More Than Family: Chapter 3

A/N: Long chapter, but I promised three chapters, so here it is. I hope you enjoy the new ending for our (at least, my) favorite characters.

December 2026

Leroy Jethro Gibbs, retired NCIS special agent and current private investigator, brought his cup of coffee to his lips, his eyes not leaving the West Vancouver house.

It had been almost ten years, filled with false leads and dead ends, but this time, he was sure he had the right house, the right family. He felt it in his gut.

Two hours after he arrived, an SUV approached and the garage door began rolling open. Gibbs could see that the driver was a middle-aged man, but from that distance, that was about all he could tell. There was no one in the front passenger seats, but he couldn't tell if there was anyone in any of the rear seats. According to the research he had done on this family—and he had done quite a lot—Kaufman and his wife, Sarah, had three kids: twelve-year-old Natalie, with a birth certificate from France, and seven-year-old twins, Alexander and Isabelle. If this was who he was looking for, if it was his former senior field agent, Natalie was really Tali. It was the twins and the wife that gave him the only feelings of doubt that Kaufman might be his man. According to the records he could find, Kaufman had been married once, and on the date of his marriage certificate, DiNozzo had been far away from France, searching for a woman very different than the schoolteacher he was married to.

The lights had already been on in the house and the car wasn't at the best angle to see any movement through the living room window, so Gibbs had no indication of where Kaufman—maybe DiNozzo, maybe just some poor sap Gibbs had been tracking—was in the house, but he figured that he'd give the man ten or fifteen minutes to get settled before he disturbed him. Just enough time to get comfortable, because people who were comfortable made mistakes.

Who was he kidding? If it was DiNozzo, he had successfully kept Gibbs, and everyone else, off his tail for a decade, and even the DiNozzo who worked for him rarely made mistakes big enough to make a difference. A little comfort wouldn't make a difference either way.

After the fifteen minutes were up and the coffee was drained, Gibbs stepped out of the car and walked across the street, for the first time uncertain about how this was going to go. If Kaufman really was Kaufman, he'd offer a quick apology and be on the next flight back to DC. But if Kaufman was DiNozzo… At one point in time, he could have guessed how his senior field agent would have reacted to being caught hiding with an assumed identity. Now, he wasn't sure.

He heard the doorbell echo through the house after he pressed it, followed immediately by a young voice calling out I'll get it! and the sound of footsteps running toward the door. A few seconds later, the door opened to reveal a small boy, dark hair in disarray and dark eyes looking curiously up at him. "Hello, can I help you?" he asked politely, and Gibbs couldn't help but smile.

"Hello," he replied. "Can I talk to Mr. Kaufman?"

The boy stood up straighter, a look akin to pride on his face. "I'm Mr. Kaufman," he said confidently, and this time, Gibbs couldn't help but laugh.

"Is your father home?" he asked.

"Dad!" the boy—Alexander—called back into the house.

"Who is it?" a voice called back, and Gibbs knew that he had finally found the right house, the right family.

"I don't know," Alexander replied. His words were met with a chuckle, which died abruptly when the man rounded a corner and saw who was standing there.

For the first time in over a decade, Gibbs found himself face-to-face with Anthony DiNozzo. There were more wrinkles around the eyes, more gray in the shorter hair, but it was definitely DiNozzo.

"Sarah," DiNozzo said, his eyes not leaving Gibbs, and a few seconds later, any satisfaction Gibbs had from finding DiNozzo was immediately replaced with disbelief.

Ziva David stepped out of the kitchen, a plate of what was obviously part of their dinner in her hands.

"Hello, Gibbs," she said calmly, as if being dead and seeing her former supervisor at the door of her home was something that happened every day. "Come in. It's freezing out there. Alex, show Mr. Gibbs where he can hang his coat. Izzy, please set another place at the table for our guest."

She didn't sound like Ziva—she sounded like a Canadian—but at the same time, she sounded exactly like her.

"How—" Gibbs started, before he cut himself out, not sure how to end that question.

"It's a long story, Gibbs," Ziva—Sarah?—said, sounding amused. "But it's time for dinner. Tali, please light the Shabbat candles."

Gibbs found himself seated at the table between DiNozzo at the head and Alex in the chair next to him, directly across from Tali, who would occasionally look at him with an expression Gibbs knew all too well, one that her mother had often worn when she was trying to figure something out. She didn't say much through dinner, but her younger brother and sister picked up the slack, peppering Gibbs with questions about who he was and how he knew their parents, and he honestly didn't know how he was supposed to answer them.

After dinner, Ziva asked the kids to clear the table and clean the kitchen, and then instructed Tali to make sure Alex and Izzy finished their homework before they got on the TV. "Mom and I are going to be in the basement, talking to Mr. Gibbs," DiNozzo said. "Don't disturb us unless anyone needs to go to the hospital." Tali and Izzy rolled their eyes, obviously having heard that many times; Alex didn't seem to notice.

