origamiflowers: bare feet on tile (ncis ziva tony)
with a violin and a song to sing ([personal profile] origamiflowers) wrote2008-11-04 11:14 pm

fic: NCIS: Motion Blur - Ziva

Title: Motion Blur
Fandom: NCIS
Characters, Pairings: Ziva
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Angst
Spoilers: 5x01: "Bury Your Dead"
Rating: PG
Length: ~700 words
Notes: For the [livejournal.com profile] sacred_20 challenge, prompt #8 (Nirvana). Ziva's thoughts on Tony's demise, and on dealing with death. See the whole table here.

*


Everyone seems to think that working in the intelligence business is about remembering.

Remembering names, dates, locations, assignments. Your cover story. The quirks of the people around you. The profiles, the minds of criminals, information from psychology textbooks. Remembering the small, insignificant pieces of information that later turn out to be of monumental importance. To be able to connect the dots, to synthesize all the nodes of knowledge written down inside your head.

To have a brain like a computer - this is what everything is supposed to hinge on, as the outsiders see it. The key to success.

Ziva knows the truth. It's not about remembering.

It's about being able to forget.

To be able to forget what needs to be forgotten, to let those things sift through the cracks of her mind: this is what her job requires. Keep the important things; let go of everything else. Not a computer, but a sieve.

Not to remember your cover story, but to forget your true self. To forget your family and your lovers and your job and even your own name; to slip into another person's skin, and rest comfortably there. It's not about lying; it's about becoming. Elasticity. You can't lie successfully unless you first believe.

To forget about your past, because memory can only weigh you down, a burden pressing heavy on your shoulders.

The human mind has an almost miraculous ability to forget former pain. Let a child touch a hot burner on the stove, and she won't ever do it again, because of the memory.

But if she remembered - truly remembered, with the immediacy and clarity of the original moment - she would never even enter the kitchen again. She forgets, slowly but surely. Knowledge without feeling. Memories dim, with time.

To forget those who betray you, those whom you loved, those who prized their own lives as more valuable than yours when the hammer fell; when you realize that your devotion was a lie, and your lover a fraud. These things you forget, mercilessly excising the pain in your chest until what is left is only hard and pure and clear.

This is the cost of being a weapon.

To forget the mistakes you make. To throw them off your shoulders and declare: It wasn't me. It did not happen. Because remembering these things can only confuse you, make you weaker. Denial is safer, and brings everything around you into crystalline focus. Guilt and memory only blur.

To forget the bodies of the dead, littered around you. Friends and family and lovers and strangers - all of them. Your fault, and others'.

Sometimes the strangers are the hardest, and you find yourself visiting the gravesites of people you never met, at four in the morning, a bundle of tulips clutched in one hand. Allow yourself that five minutes of grief, and then forget. Forget it all.

Let the dead grow distant. Let their graves grow thick with grass and wildflowers.

Busy yourself with living.

Ziva knows: it's the only way to survive.

So when she watches the tape, the tape where Tony's car explodes in white flames that stream like ribbons, she begins doing what she has to do: she forgets.

She will forget lopsided smiles and crooked grins. Smiles that are [were] irritating and condescending and winsome. She will forget the arrogance, and the attraction.

She will forget the hard planes of his face, the square set of his jaw, his relentlessness, the slant of his shoulders as he would cross his arms. And she will forget his eyes - blue, blue eyes, blue like the color of cloudless skies and cornflowers and the promise of adventure.

Soon, he will fade. It will take time, but he will fade.

Eventually, his edges will soften in her memory, and his face will blur until he is no more recognizable than a stranger. Painted in washed-out pastels. He will pale, become nameless, his life reduced to letters on a page. She will know of him, but she will not remember.

She can feel it beginning already. She has too much practice with this.

As distant as a photograph in a file.

It's the only thing she can do.


*

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