with a violin and a song to sing (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
origamiflowers) wrote2008-12-09 06:45 pm
origamiflowers) wrote2008-12-09 06:45 pm
fic: NCIS: "Can You Sing Hallelujah" - Tony, Ziva
title: can you sing hallelujah
Fandom: NCIS
Characters, Pairings: Tony, Ziva
Genre: Character Death, Hurt/Comfort
Spoilers: set very early-S3
Rating: PG13 (swearing)
Length: 2100 words
Notes: For the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sacred_20 challenge. Prompt #01: Supplication. See the whole table here. Tony runs into Kate's old church and reflects on her death.
The witness just stares at Ziva, as though she's grown an extra head. "Um, I don't know?"
Part of Tony just wants to bash his head into the girl's doorframe. There's a murderer out there, one that killed a petty officer, and the evidence is stonewalling them from every direction - even the eyewitness. Why, oh why, had Gibbs decide to delegate this today?
But Ziva tries again. "You told us that you saw a man covered in blood running away from the park where Petty Officer Browne was killed." She speaks slowly, enunciating every syllable as though she were speaking to a small child. "What did this man look like?"
The girl has to be all of fourteen, tiny, with wide eyes and light hair. She has a soft, uncertain voice, one that almost floats away on the breeze when she speaks. "Um, he was wearing a hoodie. The hood was up? I don't know?"
It's the way her voice turns up at the end, the interrogative tone that attaches itself to her words, that makes Tony's hand clench in his pocket, fingernails digging into palm. But, he reminds himself, he's not angry with her, with this little girl, not really, and he manages to restrain himself from saying something he'll regret.
Ziva does not, obviously, possess the same level of self-control.
"Did you see something or did you not? Please decide. You're making it difficult for us to do our jobs. We would like to catch a murderer. What would you have us do?" Ziva's arms are crossed over her chest, she is breathing heavily through her nose. Always a bad sign.
The girl's mouth opens, and she starts to look distressed. "I swear, I only saw -"
Tony tugs on the elbow of Ziva's jacket. She circles around, her features harsh and forbidding in the bright sun, but he cuts her off before she can say anything more. "Take a walk, Officer David," he says, in his most professional voice.
Her lips thin and her eyes narrow at him with clear anger, but she turns around and starts walking back toward the road.
Tony turns his attention back to the girl. "It's okay, ..." He checks his notepad. "... Jaime. My partner is just a little stressed out. Can you remember what color his jacket was?"
He asks her a few more questions - height, weight, the generic stuff - and closes his notepad. "Thanks for your time, Jaime. If we need to know anything else, we'll get in touch. At some point, we'll probably need an official statement." He smiles his best reassuring smile at her. And when she closes the door, her expression is one of relief.
Ziva is standing several yards down the road, looking around with a bored expression and waiting for him. When he finally catches up to her, she says darkly, "It's about time. Did you wile something out of her with your charms?"
"Don't act like that toward witnesses," he says without preamble, ignoring her jibe. "It's not her fault. And get over your Mossad thing." He says "Mossad" with distaste, rolling the word around in his mouth as though it's sour. "It doesn't work well on frightened teenage girls."
"It's not her fault that she is unobservant and cannot remember what was obviously an important moment?" Ziva snipes as they walk down the street to the parked car.
There's been a lot of anger inside Tony lately. And it all just wants to come out. Now. "Come on, she's just a kid," he says through gritted teeth. "She saw blood all over him and it was the only thing she focused on. Because she was scared. Jesus Christ, Ziva."
They're in front of the car now. Ziva doesn't say anything, doesn't move toward the car door, but Tony keeps talking anyway, almost can't help it. It feels like some dam inside him has broken, and his words spill out of him in a rush, and it feels good, damn good.
"She's not a professional. She's not trained to notice details like us. You're supposed to be the professional. That means keeping your cool, not blowing up at every scared little kid who can't remember what a suspect looks like."
He's angry at being put in this position, too. He is not ever supposed to be the mature partner. That is - that was, he mentally corrects himself - Kate's job. She was always in control, no matter how frustrating a situation became.
