A/N: I'm still here. How 'bout that?

For anyone curious about the Abdul-Qadir Al-Gailani mosque mentioned in this story, I regret to admit that good photographs are very hard to find online. But if you're just interested enough, you can go to google videos and search "IRAQ: The Cradle of Civilization," and click on the first result, then skip to minute 37:50 of the video, which offers you a beautiful if not brief view of the gold-encrusted walls and ceiling. I like this video in particular because the glittery effect is only really achieved when you have a moving medium like film.

This story is for/on behalf of Anonymous033, who has been kind and patient and generously offered to teach me to read Mandarin.

EDIT: Fixed one small mistake, but thankfully I don't think anybody noticed it. Also, to those wondering, "Rimal" is the phonetic spelling of the Arabic word for "sands."

Becoming

She has never been soft, she has never been weak; nor has she ever been cold.

But in the mess and the planning and chaos of things, whoever she was, whoever she was born to be, is left buried in the dunes of the desert, somewhere; and there is nothing but sand in her veins.

She is five years old the day she meets her first American, and she is plainly disappointed that the man bears no resemblance at all to a Western cowboy.

He is stiff and unremarkable; as tamed in his cement-grey blazer as any other suit she's ever known, and when her father claps her on the shoulder and introduces them, she cannot hide her disapproval. The man is short and almost portly; like a dollop of oatmeal all wrapped up in hoary canvas, his hands and head oozing out from the seams of his suit.

Bluntly warped by what she assumes to be a lifetime of dull and disappointing meetings just as this, the man hands her a piece of licorice wrapped in tin foil and smiles. Her father nudges her and she takes it, of course.

But she is scowling the day she meets her first American.

She isn't prepared for the challenge – emotionally, physically, practically – the first time he guides her out into the trees and leaves her there, but she is easily prepared to deny it. She marches through the woods with her chin held high and her hands balled into little fists at her sides, daring the trees not to let her pass; bending the rocks to her will. She is sharp and unyielding. She is as brave as she is proud. Three hours in and she finds herself circling and circling and never quite finding her way, her ill-chosen sneakers scuffed and torn from the uneven earth she refuses to leave uncharted.

She isn't prepared for the challenge because she is not a soldier, then; but she's young and her lessons have yet to be learned – and that is what fathers are for.

The smoke is still heavy in the air when she marches in, tendrils of dust swirling around her ankles like wide, shapeless serpents. There is no light beneath the dome. Her vision is confined by shadows, dark corners and silhouettes, but for a slowly pulsing glow; reflections of the flames which lap the gutters in the street behind her. Stiffly, she surveys what she can and inches, unafraid, from this room to the next. Her gun a constant fixture of her body: the spare limb branching out from her wrist, and she can no longer tell where her arm ends and the gun begins.

Rapid-fire gunshots echo from the streets outside, sending tremors through the walls. She dares not call out. She suspects now that she is alone, the mosque is empty. She needs to know. She is not afraid, has never been afraid of this, has carried this warzone trauma on her shoulders for so long that the shock of the chaos is normality, and knows she would be frankly troubled by its absence. She is drawn to the chaos like a moth to the flame. She is a weapon; her usefulness is lost outside the war-zone.

Inside the mosque, it's quiet, and she's anxious to return to the battle going on outside.

The floor is suddenly troubled by a far-off explosion and she starts, her balance thrown off an inch or two; as she steadies herself she sweeps her gaze across the walls and catches sight of something gleaming there. It takes a moment of quiet gazing for her to realize what it is –where she is, she knows this place– and, as if entranced, she moves curiously through the threshold on her left, trudging through the dust-laden darkness to a room nearer to the street where she's certain the light will be better and she can see–

Somewhere in the back she finds a heap of timber gently burning, its flames mutely lapping in the darkness as if spellbound by its isolation. She follows its light until the fire is just in front of her and she can feel its warmth against her shins. But it is not the fire which draws her in or holds her attention; the walls are glittering with gold. In the dim light she can see it now, the lavish walls gleaming and sparkling as if carved into a block of sheer pyrite, cold and hard and glowing. She tightens her grip around her gun because that will always be her first priority, but for a moment she can feel the wonder of that place, the splendor; feels transported back in time to see the treasures of the pharaohs in golds and brilliant blues; the wearied burden of their slaves. She feels suddenly unwelcome and unclean with her gun and the sweat of her brow.

From the corner comes a quiet sighing; she turns to see a little girl huddled there, softly praying in the firelight.

