Time Gone By ✡ NCIS TIVA Fanfiction

Chapter 25

"Where am I? Where is Ziva? Is she alright?" Tony sat up in a hospital bed.
Again. In the past few days, he'd been to hospitals way too often.

"She's recovering." Ellie's voice reached his ears faintly.
"I need to see her now." The bright colors of his surroundings were screaming at him, it was all too much.
Yet he kept trying to leave the bed.

"I don't think that's such a good idea right now." Her hand squeezed his arm lightly, as if trying to push him back down.

"Are you lying to me? What happened? I don't remember..." His voice broke off and he struggled for breath. Helpless.
A hand reached for his shoulder from the other side and he turned around, barely able to make out the face of the person sitting on the side of his bed.

It took a moment for the colors and shapes to come back in place, then he recognized his friend. "Tim."
"Tony, you're in a bad state. So is she. Give it some time." McGee's face was so thin, the shadows under his eyes darker than ever.
"I can't hear properly. My eyes don't really work either... Will I be okay?"

"The doctors can't tell."
"Fine. It doesn't matter. Will she be okay? Will our daughter -..." Once again, his voice failed at delivering the words.

"Nobody has answers right now. I'm sorry." Tony's head seemed to be exploding with pain. "I'm going. I need to check on her. I need to see her. Don't you understand?" Every last bit of his body ached, but he got up anyway. Bishop didn't try to stop him. Tim grabbed his shoulder and helped him stand.
"You can't walk this far. They put her into another hospital wing. She's in surgery right now."

The information made his feet give in. If it hadn't been for McGee, he would have fallen onto the floor. Instead, he landed more or less swiftly on his sheets.

"It's that bad?"

Around him, everything was spinning too fast.

Ziva.

In a bad state.

Surgery.

His world came falling down all over him.

"I haven't told her..." But before he could finish, the tears came running down his face. An uncountable amount of wet, unmanly tears that still couldn't come close to describing the pain he had bottled up inside, and not just the pain, but every emotion he hadn't been able to let out:
The despair, the longing, the fear; And most of all, the anger.

Anger about her leaving him, anger about her coming back because of the child. Anger about never getting to say the things he wanted to, anger about there always being something to tear the perfect moments into peaces.

He didn't sob or cry out loud, but there were so many tears and by the end of it, his sheet was soaked. It didn't matter that his friends saw him, it didn't help that they rubbed his back or held his hands.

In fact, nothing mattered and nothing helped, except for the one that was so, so far away.
Ziva.

He whispered her name, and he didn't fall asleep.
And when his friends left and new people entered the room, he maybe got calmer, but he never stopped.
He let the doctors inject him with things he didn't ask about, and he let his visitors tell him stories he couldn't hear.
All he heard was his heart beating, his breath shaking and his voice repeating steadily the name of the woman he loved. Ziva. Ziva. Ziva...

Her hair tickled her neck.
Am I dead?
Then she smelled the clinical smell of disinfectants and coughed.
Nope, this felt very alive.

She touched her nose and felt a chill. She was breathing.
Her hands trailed down her neck and pain erupted in her body. This hadn't been there before. It all came back at once. What had happened in the cellar of NCIS headquarters...
Pictures she'd rather forget flooded her mind.
The man from Netanya...

"He's dead, Ziva." Gibbs' voice was like music, a nice thing to hear after having been unconscious. Yet her eyes widened.

Tony? Was Tony okay?

"The man who wanted to kill you, I shot him."
Relief washed over her, followed right by guilt. She shouldn't be glad that a man had died.
"It was payback for what you did in my cellar, all those years ago. We're even." The painful image of her dead brother flashed before her eyes, mixing with the face of the scarred man who threatened her and Tony.

It's okay now, she told herself. But she wasn't.