It makes his head hurt to think about what this would be like if she were alive. It would be him, getting frustrated, losing his cool, and diplomatic Kate would be the one straightening things out, ironing the wrinkles, setting the situation to rights. Thinking about it can only make him crazy, crazier than a shithouse rat, but it pounds with dull and relentless fervor at the back of his skull anyway.
"She was just being like any other normal, scared person. Maybe you'd know that, if you actually ever acted like a fucking human being."
Ziva huffs, but still doesn't say anything. They stand like that for a few minutes, not speaking, the cool wind biting at his face, and the silence stretches long between them, into deeply uncomfortable territory.
It's her silence, her refusal to fight him on this, that does him in, finally. It needed to be said, yes - maybe - but for a few moments, he can only look anywhere but at her.
They're parked next to a church, he notices as he tries to avoid her gaze. Brown brick, high steeple. Something old-fashioned, but not Gothic. Good, hardy American Catholic.
He catches a glimpse of the name of the church on the notice board: Our Lady of Victory.
That sounds familiar, somehow. He tries to tease out this connection. Does Abby go to church? Something about Sister ... Rosita? Something Spanish. He regrets not ever listening to her. No, that's not quite right. It's not Abby that this place reminds him of.
He tries to run through the list of people he knows. McGeek's agnostic, so that's not it. Gibbs? I don't think that man's ever stepped foot in a church, except maybe to get married. He sneaks a glance at Ziva, looks at the glittering Star of David hanging from her neck. Jewish. That would be no.
And then he remembers: Kate. Kate is - had been, he reminds himself, and the constant correction is starting, slowly, to wear him down - Catholic. It was her church.
Our Lady of Victory. He stares at the name again, at the sign of the cross, sharp and pointed. There was no way, he reflected, Kate would have gone to an "Our Lady of Peace." Kate liked the struggle, liked to fight, liked to win, liked her victory.
Ziva's voice broke through the fog of his distraction. "Tony? Is something wrong?" He can hear the restraint in her voice, can sense her trying to hold back her irritation. He's grateful for it, at the moment.
"Gimme just a minute. Just a minute." He doesn't say anything more, just lets her follow him up to and inside the church's door.
The interior of the church is dimly lit, mostly empty, and it smells musty. Like dust, and old wood, damp and earthy. The smell is a familiar one. He wonders, briefly, if all churches really do smell the same, even between frightened a nine-year-old boy receiving his first communion and thirty-two-year-old Special Agents digging up memories of his dead friend. Coworkers. Whatever.
What was he looking for, here, he wondered.
He feels Ziva's hand light on his arm, and she points to one side of the room. "Your friend. Yes?" Her voice is soft, barely louder than a whisper, but it carries in the solemn silence. Tony glances at Ziva, and can see: she understands.
There's a picture of Kate sitting on a table, surrounded by flickering votive candles and little mementos. The picture is from maybe a year or two ago, because she has her NCIS cap on, and she is smiling radiantly out at him.
A memorial. For Kate. He almost can't make his mind wrap around the idea.
Slowly his feet carry him, unwilling but curious, to the memorial table.
A ragged-looking teddy bear. It doesn't fit with what he knew about her - he can't associate her with a teddy bear in any capacity whatsoever - but it does tell him something. Something about what he doesn't know. What he didn't know. What, now, he'll never know about her life.
It's funny, he thinks, even though it's not really funny at all, all the things you think you know about someone, and still there's all this stuff you don't know, all these different little lives you don't realize they're living. His hand drifts toward the photo.
His eyes are drawn to a piece of blue-lined notebook paper, folded and standing upright like a Christmas card on a fireplace mantle. It has "Kate" written on the front, in a child's blocky letters, and his fingers graze it gently.
"Did you know Miss Todd?"
The querulous voice comes from beside him, from a man hunched over with the weight of his many years. What's left of his hair is white and wispy, his face is covered in wrinkles, and Tony can see his pink gums and the gaps in his teeth when he smiles openly.
