Sleep and Dreams

This chapter is a tag for Power Down 7x08, exploring the effects of two nights of sleep deprivation on Ziva. There are some references to sex and rape in this chapter, but I think they're pretty PG-13. Let me know if you think this needs a higher rating.

His lips on hers are the stuff dreams are made of, teasing and aggressive and hungry. Her nerves are alight with sensation: his hand on her breast, the smooth back of his knee against her heel as he presses her down into the bed and she holds him there.

Ziva's not sure anything has ever felt so good as this moment in his arms as he thrusts into her. Neither of them has any patience and he's using his fingertips to push her over the edge, stopping just before she comes, teasing her.

She moans, her voice rising, inarticulate, the pleasure so close to overwhelming.

"Ziva," he gasps into her neck and she cries out.

*

Her hips arch up from the mattress into empty space, her eyes opening in panic as her body demands ecstasy. It takes half a second before she can make sense of her arousal, his absence, the racing of her heart. Ziva closes her eyes again with a sigh, frustrated. She reaches down and finds quick release.

Laying still as she relaxes again, Ziva laughs softly to herself, a manic laugh, at the irony. "Out of everyone in the world," she murmurs to Tony's specter, "it had to be you."

It seems at once logical and impossible. On the one hand, the hero rescues the princess and is supposed to get to kiss her awake. That's just how it goes. On the other...he is her partner, he killed her lover, he has body hair in places she'd rather he didn't.

Closing her eyes again brings Ziva too close to the other dreams.

In all these months, while she was held and now since her return, she has never dreamt of Tony. Until tonight. Just remembering it makes her heart begin to race again; she can feel her skin warm. Desire is like an epiphany. She thought she would never want anyone again. Could never.

She rolls over on her side, confused. No nightmares at least. As she lets sleepiness wash over her again, Ziva's lips curve in genuine mirth. It's a very good thing she didn't have this dream next to McGee. She begins to giggle. For nine long hours, she sat panicked in the elevator. Well, the first hour they screamed for help and the last two they talked to the maintenance staff, but the other six while McGee tried to sleep were torturous.

She couldn't tell him about them, which meant she couldn't sleep. Them, the nightmares, the ones she has every night: cigarette butts against her skin, a rod beating down on her back, new and creative tortures Saleem has invented for the occasion. Or else the ones about his men, two pining her to the ground, or holding her still for another could tie to up, their hands and mouths, the stinking weight of their bodies as they defile her.

She spent hours forcing herself awake, growing slowly more claustrophobic, more irritable, more frightened that she would drift off and wake screaming in front of her friend.

But at last they were freed, even if the next night Abby kept them up again, working. She'd prayed to a God she's not sure she believes in for good sleep tonight, and as Ziva falls asleep again, still smiling, she wonders if the stretch of sleeplessness has freed her from something, if perhaps she can finally close her eyes without fear. It seems too much to hope for, but perhaps it is not Saleem but Tony waiting in her dreams tonight.