The Soldier

grey eyes staring at grey dust

The gala was a huge success, but Tessa was not in the mood for partying today. She came here for a funeral, not to sip overpriced drinks with flamboyant people while acting like she would understand anything at all about art.

She could value beautiful pictures, but that was about it. She had no need to interpret anything into them, only to appear smarter or deeper than she actually was.

Tessa liked artworks or she liked them not, but the second she had to explain why she felt like that her thoughts became blurry and suddenly she just despised them whether or not she thought they were beautiful in the first place. Art galas were so far away from what her life had become, art galas were something that fitted Lauras imagination of a good life.

Which in conclusion meant, Tessa despised them.

So she decided to stay outside, enjoying the cold air, looking up at the crescent moon. The moon looked exactly like the other night, when...

'Stop thinking about it', Tessa scolded herself, burying her hands deeper in the pockets of her hoodie.

She waited for the next bus that would bring her to the hotel she would stay in before finally going home.

Alone the thought of going back home was utterly weird. In less than a week, she would sip coffee out of her old blue mug, her cat Wendy laying by her side. She had to search for a new job, something dull and boring probably, something that gave her back a sense of routine.

She allowed herself to become rather lazy the last weeks, losing Ziva left her devastated.

But after the funeral she would need to get herself together finally, she would get her life going. It felt pointless without having Ziva by her side, but that would pass eventually, sometime in the future when not every single thing she thought about reminded her only on Ziva in the end.

Even now Tessa could not stop thinking about how well Ziva would fit into this place, of course, this was her hometown after all, but the gala. The art, the people. The loaded atmosphere of this place, the chattering, this entirely different world, Ziva would have just so easily adapted to.

She would drag Tessa around with her, gracefully sipping one of these drinks Tessa could not even pronounce the name of. There was a certain kind of elegance, charisma, that Ziva just owned and Tessa could not even explain it properly.

She would laugh and smile and interpret art and explain why an artist used that colour or technique instead of anything else and Tessa would listen and enjoy her company so much, she would even forget that she was not a big fan of art galas.

Suddenly a lot of people started running out of the building in front of her.

'Was there a bomb threat or something like that?' Tessa stood there a couple of seconds and when there seemed to be no more people in the museum, she went on, not really caring anymore. In case there was a bomb coming down here, she should hurry up and get away as far and as soon as possible, but her steps were heavy and slow.

This would not be the first bomb she witnessed exploding eventually, and as long as there were no people harmed, she could not be bothered by it. Watching a building being reduced to its bricks was not something that could make her emotional anymore, she had seen too much for that already.

What was a building to a bomb anyways? Nothing but an easy target.

War was always like that, the world was like that. People build things, people destroy things, life just works like that, end of story.

Why so cold, sweetheart?

Realising her uncaring attitude to such a thing made her frown, but she could not bring herself to do anything else.