A/N: Another brief exploration of the friendship between Tim and Ziva. This is a small tag to two season four episodes, "Skeletons" and "Grace Period." It refers to events that took place in those episodes and in the episode preceding "Skeletons," "Dead Man Walking." It therefore will contain spoilers for those episodes.

"I liked him, he died, and, what else is there to say?"

That's what she'd said to Abby. Earlier, she'd shrugged off McGee's suggestion that she pace herself after she had, according to him, gotten a little emotional when interviewing one of the victims' relatives. Now that their current grisly case seemed to be wrapping up, Gibbs and Lt. Colonel Mann had left, followed shortly by Tony. She glanced up at McGee, working away at his desk. She'd rather stay and do the same, but she was afraid once the squad room had thinned out, McGee might get it in his mind to try and talk to her, and she didn't want to talk about... anything.

"You shouldn't work too late, McGee," she called as she turned off her own computer and grabbed her coat and pack.

He looked up, a lop-sided smile on his lips. "Just finishing up this report so I won't have to think about it when I get home. Don't worry, Ziva, I won't be far behind you."

Waving over her shoulder, she called back. "Good night."

"Night."

Tim watched as she entered the elevators and the doors closed behind her, letting out a heavy sigh. He remembered earlier during the interviews the look on Ziva's face. There was a crack in that thick wall she had spent a lifetime so carefully erecting around her heart and the cause was one Lieutenant Roy Sanders, U.S. Navy, deceased. Now she was grieving, and she didn't know any other way to do so than to hold everything she was feeling inside of her. Gibbs and Tony, both practitioners of the tactic themselves, seemed to accept it and were allowing her to follow her own path. He knew Ducky had offered her a listening ear, and Abby had mentioned to him her conversation with Ziva, although the lab tech still wasn't exactly being forthcoming about her own bout with the darker emotions. Whatever the problem had been, Abby seemed to be getting back on track. She told Tim that Gibbs helped her understand something that had been bothering her; that he understood. That was more than a little frustrating since apparently Gibbs was the only one to whom she'd actually confessed what had been bothering her in the first place. How could she expect any of the rest of them to understand?

Ziva, on the other hand, didn't have to tell them what was weighing on her mind. They had all had a front row seat to that tragedy: the charming young lieutenant reporting his own murder to NCIS; Ziva assigned to watch over him in the hospital as he inevitably succumbed to radiation poisoning; the obvious feelings she had developed for him over the short remainder of his life that she was now having to deal with.

After depositing his report on Gibbs' desk, Tim was on the elevator not ten minutes after Ziva had left. He offered a cheery "goodnight" to the security guard and made his way out to the employee lot. Parked a few spaces down from his car was another; one that Tim recognized as Ziva's. He frowned as he walked around the car, looking to see if there were any signs of a problem. No flat tires, doors still locked. Nothing seemed out of place. Except that Ziva should have already left by now.

He scanned the surroundings, looking across toward 10th Street in the direction of Gibbs' favorite location in the Yard, the coffee shop, around in the direction of the riverfront, then finally toward the small green space adjacent to the parking area.

There.

On a bench in the semi-darkness under one of the large trees, a stray beam from one of the streetlights made its way through the leafless branches and illuminated a splash of neon orange.

McGee put his gear in the trunk of his car and pulled his coat a bit tighter against the late February chill of the breeze coming off the Anacostia River. The crunch and click of his footsteps against first the asphalt, then the concrete sidewalk echoed above the distant traffic sounds from the parkway and the 11th Street bridge and the lapping of the water against sides of docks and the hull of the USS Barry moored there. He knew the hyperaware Mossad officer heard his approach from behind her, he wasn't attempting stealth, but she gave no indication. He stopped a couple of steps away, one last moment of hesitation, then stepped around the bench and sat down beside her.

Ziva said or did nothing to acknowledge his presence beyond a sideways glance. He really hadn't expected her to. It was almost a full minute before Tim began to speak, his gaze straight ahead toward the lights near the river.

"It was my first year on Gibbs' team. We got a call that someone had witnessed a sailor being strangled. Metro was convinced it was bogus. It had been the wee hours of the morning, the witness had had a few glasses of wine, the LEOs had checked out the apartment where the murder was supposed to have occurred and found no signs of any kind of struggle. But the witness was insisting to speak to someone from NCIS. Gibbs sent me to check it out, see if it warranted a full call out. Kate said it showed his confidence in me; Tony thought it was a test. All I knew was I had to get it right."

