July 2004

It was the small things that drove her mad, in the end.

Her skull felt like it had been bashed in, her stomach so empty as to be concave. Stabbing shards of pain shot through her ribcage with each breath. Everything throbbed. Surely by now every last inch of her body was black and blue or coated in red?

And yet, that was all so easy to deal with. She had been trained for that, and trained excellently.

Rather, it was the constant drip drip somewhere behind her head, like the erratic ticking of some morbid clock counting down to her last breath; the stickiness of the blood that filled her mouth and nose as if to drown her; the tiny bugs that crawled along the damp concrete floor and onto the ruined skin of her feet. It was the way her left eye had swelled shut, eyelashes glued together by the congealed blood that ran in rivulets from the wound on her forehead, the way the biting metal chains locked around her wrists and chafed against her raw skin, the macabre jewelry of their torture. It was the way her throat burned for just one tiny drop of moisture.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Those were the real tortures, the things the training had not prepared her for. With each passing moment they brought her closer to the brink of insanity, compounding and building off of one another until she began to wonder if this was what it meant to break.

But this was her punishment, after all. The price to pay.

A life for a life.

It was poetic enough—almost romantic, even—that for a second she selfishly mourned that he would never know. She would die and he would continue his life, without ever knowing her sacrifice.

And perhaps that was the way it was meant to be. It was better for him this way, she knew. He will continue his life.

She knew she was going mad, then, when she looked up to find four people standing against the musty brick wall. They shimmered in the faint light that seeped in from the hallway, the dust in the air floating undisturbed around them. They were still as statues, four pairs of accusing, disappointed eyes fixed on her.

Her mother, her sister, her father, and Tony, lined up in front of her like a firing squad.

It was a fitting end, she thought, as she laid her throbbing head back against the wall, face to the ceiling.

"I am sorry."

The words, the first spoken in a week of torture, were barely audible as they fell brokenly from her sticky, blood red lips. She did not know specifically what she was apologizing for—there were so many apologies to be made to so many different people. But she did not have the energy, and the drip, drip continued to count down the seconds. She could hear her heart beating irregularly in her ears, could feel the weight of their accusing stares.

I am sorry, she mouthed a last time, wishing she could deliver her final message in person.

Her one good eye slid shut and she floated.

Three months earlier

She fidgeted on the cushion, tugging at the coarse black fabric of her dress. She hated the damn thing, but whether that was due to the itchy material or the emotions weaved into it with every use was up for debate. She kept it in the back of the closet in her room at her father's house, and it was only ever pulled out on occasions such as this.

All around her people were dabbing their red eyes, whispering phrases like she was so young and such a tragedy. But somehow, Ziva's eyes were drier than bone as they stared emptily across the coffee table. Speculation flew around that day in whispers they thought she could not hear—perhaps all the tears that she had were cried out the nights before, when she fell asleep shaking on a soaked pillow; perhaps the reality hadn't truly sunk in yet, even though the coffin had already been lowered into the ground days ago; or perhaps she was simply heartless.

None of that mattered, though. What mattered was the aching pit in her stomach and the adrenaline that she had woken up with coursing through her veins—the nearly irrepressible need to run, run, run until she couldn't feel this stabbing pain anymore. She wanted for forget—she needed to leave. She needed to fight.

She needed to kill someone.

The couch beneath her shifted slightly and she looked up to find her mother's concerned and watery eyes studying her. Every time Ziva has seen her in the last few days she has been slightly surprised to see how the years have treated the woman. The years when they all lived together as a family seemed like a distant memory. It was hard for her to remember what life was like before her mother left her father, before Ari left for Edinburgh, before she herself left for the IDF. Ziva had hardly seen her mother in the three years since she had joined the army and later Mossad, and since then much had changed. Rivka's dark brown hair had streaks of gray, and her normally youthful face seemed to have more wrinkles every time Ziva saw her. With the loss of her daughter they had only become more pronounced.

The two mourning women sat in silence for a few moments. Ziva knew she was also very different from the daughter Rivka no doubt remembered. She had been baptized in fire, seen and done things her mother probably could not imagine.

There was a lot more than Talia's death between them.

It was Ziva who made the first move, pulling a manila file off of the table in front of them. She barely looked at her mother as she handed it to her.

Only a few precious seconds passed before the silence was shattered. Rivka's eyes were wide as she looked from the paper to her daughter. "Ziva, you cannot seriously—"

"I am leaving," Ziva interrupted, her fiery stare holding steady with her mother's disbelieving one. "Tomorrow."

Disbelief quickly morphed into anger. "How dare he?! He knows that you are hurting! You need to be here with your family and mourn your sister!"

Ziva frowned dangerously, knowing but not caring that they were making a scene in the middle of the shiva. "Do not pretend to know what I need. I asked for the mission! I asked for these orders, and I am leaving tomorrow whether you like it or not."

"I know my daughter, Ziva," Rivka shot back, furious. "And I know that the last thing you need is to be sent out on some mission where you'll be directly in the line of fire! Why do you not let yourself grieve for her?"

"I am grieving!" Ziva yelled, standing up from the couch with her fists clenched at her sides. Rivka laughed sardonically, shaking her head.

"He's made you just like him, hasn't he?"

The sudden shift in tone of the conversation threw Ziva for a loop. Bold-faced anger she could deal with, but she had little experience with soft, thinly veiled accusations.

Her eyebrows shot upwards. "Excuse me?"

"I was afraid Eli would do this. Look around, do you see him? Do you see him sitting shiva for his youngest daughter?" Rivka scoffs. "No. No, your father is at work, orchestrating deaths and fiddling with his master plan."

Ziva's eyes narrow, and in her peripheral vision she notices that the other mourners have filed out. "What exactly are you accusing me of?" Rivka stands up to be at eye level with her daughter.

"The Ziva I knew, the Ziva I raised, would have stayed here and sat shiva and cried with her mother. But you?" Her mother shakes her head sadly. "You are doing what he does! Throwing yourself into the work, into fighting and shooting and killing! Funneling your emotions until all there is left is an empty shell that knows nothing but war and bullets and death!"

Every word seemed to add another brick to the heavy weight settling on Ziva's chest. "How dare you?" she hissed, breathing heavily. "I just lost my sister!"

"And I just lost my daughter!" Rivka fired back. "But I am not running off to vent my pain through the slaughter of others!"

The air in Ziva's lungs flew out with a whoosh. Her words began low but quickly increased in volume. "Slaughter? That is what you think I do? That is what you think of me?" She jabbed her finger accusingly in her mother's direction. "You do not have any clue what I do, what I have faced!"

"You forget who I was married to," Rivka retorted. "I can hazard a fair guess."

"I do not kill because I enjoy it, Momma!" Her eyes were wide and wild, but under the layers of anger there was deep hurt. "I kill to protect my country, my family! I am not slaughtering innocent people like some kind of… some kind of monster! The people I take out are guilty, they are threats!"

Over the pounding in her head she managed to make out her mother's soft words: "Is that what he has you believe?"

Ziva ground her teeth, snatching the folder out of her mother's shaking hands. "I do not have to stand here and take this. Goodbye, Momma."

And then she turned on her heels and left, the slamming of the door unable to mask the sound of her mother desperately shouting her name.

.:.

It was only a week later that she took her knife and slit a man's throat. With adrenaline pumping through her veins, the blood of the man who orchestrated her sister's death coating her hands, she had never felt more alive.

She left him limp and gargling on the bed and headed to the hotel room's sink, turning on the faucet and watching mesmerized as the crimson-colored water swirled down the drain.

For you, Tali.

.:.

Once was not enough, as she found out very quickly. She felt an incredible reprieve from pain when she watched her sister's killer's life drain away onto her hands, and she wanted to feel that again.

Luckily for her, Hamas was a large organization with plenty of people that could be considered responsible for the attack. Her father was all too willing to search them out for her, and every new manila folder brought with it the promise of relief from the sickening ache in her chest, even if that relief was only momentary.

She was like an addict, and vengeance was her drug. More and more blood spilt, and with each droplet the words:

For you, Tali.

But every time she stood and washed the red from her hands, she would see herself in the bathroom mirror, and every time she heard from somewhere in the back of her mind a little voice.

I never wanted this.

.:.

With each mission the mark became less and less to do with the bomb that killed Tali. She noticed, of course, but logically there were only so many people who were really to blame. Gradually, they became less about vengeance and more about the escape. The pain was never going to go away, no matter how many throats she slit in her sister's name.

She had nothing left but Eli's orders—so she followed them, knowing but not caring that she was losing herself in the process.

I never wanted this.

.:.

She lost count of how many missions there had been by the time she boarded the plane to America. Her calendar told her it had been over two months since the funeral, so what did that make this one? The tenth? Eleventh?

The engines rumbled to life and she opened the profile on her lap, reading the name at the top.

Anthony DiNozzo, Jr.

A/N: I need to stop beginning stories when I already have tons of others in progress. I also need to stop beginning stories when I have a ridiculous amount of homework to do…but c'est ma vie. That's French for something.

Lots of credit goes to Kiera (Tapes and records) for helping me brainstorm this up. Also to Nicole (mcgeekle) for being such a wonderful person to bounce ideas off of. I appreciate it a lot. This little monster of a fic was born out of me beginning to watch Supernatural and it's probably more influenced by that show than by NCIS (with the exception of the characters and of course the fact that this is 100% paranormal free) so if you watch it then you will understand the true meaning of the title.

The next chapters will be longer. Hope you enjoyed! Please let me know what you think.

-Allison