Another piece of the multi chapter fic. Just Tiva talking about their lives (something we did not get enough of in the show). Enjoy!
Note: there’s a Hebrew phrase in here that didn’t translate very well. Basically: if you’re a native Hebrew speaker, I’m terribly sorry for botching your beautiful language.
“Anything else interesting in those boxes?”
She looked over at a particularly large box he now noticed was sitting on top of the piano, and caught her lower lip between her teeth. She seemed to be mulling over something big as she chewed lightly on her lower lip.
Finally she looked back over at him, a slight smirk drawing the corners of her mouth up.
“Can I show you something?”
His eyebrows went up at her tone, seemingly mocking the way he had asked her the same question more than a year ago, sitting in the break room with a stack of pictures in his hands.
“Yes,” he responded. She motioned for him to sit on the couch and he did, watching her as she got up and crossed the room, reaching into the mysterious box.
She pulled something out of it and held it low in front of her so he couldn’t see. She fingered it in her hand for a moment before pivoting around and walking over to him. She held the object in front of him so he could grab it as she sat down beside him, halfway on his lap, and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.
He slipped an arm around her waist as he looked at the small photograph in his hand.
There were two people in it. One a small girl, all smiles and unruly curls as the other one, a young woman with dark features as thick rimmed glasses, held the child over her head, circle of life style.
He squinted at the little girl, “Is that you?”
She nodded, her eyes trained on his face as he kept staring at the photo.
“And that’s your mom,” he stated it rather than asked, but she nodded anyway.
A small smile spread across his face as he looked at the tiny Ziva, so clearly content to be held by her mother and so obviously full of that spunk he knew so well. His eye drifted back up to her Mom.
“She looks just like you.”
“I believe it is me who looks like her, yes?”
He shrugged, “Either way.”
She turned her head to look at the picture with him, lowering it to rest right in the crook of his neck as they both stayed silent for a long time.
“Do you think she would have liked me?” He barely whispered the question, hesitant to break the comfortable silence they had been in.
Ziva laughed lightly, “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“Rivka David would have hated you,” she said it with such amusement in her voice that he couldn’t bring himself to be offended, “At least at first.”
“Really?”
Ziva sat up a big and puffed out her chest in what he assumed was a dramatic impression of her mother’s voice, “Req at hetveb beyvetr 'ebevr Ziva shely. Ayesh nhemd. Adem yhevdey.”
He looked at her expectantly, waiting for the English translation.
“Only the best for my Ziva. A nice man. A Jewish man.”
He chuckled, “So she wouldn’t approve?”
“Not at all. She would probably call you an Italian American cowboy and try to kick you out of the house.”
“But you said she might come around?”
“Oh, I know she would come around… eventually. Once she saw the way you looked at me or how happy you make me. But it would take some time.”
He nodded, his thoughts drifting off to fantasies about bringing flowers to the door as he stood nervously, his hand locked with Ziva’s as he awaited a final verdict as to whether or not they had her mother’s approval.
“Well, my mom would have adored you,” he mumbled into her hair as she rested her head on his shoulder again.
“You think so?”
“I know so. She would have probably cornered me right after meeting you and asked just who I thought I was making deals with the devil because there is no way I could score a woman like you without some divine intervention.”
She lifted her head and pressed her lips to his cheek as she ran a hand through his hair. Then she leaned her head against his as the comfortable silence returned.
Once again, he was the one to break it.
“You know, you accused me other never talking about my mother, but I’m pretty sure you have avoided talking about yours even more than I have. You’ve never even told me how she died.”
Ziva seemed surprised, “Really? I thought I would have mentioned it. Well, I guess my mother’s death was the least traumatic out of all the deaths in my family, so I don’t find myself in too many positions where I have to talk about it.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged, “She got sick.”
“Cancer?”
“Not exactly. She was told she had a brain tumor shortly after she gave birth to Tali. They said it was benign, but inoperable. They monitored it for years, but it didn’t seem to be growing or causing any problems. She eventually got tired of all the hospital visits and scans, so she stopped going. A year or so later she died in her sleep. They said the tumor wrapped itself around her brain stem and cut off the oxygen supply. They told us she died quickly and without pain.”
“How old were you?”
“I believe I was 12 or so. Tali would have been 6 or 7. We went to bed one night with a mom, and woke up without one. It seemed like the end of the world at the time, but I am just thankful that she went peacefully.”
He nodded.
“You haven’t really told me how your mother died either.”
“Yes I did. She had cancer.”
“Yes but you have always left it at that.”
He shrugged, “There really isn’t much more to tell. She was in the hospital a lot while I was growing up. She went through a lot of treatments. In the end, she underwent an experimental surgery that they thought had been successful. It seemed like she was getting stronger. But they messed something up, and she died a few days later.”
“Were you there?”
“I was the only one there. Dad had run out to get us all dinner. Mom hated the hospital food, so she convinced him to buy us all hamburgers. We were just watching a movie, waiting for him to get back, when all her monitors started going off. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even yell for a nurse, I just watched her breathing slow until someone came running in. She was long gone before my dad got back with the food, and I felt like I had let him down somehow. Like it was my fault. He sent me off to my first boarding school not too long after it happened, and I think that really solidified it in my mind that he blamed me. I realized years later that wasn’t the case, but the damage had been done.”
“How old were you?”
“8.”
“Wow. So young.”
He nodded, “It wasn’t fair.”
“It never is.”
He looked up at the emotional hitch in her voice. She had tears brimming in her eyes as she carefully took the photo out of his hand.
