A/N: I wrote this back when Swan Song first aired, but was so caught up in My Probie's Keeper, that I didn't post it. It languished on my hard drive, forgotten, until I stumbled across it last night and decided it's worth the (very delayed) post. I only fixed the grammar in my final edit, so this is a truly snapshot of my thoughts from four years ago. I hope there is someone out there who will enjoy this.

Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS.

Ziva David had always been a woman in complete control. She walked with her shoulders back and her head up, looking directly into the eyes of everyone she passed; she rocked out to her Israeli rap and drove her car as fast as possible. In short, she did what she pleased and no one, not ever her father, was capable of reigning in this untamed vigor. She kept her real feelings locked deep inside her, in a place no one could access, only allowing people to see her carefully constructed mask.

But lately that had changed: no longer was she that carefree soul that had marched into NCIS five years ago. That Ziva had been replaced with a world-weary shell who had experienced more than her fair share of tragedy to continue pretending that she hadn't. Now, she went through the day, visited crime scenes and wrote reports in a more subdued than before, her head bowed slightly, her shoulders hunched with the weight of the world. She no longer sought to be included in the pranks between Tony and McGee; instead she sat passively behind her desk while Tony mercilessly ridiculed McGee about the blow-up doll he had received. Once upon a time, she would have sprang from her seat and assisted in needling McGee until the geek's face turned tomato red with embarrassment…but not today. Not for a long while.

Things were different between her and the team since Somalia, since her father returned, and most recently, since Ray. Each time life tossed her a curve ball, she retreated into herself, the one place where she could no longer be hurt by anyone else—the one place where she was truly safe. As time passed, she slowly crept out of her safe haven, trying to regain some semblance of normalcy until she was blindsided again. With each passing occasion, she receded deeper and deeper into herself, reaching out less and less after every incident. Would the day ever come when she didn't come back, when she'd be completely gone from a world where people continued to disappoint and reject her on a daily basis?

And when that day came, would she be truly happy?

Her feelings had manifested themselves that night in Autopsy, staring at Mike Franks' body. Another person who had been kind to her had been smote by a cruel twist of fate. They had never been close, but she had never had any reason to doubt his loyalty to the team: Gibbs trusted him and she trusted Gibbs. Their own bond had been formed around the death of her brother Ari, their uncertainty morphing into mutual appreciation. She had earned her spot on the team and had willingly accepted it, not knowing at the time that her choice would be one of the most important in her life.

After that, things began to change for the better. She discovered there was another side to Anthony DiNozzo, one beyond the mask he wore on a daily basis. She had seen how he acted around Jeanne, how caring he had been, how thoughtful, and how mature. Though they had never acted on their feelings, there had definitely been a spark between the two of them, one they both pretended to ignore, citing Rule 12 as the reason they never acted on their impulses. If Gibbs had not had his rules, would life have been different? Would they have ended up as a couple? It was uncertain and irrelevant since he had been exclusively dating Jeanne and, seeing how truly happy he was, Ziva stopped interfering.

Around the same time, she began to show the world that there was more to her than the blood-thirsty assassin she portrayed. She discarded her cargo pants and expansive headbands for more feminine outfits that accented her curves perfectly. She developed an interest in American pop culture, yes, even the films Tony was so insistent were classics; she read Faulkner and spent her free evenings socializing with the team. She slowly bought into the American dream until the day came when she realized she no longer had to pretend she was a citizen—she was more qualified to be a citizen than some of the natural born residents.

Then the Jenny debacle had happened, sending her life crashing down around her. Everything she thought she knew about NCIS was shattered when Vance sent her, Tony and McGee away. She was once again left alone, all the relationships she had spent time forging were lost in the blink of an eye. Now, in Morocco, she had no one to rely on but herself.

Somehow, Gibbs managed to convince Vance to win her back, so Ziva had returned to Washington, D.C. somewhat hesitantly, not wanting to be cast out like a pile of trash during the next mole hunt. Despite all her experience, she was still the Probie on the team and, if her loyalty was ever questioned, she was sure the new management would rather cut her loose than have to field questions about her true intentions.