Not surprisingly, knowing DiNozzo, they had a fully finished basement, with exercise equipment in one corner, a bar in another, and what appeared to be a home theater system on the other side. "Tony still enjoys his movies," Ziva said dryly when she noticed where Gibbs was looking.

"I'm assuming bourbon is still your drink of choice?" DiNozzo asked Gibbs, holding up a bottle from the bar. He began pouring without waiting for a response, and then another for himself and one for Ziva. "How did you find us?" he asked, his voice devoid of any of the levity it had when upstairs with his children. "After all, you were the one who told me that if Ziva David wants to disappear, I'm not going to find her."

"And yet you did," Gibbs said, his eyes going from one former agent to the other. "Twice."

DiNozzo shook his head slightly. "She found me the second time."

Gibbs didn't answer the question; not really, anyway. "Anthony DiNozzo checked into a hotel in Paris with his daughter and paid for two weeks. After three days, he abruptly checked out early. Last sighting of him was an ATM camera when he pulled money out the next day. Day after that, all of his accounts and investments were moved to a Swiss bank account." He swirled the liquor in his class without looking at it. "Senior hired me to find you two months later. He died, four years ago."

DiNozzo nodded. "I know," he said simply.

"So how did you do it?" Gibbs asked. "Or maybe, the better question is, why?"

Unbeknownst to her parents or the mysterious unexpected guest, Tali Kaufman had quietly opened the basement door and just as quietly closed it behind her before taking a seat near the top of the stairs, where she knew from experience she could hear everything discussed at the bar without being seen, and there she sat, at times biting her knuckle to keep from making any noise, as she listened to her parents describe how they had moved money from one account to another, how they had changed identities, her father learning a new language, moving from one place to another quickly throughout Europe before making their way to Quebec and then, finally, the summer Tali turned five, making their final move to Vancouver.

Who were those people? What had they done? Her mother taught Hebrew and French at the Jewish private school, and her father casted extras for the movie and TV studios. They weren't the type of people who even knew how to do what they were talking about, and weren't nearly interesting enough to need to.

"As far as the why, Gibbs, I don't think you need to guess on that one. You met every reason why already," her father said, and then there was a pause. "Tali, well, she's her mother's daughter. She is so strong, and so talented. It might just be proud dad talking, but everything she touches turns to gold. We keep telling her that she needs to cut back on the activities, because between school and ballet and piano and ski team, I don't know how any of us sleep. I don't know how she's going to pick what to do, though, because she's so good at all of them. And then she decided that she's going to have a bat mitzvah, so starting in January, she's going to be in classes at the synagogue for three hours a week."

"Wasn't aware that that was your thing," Gibbs commented, and Tali wondered at that. Their last name was Kaufman; was he surprised that they were Jewish?

"And then there's the twins—"

"I wanted a boy and a girl, back when I was young enough to think that was a good idea," her mother said.

"Then we got Izzy as a bonus," her father said, and Tali smiled at the smile in his voice. "Izzy's definitely mine. She couldn't care less about her schoolwork, no matter how much we threaten or bribe her, but she has yet to met a sport she hasn't excelled at. She plays for a U-10 hockey team, because she's too aggressive for the U-8 team. She plays soccer in the summer and has recently decided that she's going to take years off our lives by taking up mountain biking. And Alex… I don't know where he came from. He's at least ten times smarter than I am and an all-around good kid. I don't think anyone ever described either of us that way." There was another pause from down in the basement before her father continued. "I will do anything for them, Gibbs. I will go to any lengths of the earth."

"I know," Gibbs replied. "They want to see you again. Both of you, if they only knew that was an option. And the kids."

"No." The single syllable, spoken so forcefully from her usually laid-back father, made Tali's eyes widen. "Gibbs, this is my family. I have to put them first. Tali…"

"She's very smart, Gibbs," her mother chimed in when her father's voice trailed off. "She does what her father does and downplays that, but she's observant. Nothing gets by her. She has started to ask questions we don't have the answers to. To meet people her parents should have no way of knowing… It is not a good idea."

"She's met them before."

"She wasn't even two yet!" her father exclaimed. "Let me have my family, Gibbs."

"No." The word was out of Tali's lips before she could stop it, and she heard all three adults below her freeze at the sound.

"Tali?" her father finally asked. He had gotten up from the couch at the bar and was now standing at the bottom of the stairs. His face softened. "Tali, you weren't supposed to be listening."

"But I did," she said, feeling her throat getting thick. "Dad, this isn't just your family. This is my life. Who are you? How do I have memories of places of places I've never been? Why do I sometimes dream in Hebrew, when I was born in France and lived in Montreal and Vancouver? I remember Gibbs!"

"You do?" her father asked, confused.

