AN: Written for the fourth round of session 5 of the NCIS Last Fiction Writer Standing competition on LiveJournal. Prompt was deceit — one team member deceives another, whether for innocuous reasons (surprise party) or more serious ones. There is a pairing mentioned in here, but I deliberately left it vague who Abby had been seeing. At some point I plan to write the story that leads up to this, but I have a couple of other projects ahead of it in the queue.

Unshared Secrets

Set in the nebulous future

Ziva walked into the lab to find Abby hard at work, her usual music muted.

"Abby." She waited for the scientist to respond.

"Hi, Ziva." She looked over her shoulder, then returned to her work. Even her horsetails seemed to droop.

Ziva walked over and put a hand on Abby's shoulder, reaching up. "Abby, I am sorry." She searched for the right words. "I did not realize."

Abby shook her head. "I didn't tell anybody," she said. "I didn't even tell him." She pulled away. "I didn't know how, and I just couldn't. And then it happened and I didn't have a choice — you all knew — and he didn't need me to tell him it was his and now everything's backways and sidewards and completely hinky." She frowned. "And I didn't want it, but now that it's over, I just... I wish I could go back to last month and do everything I did wrong over and see if it comes out right this time."

Ziva hesitated. She did not want to reveal her secret. She wanted it to stay where it belonged, in her past. It died in the Somali desert, along with the part of her she did not want. But she understood, only too well, what Abby was dealing with. She had to find some way to help her friend, without revealing when she did not wish the others to know.

"Abby, it is all right to grieve," she said, her voice soft. "Just because you were not happy about the situation, does not mean you might not feel sadness because it has ended." She searched for the words. "I cannot know how you feel. My experience is too different. My situation, it is different. But I do not think you can expect that you will feel a certain way." She was not being entirely honest. She could not afford to be, could not let everyone know. Ziva knew she had to pick the pieces of truth she could tell and wrap them in enough other words to keep up her facade. It was the only way. "Sometimes, we find ourselves in a situation where we do not wish to be, and we are not willing, or perhaps not able, to confide in others."

Abby nodded, her wide green eyes shining with unshed tears. "When I found out, I couldn't figure out how to tell him. It wasn't something we'd planned or talked about. I knew he'd want to do the right thing, I knew how he'd define the right thing and I didn't want that to be how we got to that point." She started pacing. "I knew I was going to have to tell him soon, before the rest of you guys all figured it out, but I kept putting it off. I mean, how do you tell your friend with benefits that you've got an unexpected 'benefit'?" She wrapped her arms around herself as she walked back across the lab. "Assuming you don't do what I did and have Ducky tell him because you guys were all there when I lost the baby. The whole doubling over in cramps thing and bleeding in the middle of trying to figure out what killed the petty officer was kind of a clue." She sighed, and Ziva stepped closer, wrapping an arm around her friend.

"Abby, you did what you thought was right," she said. "He might not understand. None of the others might understand what it is like to realize you have a life inside of you, one you were not expecting, one you perhaps did not want." She thought back through the years. "They are men, yes? No matter how they try, there are some things they cannot understand. Gibbs, maybe, is closer than the others because he was there with Shannon for Kelly."

"Did you get a wisdom transplant from Ducky?" Abby asked. "Usually he's the one I have these discussions with."

Ziva pulled back and put her hands on Abby's shoulders. She looked up at her friend. "I have learned many things in my life. Growing up, I dealt with many things other children did not. It was the same in Mossad. I watch McGee and Sarah sometimes, and I wonder if Ari and I might have had a relationship like that if we had grown up in a different family, in a different country." She inched closer to the forbidden topic and picked her words as she once had picked her steps through a mined field. "I do not know what it is like to lose a baby you want. I do not know if I will ever know that." She hesitated. "You can know something would not have worked, know the timing would be better in a month or a year, and still regret that it did not take place." She rubbed her hands along Abby's arms before removing them. "You can not want to talk about it, and still lean on your friends for their support. We are here. It is what family does."

Abby nodded and pulled Ziva into another hug. "Thanks, Ziva." She released Ziva and turned back to her computer, typing away. Her horsetails were — what was the word — poky? No, perky — again. "I know you don't like talking about your Mossad days and everything, so I really appreciate that you're OK talking to me about it."

Ziva nodded and excused herself. Once in the elevator, she closed her eyes. Abby would not feel the same if she ever found out the secret Ziva was keeping. If she had ever thought she might be able to tell somebody, she knew now she could not. It had died in the Somali desert four years ago, and it would stay there.

AN: Ziva's secret here is one I stole from the backstory I've imagined for her in my Breathe series, and the next story in that series, probably coming in the fall, will explore that and really tackle what happened in Somalia.