But time had passed and it seemed that the team was finally returning to normal: the strained relationship between her and Tony was ever so slowly relaxing—the dialogue between them was no longer clipped and obligatory. She allowed herself to be drawn into Abby's get-togethers and Tony's movie nights, though she held a bit of herself back, knowing that if she was ever drafted by her father, this would all be destroyed, and she wasn't sure she could handle that experience again.

And therein explained why Mossad taught you to never form emotional bonds towards the people with whom you worked. Emotions made you act foolishly. When your responses are dictated by your heart and not your brain, mistakes were made—costly mistakes that usually resulted in casualties. At that point, the intent did not matter, only the carnage.

Slowly though, as her time at NCIS wore on, she found herself growing closer and closer to those she cared about, the threat of her deployment slipping from the forefront of her mind until she found she could go entire days without thinking of what her life would be like without her team.

Then, Michael Rivkin had waltzed into her life and shook her at her very core. She found herself attracted to Rivkin, whether this was because this was strictly forbidden by her father or because she truly loved him, she would never know, for their relationship was brutally cut short when he had tried to kill DiNozzo.

Hearing the news of Rivkin's death had made her want to curl into a ball and weep, but she had long ago conquered those emotions, so she blanked her face and filed her report, not interested in how her partner had fared or what injuries he had sustained in the fight. All she knew was that he did not trust her to make a solid relationship choice and had continued to pry into her business for the purpose of driving a wedge between her and Rivkin, she had assumed. Later, she discovered she could not have been more wrong. Ziva wouldn't understand that Tony had put his career on the line for her until much later. At that time, she wasn't thinking clearly enough to see all he had sacrificed coming alone to confront her. All she could see that night as she pushed her jacket into Michael's bleeding chest was that she had been betrayed: betrayed by her own team, by the people she trusted with her life.

Then her father had offered her the choice, defending the honor of her "family" or going back to America with the people she was supposed to be observing. There was no choice really, not if she wanted to stay in her father's good graces and restore Michael's honor, so she accepted the mission. But there was one thing she needed to know first so she had posed the question to her boss, the man she trusted more than her real father, and made him choose.

In hindsight, she wasn't sure why she had asked: there was no conceivable outcome in which he would choose her over his partner and protégé of six years. The bond she and Gibbs had forged paled in comparison to the deep connection between him and Tony. Their dysfunctional relationship was successful and, for all intents and purposes, unshakable. She had seen the emptiness in Gibbs when he thought Tony had been killed by Kort's car bomb and heard stories of the incredible lengths the Lead Agent had gone to when DiNozzo had been infected with Y. Pestis. Yes, the question was stupid, but it was what her inner child wanted to hear: that she was loved, that she was wanted, that someone cared for her more than life itself.

He kissed her once and turned away, leaving her alone yet again. She had been betrayed by the man she was certain would never hurt her. Her faith in humanity was shattered: she was on her own from now on vowing never to have another personal relationship. If she survived this mission, she would never go back to NCIS, no! She would continue to work on her own where no one could touch her, where no one could hurt her with their empty promises and ambiguous emotions.

When she had been captured by Saleem, she found she didn't care that she hadn't eaten in two days or that she was a mass of bruises. She had nothing to live for, no one to cared about her. Needless to say, she felt more than a little surprised to find Tony sitting across from her in that dusty room, having planned an entire escape, one that ran almost without a hitch. As they left, she felt a glimmer of hope that things might go back to normal but reality intervened, quashing her thought with reminders of her past experiences.

She thought she was too far gone for even her old friends to save her, but slowly they wormed their way back into her confidence, trying to draw out the old Ziva they knew and loved. But that Ziva was gone: she returned from Africa a changed woman. She functioned almost robotically, going from day to day without feeling, attending psych eval after psych eval until they declared her ready to return to duty. All this procedure was purely red tape and was completed without meaning.

She was trying to derive meaning from this orderly process but found herself as barren and hopeless as before. She had lost herself in Somalia and, despite the team's encouragements, was unsure she would ever be able to recover it. She saw the quick glances between them, silently asking if she was ready for this or if she would ever return to her old self, but she chose to ignore them, giving herself time and space to decide what she really needed.

