Cairo - Tony's perspective
Never told anyone this, but the one visual I have of Tony searching for Ziva in Cairo is him trying to run in the middle of a desert storm and his feet failing to cross the sinking sand.
I always had the conviction that, from his perspective, it would be such a lost search. He found her once, then he did it again, and now the same person who hid such a tremendously big thing from him is doing whatever she wants somewhere he can't figure out. I still hate the plot device they used of "oh no, they had a child. oh no, she isn't dead" but that opens such a canonical traumatizing door for their characters.
I think that's why I wanted to write about it so much (for real, might do a third interpretation of Cairo somewhere in the future), because he must be so traumatized. He just found out he is a father, then that his partner is dead, and then that she isn't. That she lied 1) about their child, 2) about her current state, and 3) doesn't want his help. And I think maybe that's the one thing that makes him furious.
People (my past self included) wanted to believe that he would be all "oh my love, my sweetheart" as soon as he saw her, but I like to think it's even better if he was so hurt he couldn't put all of that information together. Just seeing Ziva and Tali together makes him flinch, because he wasn't able to fully absorb reality until it hit him like that. And maybe he would be relieved for a millisecond that Ziva was alive, but then be inundated with betrayal, because that was the one and true betrayal from her.
The fact that she doesn't want him involved (she only told him about their child because she needed to), nor wants him there, and that he can't really understand at first, but maybe it dawns on him that she is just wrong. The martyr complex from her doesn't work in this instance, and that's why I want to write this big, big, big fight between them, because she won't want his help, and now he can't make himself lose it for the third time. Even if she was so wrong, Tony wanted this life so badly that he would force her to see his perspective this time, and still, they wouldn't see eye to eye.
Sinking sand because he won't be able to bring her back at the end, and that is so FASCINATING to me personally. As if Ziva will stay as a martyr and he will take Tali back because now he has accepted that maybe she is too lost to see it clearly, but now she has a bigger reason to return to him that doesn't involve HIM, but their child. Because he thinks he isn't enough or important to her at this point in their timeline, that's why it's a lost search. Even if he does find her, he knows already it will be difficult to convince her of any other possibility. So, furious. He's so hurt he was robbed of the possibility of interfering, and now he knows it's impossible because she's Ziva in her most, most, much more than 11x02 hyperaware state. Tali, unfortunately, was just collateral. But somehow, he begins to see her as the solution.