In the Abdul-Qadir Al-Gailani mosque on one violent night in Baghdad, she feels herself displaced, briefly; removed for the first time in her life, like waking from a vivid dream of guns and fire and glory to find oneself stumbling in the dark, mortal and unclaimed, and in the chaos, she is crawling, clawing, and…

She pulls herself across the dunes and her arm has been split open, and the dragging and shuffle make it burn. She pauses for a moment, leaning back against a sun-scorched rock to catch her breath. The sweat and the sand have made a gummy mess along her forehead and she feels her hair adhering to the skin along her face, sticking to her cheeks and to her jaw line;, tastes the brine of sweat and blood and sand between her lips.

Far away, she hears the gunfire. It hardly matters.

A yard away, Asif is struggling to light a cigarette, his fingers slick and clammy. She can see that the paper is damp, stained, and grimy, crushed between his fingertips, and it surprises neither of them that he's still attempting to get it lit, that he hasn't given up.

"You should put a tourniquet on that," he comments, never looking up from the lighter in his hands.

"It will slow us down."

"So will bleeding out."

"If I tie it, it will go numb. I won't be able to fire my weapon. It will only slow us down." Ziva bites her lip just briefly, feeling ashamed by how long it's taking for her to catch her breath. Sighing, she narrows her eyes at him and says, "Smoking that will slow us down, too."

He grins; his attempts to light the cigarette proving futile, he settles for simply sucking on damp paper. "Alright, rimal. You are welcome to bleed to death, I will not stop you."

"I won't bleed to death. It's a shallow wound."

He waves his hand as if to dismiss it, and she is moving, pulling back until…

Her shoulders hit the wall and the coolness of the metal makes her skin break out in goosebumps; one palm is flush against the hatch, the other grasping excitedly somewhere behind his neck, and she has never been soft and she has never been weak, and even here she thinks of mortar shells and tactics, and he smells so much like gunsmoke that for a moment, in a flash as they move and bear the ecstasy of their mutual mortality, she wonders if there ever was a difference between battlefield and bedroom; she is the soldier and the vanquisher, master of her arsenal, and she is briefly thrown off guard by a sudden, peaking fear that if all of her world is weaponry, and then…

…then, there's this.

She is the scorpion, the spear; she is danger and beauty in a single breath, and she knows how to handle her guns and she knows how to handle her men.

She is twenty-six years old the day she meets her first real cowboy. Three days later, she saves his life.

And when she pulls the trigger, for the first time in a long time, she feels her own body lurching as the bullet runs her brother through.

She is the scorpion, the spear; she is the sand incarnate, yielding to the will of the wind at her back; ever shifting, ever scathing, cursing the breeze that brought her here and reaching, ever out, into a vast and shapeless destiny, and she finds herself reaching for the edges of the world, when…

There is nothing but the desert and the heat and the drumming, rush of the summer rains. Needle to vein, boot to bone, rope to wrist – none of it matters because this is the kill switch, the ultimate default setting: revert to nothing, wipe the mind, prepare to die. She will never give him the truth.

"What is your name?" Saleem asks, and her lips are dry and cracking when she rasps, "I am rimal."

It isn't the answer he's looking for, but it's not quite the lie she intended to tell.

She sees gold in the ceiling of her cell. She can feel that old metal wall at her back. Nothing is real and there is nothing which matters to her, anymore.

But she has never been soft, she has never been weak. And the pain and the time do not act upon her; she acts resolutely on them.

She doesn't know how and she doesn't know when, but at some point, in the darkness and the ceaseless heat of that summer, she looks up and out into the shadows; and it is many years and a lot of grief later, but she finds herself buried there, waiting and waiting, and as she thinks of who she has become and the bittersweet knowledge that she is still going to die in the desert out there…

And he's grinning stupidly, bound to his seat across from her; and whatever happened to handling her men?

She can't smell the guns or the bombs or the hard, sun-scorched streets, anymore, and it's a childish kind of pride she feels at holding that flag in her hands.

And there is always that sand coursing deep in her blood, for she has never been soft; she has never been weak. And she can remember all of those meaningful moments – those glimpses, little glances - that lead to her becoming exactly who she is.

A/N: There's a clutch of researchers up in Copenhagen who have substantiated claims that fanfiction reviews act as effective nutrition on which ghosts and otherworldly critters can communicate with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, their research is limited because not very many people leave reviews, and there are lots of ghouls in need of subsistence. So what do you say? Help a ghoul out and drop a review.

Edit: "Ghosts aren't scary," assured one of the researchers on Saturday during a make-believe press conference. "They're actually adorable, like floaty baby koala bears. And when people stop reviewing, those floaty baby koala bears just curl up in a corner and cry."