He almost says no, but then - why would he be here, if he didn't? "Yeah," Tony says roughly. "I knew her." Except he didn't, he thinks numbly, not in any tangible sense. His chest feels tight and constricted.
The man is nodding, just keeps nodding at every word that Tony says. "A wonderful woman. Very dedicated to her work. But she always had time for the church. The children loved her. But I'm sure you already knew that." He speaks slowly, ponderously, partly in fragments, as though he has to think deeply about the shape of every word, every sentence.
"Yes, Father," Tony says, and the automatic response surprises him. It's the only thing he can think of saying - but still, it seems, old habits die hard.
The old man pats him on the arm gently, smiling his gummy smile, and ambles away. Tony watches him for a moment, then turns back to the table.
He picks up one of the unlit candles, pauses for a moment, and then lights it with one of the thick, tall ones. He sets it down. Wonders if he should say something, or pray something. He doesn't know what he should say.
Churches just seem to give off this aura of darkness and guilt. The very air seems thick with it, palpable and heavy. It rests on you, seeps under your skin, until you're carrying it around with you everywhere you go. Maybe that's just Tony's past speaking, or Kate's death, or something else, but as he's standing in front of her photograph, he can't help but think of everything he did wrong. Every way he failed her as a partner. How maybe it should have been him getting shot.
And it doesn't let him leave.
Tony sits down in one of the pews in the back. He can feel the hardness of the bench under him, biting into the backs of his thighs, and the edge of the pew's back is sharp against his spine. Even sitting in a goddamn pew is like doing penance. It makes him feel like a child, like he did when his parents made him go to church.
He's never really been a religious man. And maybe it's just the fact that he's here, in a church, dredging up memories and sensations better left buried, but he can't help but wonder: Where is she now? The question affects him, more now than he can ever remember. He thinks about purgatory, a world gray and unformed, a middle place with no resolution, and it frightens him.
Tony feels Ziva's hand come down on his shoulder silently, feels her hand squeeze and her nails dig into his collarbone, sharp and sudden, bringing him back to the ground. He rocks with the pressure of the gesture, lets, briefly, his tight clench of his body go.
He begins, for the first time, to resent her a little less.
He can feel it in the gesture: that she knows, too.
They wait together in the silence, for a voice that doesn't speak.
Fandom: NCIS
Characters, Pairings: Tony, Ziva
Genre: Character Death, Hurt/Comfort
Spoilers: set very early-S3
Rating: PG13 (swearing)
Length: 2100 words
Notes: For the
sacred_20 challenge. Prompt #01: Supplication. See the whole table here. Tony runs into Kate's old church and reflects on her death.The witness just stares at Ziva, as though she's grown an extra head. "Um, I don't know?"
Part of Tony just wants to bash his head into the girl's doorframe. There's a murderer out there, one that killed a petty officer, and the evidence is stonewalling them from every direction - even the eyewitness. Why, oh why, had Gibbs decide to delegate this today?
But Ziva tries again. "You told us that you saw a man covered in blood running away from the park where Petty Officer Browne was killed." She speaks slowly, enunciating every syllable as though she were speaking to a small child. "What did this man look like?"
The girl has to be all of fourteen, tiny, with wide eyes and light hair. She has a soft, uncertain voice, one that almost floats away on the breeze when she speaks. "Um, he was wearing a hoodie. The hood was up? I don't know?"
It's the way her voice turns up at the end, the interrogative tone that attaches itself to her words, that makes Tony's hand clench in his pocket, fingernails digging into palm. But, he reminds himself, he's not angry with her, with this little girl, not really, and he manages to restrain himself from saying something he'll regret.
Ziva does not, obviously, possess the same level of self-control.
"Did you see something or did you not? Please decide. You're making it difficult for us to do our jobs. We would like to catch a murderer. What would you have us do?" Ziva's arms are crossed over her chest, she is breathing heavily through her nose. Always a bad sign.
The girl's mouth opens, and she starts to look distressed. "I swear, I only saw -"
Tony tugs on the elbow of Ziva's jacket. She circles around, her features harsh and forbidding in the bright sun, but he cuts her off before she can say anything more. "Take a walk, Officer David," he says, in his most professional voice.
