Title: The Bittersweet Taste of Hope
Pairing: slight McGee/Ziva
Rating: K
Genre: Gen
Cat: Angst
Spoilers: References to season 10 and 11, so as long as you know the basics there, you're good.
Warnings: None.
Summary: He didn't think he'd ever forget her, but he wasn't sure he wanted to, either.
Author's Note: Written for OxymoronicAlliteration for the Nepal auction on NFA. She requested something about how McGee handled Ziva leaving. (And this has been finished for awhile & I'm just lazy. SORRY. LOL.)

She was never the same after her father died. After he was killed, really. And didn't that just describe her life - everything she knew uprooted by violence, everything taken from her as soon as she'd grown to love it.

He thought maybe that's why she chose to leave the U.S., chose to leave NCIS.

Chose to leave him.

He never told anybody, but she'd come to him the night before she left. She had wanted to tell someone, and she knew she couldn't go to Tony or Gibbs, Tony especially, because he would beg her to stay, and she wasn't sure she could say no.

But he would let her go. It would break his heart to lose her, but he wouldn't keep her from doing what she felt was the right thing.

She had shown up at his apartment and he knew immediately.

("You're leaving."

"I have to. You understand?"

"No, not really. But if that's what you feel you have to do. . ."

"I do. I'll miss you."

"Yeah. But you might come back someday?"

"Maybe.")

They both knew she would probably never return, but neither of them bothered to say it. She kissed him then, just a feather-light touch of her lips to his, and he had a fleeting thought of everything that could have been, had things been different.

Her lip balm tasted like peaches.

And then Tony followed her to Israel, tried to talk her into coming back, just as they both knew he would, and he pretended it didn't bother him, but he couldn't deny it when he talked to himself. He was happy with his life, but then he'd think about her and feel just the slightest bit of indignation - at Tony, for being so handsome and charming, at her, for falling for it despite her best intentions not to, even at himself, for not being all the things he thought he needed to be in order to be good enough for her.

But then, he didn't think anyone was good enough for her.

He thought of her from time to time, after she left, whenever he saw something that reminded him of her, or of the two of them together. All the things he felt were them - Scrabble tiles, apples, lilacs. Just small memories, but enough to make him smile, make his heart ache just a bit, and then someone would say something to him and the memory would float away, just like her presence from his life.

And now, nearly two years later, he still can't eat peaches without thinking of her.

THE END