Hey y'all! This is a Tali-centric piece that focuses on the David family's childhood. Hope you enjoy! I started writing this in May, and finished it just a few moments ago. Reviews will make me SO happy. Critiques are very welcome. Thanks! Disclaimed.

-Alivia

In a moment, the world turns itself inside out, sorely reminiscent of the first time she'd dressed herself and the laughter that had creaked in the skeletons of floorboards, tainted with dirty fingers and shushing notions and sugary mouths. "You are doing it wrong," Ziva had giggled.

Beep beep beep beep. Reaching, floundering for an alarm clock that isn't there. Dreams, she thinks, have never been this incoherent.

Sounding as a harbinger, as her knees shudder and her dress sways between her legs in the breeze of the open window of the compound. Pulse thudding in her ears- sixteen, she is sixteen, and knows nothing of this panic.

For the milliseconds that slug, all is but a white blanket, limbs slow and sluggish in their movement.

Then-

Tick tock goes the clock. An angry hornet buzzes at her ear. Tali David flinches.

Sixteen, she is sixteen, and she is far too young to look death in the eye. It crawls across the dirt floor, and snarls at her.

Tali clenches her fists and shuts her eyes before its fiery tongue licks up her dress. She smells sulfur.

"Dying is much easier," Ziva had said once upon a time, in a far away land. "Living is the hard part."

She had never pined to know exactly how the information had come into her sister's grasp. She wishes, uselessly, she had thought before the flames danced around her and the building fell in her eyes.

...

"My pretty girl," her mother whispers to her. "My pretty, pretty Tali."

She smiles like she is princess, and sips her juice with gusto.

…

Sometimes after Ima has tucked her in and the light at the edge of her door flicks off, the night is disturbed. It happens nearly every evening, and she makes it a habit to watch as stealthily as she can- brown curls falling in her face, humid air on the back of her chubby toddler thighs, diaper hanging off. She peers through the bars of her crib attentively, waiting for the telling creak of the door.

All lights remain off. The only thing she can do is suck her thumb, and wait.

When her sister opens the door, she falls back onto her knees, and coos.

"Hush," Ziva murmurs to her. Ziva is only five, but already she can pull the bar of the baby bed down a notch, just enough to reach Tali's little head of curls, to stroke them softly.

Ziva's breaths are near silent. "I am glad you have not stopped breathing in your sleep," lingers the quiet, child's voice. "That happened to the other baby. It was a boy. His name was Liam."

Tali loves the sound of her sister's voice, and it almost puts her to sleep.

Eventually, the hand in her hair stops moving, and the older girl starts back to bed. She whimpers.

"Hush, Talia. I shall be back tomorrow night."

….

When she sees her father, the first thing she does is run to his lap. Fisting his shirt in her meaty fists, inhaling the musky scent of his cologne. A kiss is pressed to the crown of her head, and his voice is strong in her little ears.

He is so strong.

"Shalom, little Tali."

….

She loses her first tooth when she is three and a half, and everyone is aware of how old she is, because she is constantly telling them. Her laughter is musical, tinkling, and she's always in someone's lap, on their hip, gracing their shoulders.

It was a lovely spring day, and what little moisture came to Israel was present. Ari and Ziva had dragged her along to the beach, and the tide was lapping at her small feet. A race had developed between her siblings, and she had wanted to join- she so wanted to be like them. Grown up.

She was a big girl.

Tali had not meant to catch her foot on the rock, and definitely had not intended to tumble onto the sharp jut of the stone basin. Her mouth erupted into over sensitized, painful nerves, and she'd cried, screamed, kicked.

She recalls being in Ari's arms, clinging to her brother's neck.

She had knocked one of her teeth out, gleaming in the sand. Ziva scooped it up in her palm.

They raced back home.

…..

She had never witnessed a thunderstorm, in all her four years.

Thunder cracked, and bare feet slapped against the hardwood clumsily. Clutching at her sister's bedcovers, and pulling them away. Ziva had let her into bed.

She clung to her like life.

Tali David decides she hates thunderstorms.

…

Nonchalantly, she sneaks licks of chocolate icing when Ima isn't looking. Ari, lanky and thirteen, is a giant among individuals. Stealthily, he inches behind her, and lifts her away; tickling her until she is shrieking with laughter and the sappy taste is still coating her mouth.

He laughs with her.

…

The fighting starts when she is in bed, and her doll is a beacon of safety in her arms.

"Why? Why Eli? He is a boy! He is a boy, Eli, and knows nothing of the world!"

"He is my only son, and his performance will dictate the security of this family!"

….

Vivid, are the memories of that Indian summer. It was nearly the driest on record, with not a drop of precipitation for nearly five months.

Happiness began to wilt, sorely reminiscent of the flowers that had bloomed the spring before.

…..

Above all else; she remembers her mother's hair.

It was thick, and dark, and nearly always tied into the neatest of braids. Early in the morning, it would remain down, drenching her shoulders in ebony waterfalls. Tali would grip it in her tiny fingers, run her hands through it, or sometimes curl a fist around a strand.

She remembers, above all else, the way it looked when her mother was dead.

Blood tipped, it had hung like a lifeless mop, splayed out around her dead eyes.

The kitchen floor burned her knees.