Time passed and she found herself regaining control, all the while keeping a majority of her feelings locked away where no one could access them or use them against her. And then she had met Ray: a true gentlemen in Miami who she had come to adore very quickly. The voice in the back of her head told her that this was a bad idea, that she had been hurt too many times to trust a civilian ever again, and she listened, keeping this new man at a distance. But Ray persisted and she found herself falling for him. He understood her need for privacy—respected it, actually—got to know her and honestly cared about how she was feeling. Being wanted with no strings attached was a new experience for her. Ray—dare she say loved—her for who she was, even with all the baggage she carried, and took the relationship as slow as she was comfortable with, never once going past his temporary boundaries she had erected.

Then she found out that he was a CIA agent working with Agent Barrett on the P2P case. And in that moment, she knew the world would never change: no matter how she acted, what she did right, she would never win. She would never have a cliché relationship seen in one of the sitcoms of which Tony was so fond. No, somehow the world was destined to keep her out, to keep her standing in the snow looking in at the happy families who sat around the dinner table laughing and smiling. How much more would she have to give up before she would receive something good in return? At what point would karma start reciprocating?

Ray had hurt her on a level that no one else could understand, even though they put in great effort. She suspected Ray and Tony had talked since DiNozzo had begun to quietly advocate that relationship, taking a large step back and essentially telling her he approved—not that she needed his approval to date, but it didn't hurt to fall in love with someone who had her team, her pseudo-family's, blessing. By that time, it was too late, for the damage had already been done.

He had never explicitly lied to her, but not telling her the whole truth had been enough. She was tired of the secrets, tired of the half-truths, tired of the white lies. She was a thirty-something woman with an uncertain future who saw younger women happily married to handsome husbands, together raising troupes of adorable, smiling children all around her. She wanted out of the deception business and into a life where she could be herself, where she could put her heart on the line and not have to worry about someone else paying the price.

Mike Franks' death was the last straw. The universe was mocking her, flashing normalcy tantalizingly close before snatching it away, leaving a large void in its place. That was one too many people that she cared about. First, there had been Tali, then Ari…Rivkin…even Ray had taken his turn…and now Franks: all people she had cared about, some she had even loved.

She stood, staring at his cold, pale body, unable to control the tears that threatened to fall. She was in no way obligated toward the beer-guzzling retiree but had come to respect him as a forerunner of the investigative field. He should mean nothing to her, but as she stared at his corpse, knowing there would be no more "Probie's" or laws broken in direct defiance to Vance, she felt saddened and inexplicably emotional. Now, his life was taken from her as well and, with it, the morale of the team. In that one act, Cobb had snatched away the team dynamic she had unknowingly worked so hard to rebuild and she was certain they would never be the same.

Would she ever win? Could she ever draw the lucky card that assured a safe, happy life? Of course not, because those cards—those lives—did not exist in reality.

Despite her best efforts, the tears that had been welling at the cruelty of the situation—the unfairness of it all—were determined to fall. Not wanting to humiliate herself in front of her colleagues, she had quickly left, seeking a private place where she could scold herself for allowing her emotions to be worn so prominently.

Yet, Tony was in the elevator, keeping her engaged in reality, stopping her from disappearing into herself and never coming back, not listening to her hasty words about wanting to quit.

And that meant more to her than anything else he could have given her. He essentially assured her that the universe would have its comeuppance, that revenge would be served—that for once in her life, someone she cared for would not be ripped away without consequences.

She stared into those green eyes and saw the promise within them, knowing that Tony would do whatever it took to find Franks' killer, righting a wrong that had been committed against the team.

To Tony DiNozzo, justice had its perks, but more important than that was letting Ziva know she didn't have to handle this by herself; that she had people who cared about her; that, even when a situation seemed hopeless, she was not alone. She had befriended a group of people who would go the distance to ensure her physical and emotional health and well-being.

Hopefully she would come to realize this before they lost her, this time without the possibility of getting her back.

I wanted to understand why our normally reserved Mossad assassin suddenly broke down so openly at Franks's death in Swan Song. I hope this piece did our favorite Israeli justice.

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts.