with a violin and a song to sing (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
origamiflowers) wrote2008-11-01 10:40 pm
origamiflowers) wrote2008-11-01 10:40 pm
fic: NCIS: Filtered - Tony, Ziva
Title: Filtered
Fandom: NCIS
Characters, Pairings: Ziva, Tony
Genre: Angst
Spoilers: post-Jeanne arc
Rating: PG
Length: ~1100 words
Notes: Ziva thinks about what might have been. For the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sacred_20 challenge. Prompt: #16, "Set Apart."
*
It is too late now. Maybe, before, there was a chance of something - Ziva does not know quite what. Maybe she doesn't want to think about that. Whatever it was, it's gone. It has floated away, like cigarette smoke, thinning out on the wind.
But maybe something, once. This is the thought, the thought she always finds her mind returning to, even when she doesn't want it to. Especially when she doesn't want it to, it seems.
She tortures herself with the idea, lets it flit in and out of her mind maddeningly.
* * *
She used to smoke constantly, running through cigarettes as though they were tissues, blithely ignoring concerned warnings about tar and lung cancer. She can still hear her father's voice, low and suffocating: Your body is a temple, Ziva. Does this practice truly honor the King of Kings?
Always the cheapest packs, lights, with filters, that burn out almost as quick as she lights them. That's her concession to her father.
The poverty of those cigarettes is part of what attracts her to them: it makes her think about the dirt beneath her feet, ground into the pores and jagged cracks of the sidewalks by a million heels, as though she can taste it on her tongue. The soil of God's creation in her mouth, on her lips, hovering on her very breath.
Eventually, her habit winds down. Not because of health concerns, but rather - for the desire to restrict her indulgences. To take a wild and erratic passion and confine it into a small space and watch it burn even more brightly. To turn a desire for waste into an experience of exaltation.
Hourly pleasures, she learns gradually, are not nearly as agreeable as the rare ones, delayed until past the point of inevitability, until you have convinced yourself that you will never partake of them again. Then, and only then, does it become sublime: as though you are being granted a reprieve from your own death.
Once every month, she allows herself to smoke a cigarette.
She delays it until the end, always, even to the last minute. But she never lets it pass.
Which is how she finds herself lighting up on a stakeout. She is with Tony, of course, and they are parked next to a curb in an appropriately nondescript sedan, between two streetlights. The air is stale, and the Chinese food has already been finished off, the takeout boxes and chopsticks littering the backseat.
Neither of them has said much, besides the compulsory niceties, and the silence is uncomfortable between them, now more than ever before. The clock in the dashboard reads 11:56. So she hesitates for a moment as her fingers brush the glossy pack of cigarettes in her purse. To speak now is almost too high a price to pay.
Almost.
"Tony."
"Huh." He seems absorbed by something she cannot see.
"Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?"
She catches his attention, at least. When he looks at her, he is looking at her, truly. Not past her, as though he doesn't see her, as he's been doing for weeks. His eyes are very blue; she finds them unnerving in a direct and sincere gaze. "What?"
Her gaze cuts over to him. "A cigarette, Tony. I would like to smoke. Since we are doing nothing else."
He looks surprised. "Sure. Just ... blow it out of the car." He makes a vague, unformed gesture toward her window, cracked a few inches.
Tony watches as she places a cigarette between her lips and sparks a light, shielding it with her small hand. The cigarette is poised, delicately, between two slender knuckles. She takes a long, slow drag, and breathes out the smoke in one satisfied exhale. Her eyes are closed.
"That's funny," he says, and stops there.
"What's funny," she mumbles around the cigarette.
"I wouldn't have pegged you for the smoking type. That's all."
Ziva opens her eyes and smiles at him. "I do not smoke often. It is something I do to ... relax."
Tony's fingers drum the steering wheel in an erratic rhythm. She thinks about his hands, those fingers. Stop that.
"I never understood that. Isn't nicotine a stimulant?"
"It is not about that." Ziva wonders if she should explain. If she can explain it to him. "It is about ... routine. Repetition." She does not think he would understand it if she said it all to him: if she told him about the comfort of the familiar, the satisfaction of consumption, the calming effect of intended and measured breaths.
She tries again: "It is a ritual."
Tony nods, and does not respond.
She remembers, then, that he is a DiNozzo, that his whole family is Roman Catholic, and perhaps he does understand. Perhaps he remembers kneeling at the altar as a child, the priest placing the body of Christ on his tongue: the burden of it, and the relief.
They are silent for the next three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
Ziva flicks the ash off the tip, watching the gray flakes escape and fall away. The smoke drifts and curls lazily around the edge of the window. She watches it rise, like incense, toward Heaven. The idea makes her smile.
Then she speaks again. "It is a reminder, as well. It is something from the past. The cigarettes, they remind me of the woman I was in the past. And of the ways I could have gone." The words spill out of her mouth, but they are not quite the right ones, not the ones that will make him understand, that will show him who she is.
He, on the other hand, has changed too much, and not in the ways she wants desperately. She had meant what she'd said: the man you are becoming, and had hoped it was true. But his expressions are closed off. His smiles are more cynical. His barbs are more sincere, and the sharper for it.
He is up to his old tricks. That is what they would say, in America. Only now he performs them more coolly, with more precision.
She had hoped too much, perhaps. It is not his fault. She nearly believes that.
Ziva has nearly reached the end of the cigarette, and flicks it out the window. It skitters across the pavement and comes to a stop several feet away. She watches it for a few moments, watches as it glows brighter and brighter and then - winks out.
*
Fandom: NCIS
Characters, Pairings: Ziva, Tony
Genre: Angst
Spoilers: post-Jeanne arc
Rating: PG
Length: ~1100 words
Notes: Ziva thinks about what might have been. For the
sacred_20 challenge. Prompt: #16, "Set Apart."*
It is too late now. Maybe, before, there was a chance of something - Ziva does not know quite what. Maybe she doesn't want to think about that. Whatever it was, it's gone. It has floated away, like cigarette smoke, thinning out on the wind.
But maybe something, once. This is the thought, the thought she always finds her mind returning to, even when she doesn't want it to. Especially when she doesn't want it to, it seems.
She tortures herself with the idea, lets it flit in and out of her mind maddeningly.
* * *
She used to smoke constantly, running through cigarettes as though they were tissues, blithely ignoring concerned warnings about tar and lung cancer. She can still hear her father's voice, low and suffocating: Your body is a temple, Ziva. Does this practice truly honor the King of Kings?
Always the cheapest packs, lights, with filters, that burn out almost as quick as she lights them. That's her concession to her father.
The poverty of those cigarettes is part of what attracts her to them: it makes her think about the dirt beneath her feet, ground into the pores and jagged cracks of the sidewalks by a million heels, as though she can taste it on her tongue. The soil of God's creation in her mouth, on her lips, hovering on her very breath.
Eventually, her habit winds down. Not because of health concerns, but rather - for the desire to restrict her indulgences. To take a wild and erratic passion and confine it into a small space and watch it burn even more brightly. To turn a desire for waste into an experience of exaltation.
Hourly pleasures, she learns gradually, are not nearly as agreeable as the rare ones, delayed until past the point of inevitability, until you have convinced yourself that you will never partake of them again. Then, and only then, does it become sublime: as though you are being granted a reprieve from your own death.
Once every month, she allows herself to smoke a cigarette.
She delays it until the end, always, even to the last minute. But she never lets it pass.
Which is how she finds herself lighting up on a stakeout. She is with Tony, of course, and they are parked next to a curb in an appropriately nondescript sedan, between two streetlights. The air is stale, and the Chinese food has already been finished off, the takeout boxes and chopsticks littering the backseat.
Neither of them has said much, besides the compulsory niceties, and the silence is uncomfortable between them, now more than ever before. The clock in the dashboard reads 11:56. So she hesitates for a moment as her fingers brush the glossy pack of cigarettes in her purse. To speak now is almost too high a price to pay.
Almost.
"Tony."
"Huh." He seems absorbed by something she cannot see.
"Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?"
She catches his attention, at least. When he looks at her, he is looking at her, truly. Not past her, as though he doesn't see her, as he's been doing for weeks. His eyes are very blue; she finds them unnerving in a direct and sincere gaze. "What?"
Her gaze cuts over to him. "A cigarette, Tony. I would like to smoke. Since we are doing nothing else."
He looks surprised. "Sure. Just ... blow it out of the car." He makes a vague, unformed gesture toward her window, cracked a few inches.
Tony watches as she places a cigarette between her lips and sparks a light, shielding it with her small hand. The cigarette is poised, delicately, between two slender knuckles. She takes a long, slow drag, and breathes out the smoke in one satisfied exhale. Her eyes are closed.
"That's funny," he says, and stops there.
"What's funny," she mumbles around the cigarette.
"I wouldn't have pegged you for the smoking type. That's all."
Ziva opens her eyes and smiles at him. "I do not smoke often. It is something I do to ... relax."
Tony's fingers drum the steering wheel in an erratic rhythm. She thinks about his hands, those fingers. Stop that.
"I never understood that. Isn't nicotine a stimulant?"
"It is not about that." Ziva wonders if she should explain. If she can explain it to him. "It is about ... routine. Repetition." She does not think he would understand it if she said it all to him: if she told him about the comfort of the familiar, the satisfaction of consumption, the calming effect of intended and measured breaths.
She tries again: "It is a ritual."
Tony nods, and does not respond.
She remembers, then, that he is a DiNozzo, that his whole family is Roman Catholic, and perhaps he does understand. Perhaps he remembers kneeling at the altar as a child, the priest placing the body of Christ on his tongue: the burden of it, and the relief.
They are silent for the next three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
Ziva flicks the ash off the tip, watching the gray flakes escape and fall away. The smoke drifts and curls lazily around the edge of the window. She watches it rise, like incense, toward Heaven. The idea makes her smile.
Then she speaks again. "It is a reminder, as well. It is something from the past. The cigarettes, they remind me of the woman I was in the past. And of the ways I could have gone." The words spill out of her mouth, but they are not quite the right ones, not the ones that will make him understand, that will show him who she is.
He, on the other hand, has changed too much, and not in the ways she wants desperately. She had meant what she'd said: the man you are becoming, and had hoped it was true. But his expressions are closed off. His smiles are more cynical. His barbs are more sincere, and the sharper for it.
He is up to his old tricks. That is what they would say, in America. Only now he performs them more coolly, with more precision.
She had hoped too much, perhaps. It is not his fault. She nearly believes that.
Ziva has nearly reached the end of the cigarette, and flicks it out the window. It skitters across the pavement and comes to a stop several feet away. She watches it for a few moments, watches as it glows brighter and brighter and then - winks out.
*
no subject