapter 4}

Title: Defensive Wounds
Author:

swithers
Prompt: Something/Someone returns from Ziva's past to haunt her. How do the team help her through? Pairing isn't neccesary but Ziva/Gibbs if one is to exist.
Genre: Gen.
Pairings: None, but lots of team love, if that counts.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: When the team discovers that a suspect on a case has a history with Ziva, she's forced to confront a few things she's buried. A massive hurt/comfort Ziva-centric teamfic.
Author's Note: Because of issues with LJ's new Rich Text editor - and I know I'm not the only one - I've been unable to edit my earlier chapters and add a link to new chapters as I post them. It is very frustrating, as I had really wanted to have all my chapters linked together. I plan to resolve this as soon as LJ fixes the problems.

( Chapter 1: The Suspect ) ( Chapter 2: Breaking Point ) (Chapter 3: The Translation )

Chapter 4
The Touchstone

Ziva stays with McGee behind his desk, supposedly to help him trace Ericson's last calls. But the truth is that she feels calmer with one of her teammates near her. She keeps glancing up at the clock on the wall, and she imagines him glancing up, in the same nervous way, at the red recording light on the wall in interrogation. What is he telling Gibbs and Tony? What are they asking him that Gibbs didn't want Ziva to hear?

The steady click-click-click of McGee's hands on his keyboard steadies her. Ziva tries to focus on what he's saying, tries to grab onto it, but then Gibbs sweeps back into the bullpen from interrogation, looking grim.

Gibbs doesn't say anything except to send her and Tony back to the house where they picked up Tamir. In interrogation, Tamir insisted that he didn't kill Ericson, but another member of his cell did. He told them where in the house the gun was hidden, gave them directions on how to find it. Tony and Ziva are to go back for it.

Ziva stays behind McGee's desk, as if frozen there, but her eyes track Gibbs across the bullpen. She watches him closely, trying to discern some change in his face, some sign that he knows things about her that he didn't know before he interrogated Tamir. But Gibbs looks the same as he always does, right down to the coffee cup in his hand. When he catches Ziva staring at him, she quickly looks away, guilty. Gibbs is the last person in the world that she should feel suspicious of.

They take Tony's car back to the house. Ziva barely has to look to see the change in him. He slams the car door shut, rams his key into the ignition, and grips the steering wheel tightly in his hands before speeding out of the Navy Yard.

Under any other circumstances, Ziva would be proud that her driving has rubbed off on Tony. But he's just come from interrogating Tamir... His lips are pressed together in a thin line, and Ziva can sense that words are aching to burst out of them. Did Tamir say something to make him so angry? Did Gibbs order Tony not to repeat it to her?

She doesn't wait long to find out. As soon as they're on their way and there's no possibility of anyone overhearing them, Ziva glances at Tony out of corner of her eye and asks, "What did Tamir tell you in interrogation?"

But Tony doesn't answer right away. He flexes his hands on the steering wheel for a moment, never taking his eyes off the road. His answer, when it finally comes, is not what she expected. "Well, Gibbs made me leave pretty early in," he sighs.

Ziva turns her head, staring at him openly now. Tony still keeps his eyes glued to the road, and she's grateful for that because she probably looks as alarmed as she feels. Gibbs wouldn't have sent him out of interrogation unless...

"Did - did you ask him anything about me?" She wants to kick herself for stammering.

Tony shifts forward in his seat and hunches over the steering wheel. Ziva can see his shoulders tense up beneath his suit jacket. "I didn't ask him about you. Gibbs told me not to before we went in," he says slowly, and before Ziva even has time to relax, he adds, "but he did... volunteer some stuff."

They both jerk forward when he hits the brake at the next red light. He slams the turn signal down with one hand and leans back in his seat, spitting his words out like they're poison. "Gibbs kept asking him about Ericson, but he only wanted to talk about you. He went on about how you were so... well-treated - " Tony actually grits his teeth around the words " - in Somalia, how Saleem gave you enough to eat and made sure none of his men touched you and..."

Ziva inhales sharply, but the it's like the air in her lungs has turned to ice, and her breath freezes in her chest for a moment. She actually puts her hand on the door handle. It's that tempting to open the door, get out of the car in the middle of the intersection, and end this conversation right now.