"Ima, wake up. Ima, wake up!"

…

"Tali, some people are too great for this world to stay long," Ari had said to her once.

…

"One day," she murmured to herself. "One day, I am going to change the world. And no one will kill anyone else, and people won't die."

"Grow up," Ziva had growled, and at only six years old, Tali David decided that words hurt far worse than any knocked tooth.

…..

Later, people would ask her what she remembers of her sixth and seventh year on the Earth.

She tells them, 'It was very dry.'

Later, when people inquire about what she remembers of her mother's death, she tells them, 'Nothing.'

She is not a liar.

…..

The new tutor is a tall, balding man with a mustache and a thick accent. Ziva tells her he is British, and she needs to treat him with the utmost respect. When her sister suggests this, she nods petulantly, and sticks her tongue out at her.

But Tali is too obedient not to do as she is told. There is something about Mr. Lehnsherr that frightens her.

At first, she cannot figure out exactly what it is.

Possibly, it is that his large hands cause her small ones to seem tremendously puny. Maybe, it is that his voice is too gruff, and she startles too easily in his presence.

Or maybe, it is because he always has a hand rested precariously upon her meaty thigh when he is helping her study.

…..

When Ari leaves home, she cries.

"You cannot, you cannot, you cannot!" she wails into the crook of his neck.

"I must, Tali. I have to live."

Three weeks after his room becomes vacant, Ziva takes it for herself. Discombobulating, is it, the way his presence seems entirely erased from the premises.

Her tenth birthday party is the following Saturday, and both her brother and her father are not present. She knows she is being bratty when she wishes they would never be around at all. Ziva gifts a doll of a garish color and, at her expense, leaves with a friend ten minutes after she blows out the candles on her cake.

…..

When Tali tells her she wishes she didn't have a sister, Ziva merely sneers, and pats her on the head like a daft dog. If someone asks Tali David what her worst birthday experience was, she would answer without hesitation.

…

Ziva begins training harder when she turns fifteen, and Aba is clear in his plans for her future. Aba hardly ever smiles anymore.

Once, her older sister sneaks a boy in the house. Their father had been away for a few weeks, and the nanny was too old to hear anything meaningful in the dead of night. Wistfully, and a bit sickly, she thinks of how Ziva used to hold her during nightmares.

Now, she listens to moans and rustling bed frames in the next room, and hopes in another life she was born mute.

…

"Can I kiss you?" Jakob Raul whispers into her ear.

When she nods, she does not mean for her lips to quiver so much.

She likes that he asked first, and when she smiles into his mouth, it is the first real smile she has exuded since she witnessed her mother bleeding out on the linoleum.

Still-

After he takes her virginity- after he stuffs his unmentionables through her as if she is his walk in closet- after he takes what little self she owned and left-

It did not matter how sweet his kisses had been.

He left. Everyone always leaves. And everything they take with them, they take apart.

…..

In a rare moment of sincerity, Ziva teaches her how to apply makeup. The sensation of her skin floundering under browns and purples and lipstick the color of fresh pomegranate is new, and akin to disapproval from Aba, but she takes one look at her reflection in the mirror, and those thoughts cease.

Beauty, she thinks, and reaches for another vile to experiment with.

When Ziva leaves home, lost to the life of vile killing and betrayal, Tali stops wearing makeup.

She takes pleasure in watching the color spectrum paint the sink a dull gray. It washes down, because nothing is permanent.

…..

"You look like your mother," Aba says to her on her fourteenth birthday.

She takes another bite of the cake the Nanny had the sense to bake- too sweet, always too sweet on her tongue- and smiles. Sugary mouths and dead eyes; this is what her life cedes.

Tali smiles like she has a secret.

…

"I think I want to go to college. A real college," she brings up with her tutor one day.

His tone is mocking. "And disappoint your father? I do not think that is wise."

Tali angers, but nods like the good little girl she is. The façade is like wax paper. It smothers her.

That night, when she goes to bed, she buries her face into her pillow and screams her throat hoarse.

…..

That morning, Ziva stops by, which is a rare occurrence.

She sips at a glass of juice and tries not to stare at the bandage over her sister's right brow.

They have barely spoken, and yet,

"Come shopping with me, Ziva. I have an errand or two to run. Please- I have not seen you in so long."

Her throat catches. "I miss you, Ziva," Tali whispers.

Ziva will not meet her eyes.

"I am tired, Talia. Another time." With that, she watches her sister disappear from the kitchen, likely to the spare room.

The taste of copper fills her mouth, and it is then that Tali realizes she had bit her lip so raw it bled.

….

The thing that draws her to that particular dress shop is the golden fabric in the open window. The market is a busy place this time of day, and the sun beats down upon the black crown of her hair. Her eyes are brown, and lively, and if anyone saw what they needed to see, they might mistake her for Ziva.

She is attracted to the gold fabric, because she thinks her sister would look lovely in it.

She enters the shop, and signs her death warrant.

…

Later, all they find of her is a severed wrist, a beloved silver bracelet still there, melded, into the slender bone.

Sixteen. She is sixteen, and merely grasps the lapels of life before it leaves her as dust.

"My pretty girl," her mother whispers to her. "My pretty, pretty Tali."

She smiles like she is the world, and allows the heat of the bomb to swallow her whole.