"Her name was Erin Kendall." He paused, and Ziva's eyes turned to look at his profile. "There was something about her that drew me to her from the moment she opened the door. She wasn't just beautiful, she was smart and very determined. I found out she went to MIT. Even had some of the same professors I had."

He turned and looked at Ziva for a moment. "I just knew she was right, that she had seen what she thought she had seen, so I told the Boss to roll on it.

"Turns out, she did see a murder. We found the body later, staged somewhere else to look like a mugging. I spent most of the day with Erin, getting her statement, trying to get a sketch of the assailant. Learning just how amazing she really was.

"That night, I was across the street from her apartment at the crime scene, staking out the place in case the murderer came back. Erin and I were talking on the phone. We talked about MIT, about our professors, our classes. About the pizza place just off campus that we had both loved. We talked about her job, and then she started asking me about how I became an NCIS agent. It was about then that she heard a noise and put down the phone to investigate. When she came back, I could hear how scared she was. Someone was in her apartment. Then I heard her struggling. I got over there as fast as I could, but I was too late. When I saw her lying on the floor, I just rushed to her, didn't even clear the apartment, and the guy smashed me in the head with a lamp. Didn't knock me out, and I got off a couple of shots, but the only thing I hit was another lamp. We eventually caught him, but..."

He looked down at his hands. "I'd only met her that morning. Only spent a few hours with her, but it felt like I'd known her my whole life."

"You fell in love with her."

He smiled sadly. "I think I was beginning to. I think it could have happened so very easily. I do know I really cared about her. And knowing that I'd failed to protect her really ate at me. I kept thinking about what I could have done differently. It took me a while to accept what Kate and the Boss tried to tell me. There was no way to have known he would attach Erin. I was where I was supposed to be that night and there was nothing I could have done to change what happened.

"But even now, I'll find myself thinking about her and wondering just how different my life might have been if..." He shrugged.

Neither spoke for several minutes, then Tim leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees and his clenched hands hanging between them as he looked toward his teammate.

"Ziva, if you ever want to talk about Lieutenant Sanders, I just want you to know, I'm here to listen. And if you don't want to talk about it, I understand. God knows, I didn't want to talk about Erin for a long time. I didn't think anyone could possibly understand. It's your choice, and I'll respect your decision to share or not share whatever you want. But, Ziva, I am your friend. And I just wanted you to know that there really is someone out here who knows what you're feeling."

He leaned over and lightly kissed her cheek, then stood to leave. Ziva reached out and took his hand.

"Could we just sit a while?" she asked, looking up at him.

"Sure," he replied, taking his seat once more.

It was a few minutes before either of them spoke again. This time it was Ziva's curiosity that broke the silence.

"Why did you look for me tonight? How did you know I was here?"

"I'm a trained investigator, Ziva," Tim answered, then chuckled. "Of course seeing as your car was still in the lot and this —" he reached up and touched the orange watch cap on her head, "was sort of sending out it's own SOS."

Ziva smiled. "Ah."

"You could have driven to anywhere if you really wanted to be alone," he told her. "Maybe... deep down you wanted to be found."

Ziva sighed. "It is... unnatural to me to allow what I feel to show. Feelings can be exploited. They make you weak."

"No," he shook his head. "I don't believe that. Maybe if everyone around you is an enemy, then, yeah. Or if you don't think anyone else will understand. I get that. I've done it myself. Probably everyone has. But I think everyone needs to have people they can trust. People they know would never use what is shared with them to cause pain. Everybody needs someone to lean on once in a while. I just hope you believe me when I tell you I would never betray your confidence."

She turned and met his eyes. "I do believe that, McGee." Looking down toward the grass, she continued, "I wonder — sometimes — if I allowed myself to fall in love with him because I knew he was dying. There would be no future to think about, to worry about. There was only that moment. In a way, that made it seem safer, gave us more freedom to feel everything more intensely."

"No tomorrow, no regrets?"

She nodded. "But now, as you said, I keep thinking about what might have been had things been different. If once, when we passed each other running, one of us had stopped and said something to the other. Maybe we could have run in the same direction, not just been two strangers passing on a bridge. Maybe we could have gone for coffee after our run. We could have gotten to know each other slowly. I wonder what that would have been like."