Her lips thin and her eyes narrow at him with clear anger, but she turns around and starts walking back toward the road.
Tony turns his attention back to the girl. "It's okay, ..." He checks his notepad. "... Jaime. My partner is just a little stressed out. Can you remember what color his jacket was?"
He asks her a few more questions - height, weight, the generic stuff - and closes his notepad. "Thanks for your time, Jaime. If we need to know anything else, we'll get in touch. At some point, we'll probably need an official statement." He smiles his best reassuring smile at her. And when she closes the door, her expression is one of relief.
Ziva is standing several yards down the road, looking around with a bored expression and waiting for him. When he finally catches up to her, she says darkly, "It's about time. Did you wile something out of her with your charms?"
"Don't act like that toward witnesses," he says without preamble, ignoring her jibe. "It's not her fault. And get over your Mossad thing." He says "Mossad" with distaste, rolling the word around in his mouth as though it's sour. "It doesn't work well on frightened teenage girls."
"It's not her fault that she is unobservant and cannot remember what was obviously an important moment?" Ziva snipes as they walk down the street to the parked car.
There's been a lot of anger inside Tony lately. And it all just wants to come out. Now. "Come on, she's just a kid," he says through gritted teeth. "She saw blood all over him and it was the only thing she focused on. Because she was scared. Jesus Christ, Ziva."
They're in front of the car now. Ziva doesn't say anything, doesn't move toward the car door, but Tony keeps talking anyway, almost can't help it. It feels like some dam inside him has broken, and his words spill out of him in a rush, and it feels good, damn good.
"She's not a professional. She's not trained to notice details like us. You're supposed to be the professional. That means keeping your cool, not blowing up at every scared little kid who can't remember what a suspect looks like."
He's angry at being put in this position, too. He is not ever supposed to be the mature partner. That is - that was, he mentally corrects himself - Kate's job. She was always in control, no matter how frustrating a situation became.
It makes his head hurt to think about what this would be like if she were alive. It would be him, getting frustrated, losing his cool, and diplomatic Kate would be the one straightening things out, ironing the wrinkles, setting the situation to rights. Thinking about it can only make him crazy, crazier than a shithouse rat, but it pounds with dull and relentless fervor at the back of his skull anyway.
"She was just being like any other normal, scared person. Maybe you'd know that, if you actually ever acted like a fucking human being."
Ziva huffs, but still doesn't say anything. They stand like that for a few minutes, not speaking, the cool wind biting at his face, and the silence stretches long between them, into deeply uncomfortable territory.
It's her silence, her refusal to fight him on this, that does him in, finally. It needed to be said, yes - maybe - but for a few moments, he can only look anywhere but at her.
They're parked next to a church, he notices as he tries to avoid her gaze. Brown brick, high steeple. Something old-fashioned, but not Gothic. Good, hardy American Catholic.
He catches a glimpse of the name of the church on the notice board: Our Lady of Victory.
That sounds familiar, somehow. He tries to tease out this connection. Does Abby go to church? Something about Sister ... Rosita? Something Spanish. He regrets not ever listening to her. No, that's not quite right. It's not Abby that this place reminds him of.
He tries to run through the list of people he knows. McGeek's agnostic, so that's not it. Gibbs? I don't think that man's ever stepped foot in a church, except maybe to get married. He sneaks a glance at Ziva, looks at the glittering Star of David hanging from her neck. Jewish. That would be no.
And then he remembers: Kate. Kate is - had been, he reminds himself, and the constant correction is starting, slowly, to wear him down - Catholic. It was her church.
Our Lady of Victory. He stares at the name again, at the sign of the cross, sharp and pointed. There was no way, he reflected, Kate would have gone to an "Our Lady of Peace." Kate liked the struggle, liked to fight, liked to win, liked her victory.
Ziva's voice broke through the fog of his distraction. "Tony? Is something wrong?" He can hear the restraint in her voice, can sense her trying to hold back her irritation. He's grateful for it, at the moment.
"Gimme just a minute. Just a minute." He doesn't say anything more, just lets her follow him up to and inside the church's door.