"Yeah. I mean, I think so." She stopped and looked down at her hands on her lap. "I remember being lost. Not lost lost, just… like I didn't know what was going on. Scared. There were new people around and I didn't know anybody and didn't know what anyone was saying, but people kept looking at me like I was supposed to, and I remember…" She tried to remember what it was. "Calm. It was calm. And smelled like wood." She felt her eyes filling with tears and wiped at them angrily. "How do I know those things? Who am I, Dad? Am I even Canadian?"

"You are American." Her mother appeared next to her father at the bottom of the stairs. "And Israeli. You were born in Israel. Tali, come downstairs." She reluctantly rose from her seat and descended to where her parents stood, and was surprised to see that her mother was crying. Her entire life, she didn't think she had ever seen her mother crying, even when the twins were little and her mother wasn't sleeping at all.

"I was a strong girl, Tali, almost as strong as you, but I wasn't strong enough to keep from getting pulled into my father's world," her mother began, smoothing Tali's ponytailed hair back. For the first time, Tali realized she was almost as tall as her mother, who had always seemed so large to her. "He was Mossad, and so was I. When I went to DC to…on a mission, I met your father and Gibbs and decided to stay and work with them for a little while." She gave a slight smile. "It ended up being several years."

Tali's eyes widened as she looked over at her father. "You were a spy?" she asked, incredulous.

"Me?" he asked with a laugh. "Oh, no. That was all your mother. I was law enforcement."

"You were a cop?" Somehow, that seemed even stranger.

"And a damn fine one," Gibbs said, still sitting in the chair by the bar. "Your mom, too."

"Like, a sheriff or FBI or something?"

"NCIS," her father said.

"Who?" Tali asked, and to her surprise, her father chuckled and wrapped her in a hug.

"Pretty much," he replied lightly.

"Tali," her mother said gently, getting her back on track. "I eventually left Mossad, became an American citizen, but…" She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, her words were coming out faster and with an accent that Tali couldn't place. "I tried to run away from who I was, but I could not. Israeli, American, Mossad, NCIS… It did not matter, I was who I was. I was always surrounded by death, by people killing each other and wanting me dead and I could not escape that. And then my father was killed, and I ran. I ran away, but your father found me, because he knew me better than I knew myself, but I would not let him take me back to DC. I knew that if I went back there, I would always be the same, would always be that girl who became sucked into my father's world." The tears continued to fall from her mother's eyes, but she did nothing to wipe them away, keeping her hands on Tali's face. "Tali, my wonderful Tali, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. You showed me that not everything that comes from me is poison. Seeing you, that was the first time I actually believed that I could be someone other than that girl who got sucked into her father's world. You were so full of joy and light, and I knew I could not let the darkness of my previous life touch you."

"Is that why you guys ran away?"

Her parents looked at each other before her mother shook her head. "Someone attacked the house where we were living. Everyone thought I was killed in the fire, and I used that to my advantage. You went to DC to be with your father."

"That's why there aren't any pictures of us together when you were a baby," her father said. "I didn't know about you until you were almost two, but as soon as I met you, you were all that mattered. I thought I was your everything, Tali, but really, you were my everything. I wanted nothing more than to be with you."

"But if you thought Mom was dead…" Tali's voice trailed off, not knowing where the story was going.

"I took you to Paris," her father said. "And that's where your mother found us. That's when we changed our identities and moved to Canada."

"But if that was a decade ago… Aren't all the people who want you dead gone now? Can't you go back?"

"Go back to what, Tali?" her mother asked. "This is my life—our life. I have been happier in the last ten years than any other time in my life. I have you, and your brother and sister and your father, and that is all that I need. There is nothing in my old life that I need." Her voice became insistent again. "This is the life that I imagined I would have, when I was young enough to imagine such things."

"But what about the life I was supposed to have?" Tali asked, and to her surprise, her mother smiled at that.

"Tali," she said gently. "This is the life you were supposed to have. You were always supposed to be safe, to have ballet lessons and piano lessons and a bat mitzvah and a little brother and sister. I am not so sure if the ski slopes were pre-destined, but you seem to enjoy them."

It hit her all that once: everything that her parents did, the running, the new identities, that was for her, to make sure that she had the things that she had. "So, you guys left your lives for me?" she asked, her voice small.

"No," her father said, and Tali was surprised to discover that he was crying, too. "Tali, we didn't leave our lives. You are our life. You and Alex and Izzy. You were right; this is more than a family, because this is everything. From the first time I saw you, I would have given you the world if I could."

That was about as much as Tali could take, and she threw her arms around her parents as she sobbed. She didn't know if she would continue to have those dreams when she was running through an olive grove with the sun on her face and her mother's laugh behind her, or sipping tea with a grandfatherly-like man who kept spilling it on himself, but she was pretty sure that if she did, that they wouldn't scare her anymore.