#tiva

Thank you to everyone who participated in the polls, whether by voting in all or some of them and answering the question: What is your favorite episode? Now it is time for the final poll! Choose the winner.

Part 1 - Part 2

Thank you to everyone who participated in the polls, whether by voting in all or some of them and answering the question: What is your least favorite episode? Now it is time for the final poll! Choose the winner.

Part 1 - Part 2

“Are you safe?” he asked. “Yes.” But the answer came too quickly. Tony closed his eyes. “Are you lying?” His grip tightened around the phone. “Ziva.” Silence. He listened to her breathing instead, slow enough to tell him she wasn't running, hesitant enough to tell him the answer had not been true. It left him with the same helplessness that haunted every call. He could hear the lie, recognize it instantly, and still there was nothing he could do except pretend not to. They had agreed this was the only way. He knew that. He had repeated it to himself often enough to believe it most days. But on nights like this, when all he had was her voice and the certainty that something was wrong, it became harder to remember why being apart had ever seemed like the smarter choice. “I am alive,” she said at last. “That is all I can tell you.”

Four months. One hundred and thirty-two days, to be precise, since Tony had last seen the inside of a real apartment that wasn’t lit by the sodium flicker of government-issue bulbs, since he’d paced a carpeted floor not designed to be hosed down and chemically scrubbed, since he’d woken next to a warmth that wasn't his own radiating out of a half-empty mattress. He didn’t know if the number felt pathetic or impressive, only that it was true. Four months he’d been stuck on this fucking boat, a reluctant agent afloat, tethered by satellite and obligation and he swears punishment for his sins. At first, he’d tried to be rational. He kept a schedule. He ran laps on the upper deck, counted calories, logged his dreams and delusions in the battered field notebook. He did everything right, on paper. But it didn’t matter. The time stretched and shrank, days melting into weeks and back again, until he could only measure the passage in failures. Four months since he thought he’d never see her again. Four months since he’d promised himself that he’d let her go, really let her go. Four months since he realized that was impossible. He’d tried not to think about her, but that was like trying not to notice when the oxygen runs thin. In the earliest weeks, he’d scroll through the saved voicemails, the texts, pictures he had of her on his phone, like any of it could possibly matter. The harder he tried to let go, the more she became a fixed star at the center of his universe, and the more he hated himself for it.