But Tony is still talking, and Ziva can't remember when she's ever heard him sound so angry. "...but we just couldn't get him away from it. That's when I got up and kicked his chair out from under him and told him if he said one more goddamn word about you, I'd throw his head through the mirror. That's when Gibbs made me leave."

As soon as the light turns green, he hits the gas and speeds forward so fast that people would think Ziva is driving. Ziva tells herself that she should feel touched that Tony is so angry on her behalf, but all she feels is panic, telling her to run, to get away from this, but she's trapped in a moving car and has nowhere to go. None of his men touched you. She tries to imagine what Tamir's exact words were, whether they were enough to make Tony suspect...

But they were. Who is she trying to kid? Tony isn't stupid. Ziva feels like another little piece of herself has ripped been open. Now Tony too has found out something about her that she had never wanted anyone to know. Just like McGee. It's exactly what she was afraid of. The angry fear is a familiar sensation, coiled up and hissing, like a snake in her chest. It was all that she ever felt in Somalia.

And then the sound of the car wheels on the road shuts off, just as if someone's hit the mute button. Ziva presses her thumb hard against her Star of David pendant, trying to steady herself. She knows that if she closed her eyes now - she won't, of course, she can't allow herself to do that - she would hear, as clear as anything, Tamir's husky breath at her ear, and the last words that the two of them said to each other in Somalia.

"Ziva, don't struggle."

"Tamir, don't do this."

"Fuck, Zi..."

Tony's voice is low, but so close beside her, startling her back to the present. He's pulled over somewhere; through the the window Ziva sees a shotgun house with a small, unkempt yard. They're near the house that Tamir and the rest of the terrorist cell had been using as a base, but they're not quite there yet. Ziva opens her mouth to ask Tony why he stopped, but then she feels a warm wetness trickling down her chest.

She looks down, surprised to see a bright crimson trail of blood at the nape of her neck. Tony leans across her, opens the glove compartment, and pulls out a pack of wet wipes. It so strikes her as something that a suburban soccer mom would do, keep a pack of wet wipes on-hand in the glove compartment, that an insane laugh almost escapes her. Then Tony silently presses one against the cut on her neck. She jerks away at first, startled by the cold, wet sensation, but then moves her necklace to one side so that he can dab at the blood.

It only takes her a second to understand what happened. As Tony wipes away the blood, she sees six tiny marks at the base of her neck, small and close together. She pressed so hard against her Star of David pendant that it dug into her skin and left six bloody pinpricks in her flesh, one for each point of the star.

Tony leans back before he speaks, and Ziva can tell that he wants to see her reaction. "And I thought Abby was the one with dangerous jewelry," he says softly. It's an attempt at humor, but also a way to tell her that he knows how she cut herself.

Ziva wonders how much more he knows. There's no way that he could know, but maybe he's guessed, somehow, that Gibbs gave her this necklace, the winter after she came back, in a case on her desk on the first day of Hanukkah. Or that Saleem ripped off her old one, in her cell in Somalia, on the first day he captured her. Or that it's been her touchstone since she saw Tamir again, her reminder that it was over. As long as she could feel it around her neck, she knew that she was here in DC, with her team, safe.

Ziva takes a deep breath and finally meets Tony's eyes, but she has to look away almost immediately. There's too much concern in them. She doesn't answer him, just brushes his hand away from her neck, takes the wipe from him, and holds it in place herself. A slight shudder runs through her, because Tony wiping her blood away reminds her of Tamir.

She can't tell him - she doesn't want anyone to think that she's defending Tamir - but she wonders again if Tony somehow knows that the man he interrogated today used to wipe the blood from her face, push her shirt up to tend to her lacerated back, clean the dirt and sand out of her wounds. That he had started out as the kindest man in Saleem's camp and ended up as the worst.

It seems like she's far away, watching someone else, as she sees her free hand lift up from the armrest and move to Tony's arm, resting on top of his jacket sleeve. It makes her feel better to touch him, just like when she put her hand on McGee's shoulder. The anger and fear and guilt inside her seep away, until she's just left with gratitude that her team is still right here beside her. They've still got her back.

"Hey... you okay?" Tony asks quietly, those concerned eyes still heavy on her.

She nods.

( Chapter 5: Test Results )