The interior of the church is dimly lit, mostly empty, and it smells musty. Like dust, and old wood, damp and earthy. The smell is a familiar one. He wonders, briefly, if all churches really do smell the same, even between frightened a nine-year-old boy receiving his first communion and thirty-two-year-old Special Agents digging up memories of his dead friend. Coworkers. Whatever.
What was he looking for, here, he wondered.
He feels Ziva's hand light on his arm, and she points to one side of the room. "Your friend. Yes?" Her voice is soft, barely louder than a whisper, but it carries in the solemn silence. Tony glances at Ziva, and can see: she understands.
There's a picture of Kate sitting on a table, surrounded by flickering votive candles and little mementos. The picture is from maybe a year or two ago, because she has her NCIS cap on, and she is smiling radiantly out at him.
A memorial. For Kate. He almost can't make his mind wrap around the idea.
Slowly his feet carry him, unwilling but curious, to the memorial table.
A ragged-looking teddy bear. It doesn't fit with what he knew about her - he can't associate her with a teddy bear in any capacity whatsoever - but it does tell him something. Something about what he doesn't know. What he didn't know. What, now, he'll never know about her life.
It's funny, he thinks, even though it's not really funny at all, all the things you think you know about someone, and still there's all this stuff you don't know, all these different little lives you don't realize they're living. His hand drifts toward the photo.
His eyes are drawn to a piece of blue-lined notebook paper, folded and standing upright like a Christmas card on a fireplace mantle. It has "Kate" written on the front, in a child's blocky letters, and his fingers graze it gently.
"Did you know Miss Todd?"
The querulous voice comes from beside him, from a man hunched over with the weight of his many years. What's left of his hair is white and wispy, his face is covered in wrinkles, and Tony can see his pink gums and the gaps in his teeth when he smiles openly.
He almost says no, but then - why would he be here, if he didn't? "Yeah," Tony says roughly. "I knew her." Except he didn't, he thinks numbly, not in any tangible sense. His chest feels tight and constricted.
The man is nodding, just keeps nodding at every word that Tony says. "A wonderful woman. Very dedicated to her work. But she always had time for the church. The children loved her. But I'm sure you already knew that." He speaks slowly, ponderously, partly in fragments, as though he has to think deeply about the shape of every word, every sentence.
"Yes, Father," Tony says, and the automatic response surprises him. It's the only thing he can think of saying - but still, it seems, old habits die hard.
The old man pats him on the arm gently, smiling his gummy smile, and ambles away. Tony watches him for a moment, then turns back to the table.
He picks up one of the unlit candles, pauses for a moment, and then lights it with one of the thick, tall ones. He sets it down. Wonders if he should say something, or pray something. He doesn't know what he should say.
Churches just seem to give off this aura of darkness and guilt. The very air seems thick with it, palpable and heavy. It rests on you, seeps under your skin, until you're carrying it around with you everywhere you go. Maybe that's just Tony's past speaking, or Kate's death, or something else, but as he's standing in front of her photograph, he can't help but think of everything he did wrong. Every way he failed her as a partner. How maybe it should have been him getting shot.
And it doesn't let him leave.
Tony sits down in one of the pews in the back. He can feel the hardness of the bench under him, biting into the backs of his thighs, and the edge of the pew's back is sharp against his spine. Even sitting in a goddamn pew is like doing penance. It makes him feel like a child, like he did when his parents made him go to church.
He's never really been a religious man. And maybe it's just the fact that he's here, in a church, dredging up memories and sensations better left buried, but he can't help but wonder: Where is she now? The question affects him, more now than he can ever remember. He thinks about purgatory, a world gray and unformed, a middle place with no resolution, and it frightens him.
Tony feels Ziva's hand come down on his shoulder silently, feels her hand squeeze and her nails dig into his collarbone, sharp and sudden, bringing him back to the ground. He rocks with the pressure of the gesture, lets, briefly, his tight clench of his body go.
He begins, for the first time, to resent her a little less.
He can feel it in the gesture: that she knows, too.
They wait together in the silence, for a voice that doesn't speak.