Tim thought for a moment. "Tell me about Roy?" His tone made it clear it was a request, not a demand.

She hesitated, studying what she could see of his face, then she began to talk, quietly at first, continuing through both smiles and tears as she told him of the time she spent with Roy Sanders, the things they talked about, their walks in the hospital garden, the conversations sitting on a bench not so different from the one she and Tim were currently occupying.

"He told me, if we had never met at NCIS, if one day he had just not been there when I went on my morning run, I might have noticed for a moment, but would have soon forgotten him. I told him he was probably right, but that I most certainly would remember him now."

"My grandmother used to say those we love will always live as long as we remember them."

"Your grandmother is a very wise woman."

"Yes, she was," he whispered.

"It is getting late."

"And a little cold," he laughed. "I wish Abby hadn't ruined my jacket. It was warmer than this old coat. We could go bug the night shift at the coffee shop."

"I think perhaps we should both go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow will be here very soon."

He nodded, stood up and offered her his hand. She took it and didn't let go as they walked toward their cars.

"McGee?"

"Yes."

"When Erin died, who did you — lean on?"

"At first, no one." He smiled. "But eventually I talked to Kate a little. When she wasn't teasing me or threatening me, she was pretty easy to talk to. I can usually talk to Abby about just about anything, but with our history, it wasn't really comfortable to talk to her about Erin. And then there's my friend Jim Nelson."

"On Special Agent Cassidy's team?"

"Yeah. We were in FLETC together and he's been a really good friend to me ever since. He's a good listener."

Ziva gave his arm a squeeze. "So are you."

They reached parking area and Ziva moved away from him toward her car.

"Thank you, McGee."

"You're welcome, Ziva. Drive carefully."

"You, too," she replied.

He stood by his car and watched as she drove out of the lot, then with one last look toward the river, he headed home.

(A few weeks later)

Ziva had been clandestinely watching McGee off and on for the past hour as he tried to work on his case report. The last few days had been particularly hard on everyone, but perhaps especially on McGee and on Tony, each having lost someone they cared about.

Although he would never admit it, Ziva knew Tony had feelings for Special Agent Paula Cassidy, and the events of the last few days, ending in the shocking self-sacrifice of her life, had really shaken the usually cocky, fun loving senior field agent. But in the past months, Tony had distanced himself from the rest of the team, keeping secrets, disappearing at odd times and tonight was no different. He had grabbed his gear and disappeared quickly from the squad room and had not returned.

Gibbs, too, was nowhere to be seen, but she had a feeling he was upstairs with Director Shepard. It had been a rough few days for the director, too. She was the one who had to make the difficult phone calls to surviving family members who would never be able to understand why their loved ones had had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

McGee was still at his desk, but his attention kept wandering. He would stop typing and his eyes would seem to lose focus as his mind went elsewhere. She had seen him wince as a remembered image or thought. She could see the pain in his eyes even from across the room. He had lost a very good friend, and he couldn't quite keep it from showing on his expressive features. He was struggling to hold it together, to be strong.

But you couldn't be strong all the time. Tim McGee had told her that only a few weeks ago.

"When Erin died, who did you — lean on?"

She had asked him the question, and she remembered the answer clearly. Kate Todd, the big sister who was easy to talk to; he had lost her almost two years ago at the hands of Ziva's own brother, Ari. And his friend Jim Nelson, the good listener. Now he, too, was dead.

Ziva saw McGee squeeze his eyes closed and take a shaky breath. And she took that as her signal. She walked over to McGee's desk, squatting down in front of his chair so she was looking up into his lowered face.

"McGee, would you take a walk with me? There is a place just outside where it is quiet at night, where you can listen to the sounds of the river and enjoy the peace, or you can talk to a friend who is willing to listen. A friend who understands."

Tim just looked at her.

"As a good friend and very wise man once told me, everybody needs someone to lean on once in a while. If you wish to tell me more about your friend Jim, we can both make sure that his memory lives on."

He offered her a sad smile, then nodded. She stood and waited as he grabbed his jacket and gathered his gear, then they walked side by side to the elevator.

It was April, the cherry blossoms were in bloom and their scent was carried on the cool spring breeze as two friends shared a few moments of reminiscence, understanding and support at the end of a long, sad day.