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She came back to herself slowly. First, simply an urge to get off the street that drove her into abandoned houses and decaying barns. Then a memory of planning and necessity that kept her moving on before Paranormal Services could come in and clean it out of her and those like her.
Ziva.
Her name had gotten lost in the blood for a moment.
(A moment? A day? A week? What was the date? How long had it been?)
She scribbled her name on a piece of paper and stuck it into her arm where she'd once kept a knife.
Blood, no matter how much of it there had been, faded in potency in time. She could think now. She could want more than the blood of passing vermin.
There was a different kind of warmth she craved even more than blood now, but it was not safe.
(Ziva David, fallen so far. Where's your precious self-control now?)
(Here, she answered and spent the day mingling at a shopping center.)
Safe, then, in terms of physical danger, but there were other risks to consider.
They did still want her to come home, did they not?
(When you're ready, you come home. No matter what happens or what you do, come home.)
Pay phones were not as common as they once were, and she had no change for one in any case. Instead, she assumed her youngest form and managed, by putting on wide eyes and trembling lips, to convince a store clerk to allow her to borrow the clerk's cell.
The cellphone was picked up on the second ring.
"Gibbs?" she asked hesitantly.
"Ziva."
He sounded as if he would have said more, but she hurried on before he could. "I cannot go back to being an agent. It would be . . . too risky. But I am better now. Much better. Is it - " She swallowed, an unnecessary gesture Mossad had tried to train out of her. "Is it too late to come home?"
There was a moment of silence where something in her tensed, prepared for rejection, but then Gibbs' voice was back, rough and filled with more warmth than any amount of blood. "It's never too late. Where are you?"
That he would come get her sent a pleasant warmth rushing through her, but she glanced at the clock and shook her head, even though he couldn't see her. "You are working, yes? I can make my own way back to the house."
"Where. Are. You?" Gibbs growled. She could hear him moving on the other end of the line.
She told him.
"I'll be there in ten minutes," he promised.
She expected him to hang up then, but instead there was another pause, a brief scuffle, and then Tony's voice came back on the line. "Ziva!" he crowed. "Tell McGrabby here to stop trying to snatch the phone away, it's not nice."
He startled a laugh out of her. "I have missed you, Tony. All of you."
It was an admission of weakness, but for once, that did not seem so bad.