Disclaimer: I ... um ... *sheepish laughter* ... No, I didn't just beg TPTB to give me NCIS! What are you talking about?

Spoilers: 7x13 "Jet Lag," Tony's bucket list, and maybe a hint to the Season 10 opener, but you'll miss it if you haven't already watched it. Like, I could've been referring to the giant purple flying elephants in the opener, for all you knew.

I mentioned a few fics ago that I would be deleting a few fics from my profile and I've decided that this will probably happen tomorrow (for reference, it is now 02:25 ... tomorrow), so if you haven't yet saved those fics but would like to (and I'm not saying you have to), then it is best if you get it done today.

That's all. Oh, and I really like how I've written this one, so I hope you do, too!

-Soph

Philosophies

"This is getting old," he says with a sigh as he spins away from the control panel and flops down onto the floor. His green eyes burn into hers. "We gotta stop meeting like this."

She purses her lips as she stares down at him from her corner of the elevator. "I know."

"This is stupid. This is Gibbs' office, not ours. We shouldn't even be stuck in here!"

"But we are."

He tilts his head at her. "You're so calmly philosophical about this."

"Thoughts do not move the Earth. I will not get out of here any faster if I am angry than if I am relaxed."

"But this is a situation that calls for anger, don'tcha think?"

She shrugs. "Not if it will not get us anywhere."

As he contemplates that, she settles down next to him. Knee-to-knee, elbow-to-elbow, fleshy cheek to comforting shoulder, they wait.

xoxo

"Your hair smells good," he tells her eventually.

She whispers, "Thank you," and she thinks he will lapse into silence again, but instead he speaks.

"Remember the time we agreed without agreeing never to talk about Paris?"

Her heart twinges. "There is nothing concerning Paris to talk about."

"Your hair smelt just like this." He ignores her.

"How do you know what my hair smelt like?"

"I woke up with your head on my chest." He pauses, and her cheeks burn. "The entire night, you'd kept, like, a foot's distance between us, and it yelledyelledyelled at me that you didn't trust me yet. The Old You would've never kept her distance. But in the end, in the morning, you were just there. Right next to me, not an inch of hostility between us. It was the best day—"

"I woke up with a slip of paper where my pillow should have been."

He's still for just half a beat. "Oh. I'd thought you were asleep."

"And you wanted to do some sightseeing," she concluded. "I do understand. But we do not get absolution in the form of ink and paper."

xoxo

"Have we no chances left?" he meekly asks.

"I do not know," she answers. "We've gotten more than our fair share of chances."

"Then where do we go from here?"

And her answer, once again, is that she doesn't know.

xoxo

"Number nineteen on my bucket list is, 'Discuss Paris,' y'know."

She gives him a little smile. "We have done that."

"But we've so many things … that we never resolved." He looks down and away, and she wraps a hand around his to give a tiny squeeze.

"I accepted a long time ago that that is how things will always be between us."

"Unresolved?" he asks, his voice strained.

"More like … 'complicated.' There is a lot in our past that we will never have the heart or the courage to address, Tony. But I am okay with that, because you are sitting beside me now, and this is not complicated at all. And this tells me that the absolution we sought so long ago, for our sins, for having mistrusted each other, for having lost the way … it is here."

When he returns the tiny squeeze and offers her a little smile of his own, she knows that chances don't lie in Fate's hand. Chances lie in their hands.

xoxo

"Maybe this could be our philosophy."

"What could be?" she asks, confused.

"'Absolution finds itself within the present, not within the past,'" he says with a flourish, and she laughs.

"You sound like a fortune cookie."

"A delicious one," he adds, tongue-in-cheek, before sobering. "And I know it's not, like, something that could apply to everyone, but it could apply to us."

"I agree."

"So, what do you say, Ziva?" he asks softly. "You and me, clean slate?"

"Only the cleanest."

xoxo

"Tell me something."

This time, it is she who speaks.

"What?" he asks, and cranes his neck oddly to look at her.

"Anything," she says. "We have a clean slate, but it needs to be written on."

"Okay…" He blows a breath out through his lips. "Okay. Wow, this makes me nervous."

"Do not be nervous." She lifts her fingertips to his jaw. "I will not hurt you, no matter what you say."

"It's not that." His eyes flick towards hers before darting away. "Y'know, even the marks on a slate can only be erased so many times before they start to stain."

She presses her lips together as she thinks about how to reply. "You know … how when you are first learning to draw or write, you have to try, and try again, and try again, before you get it?"

"Yeah…"

"We have been learning." She makes sure to hold his gaze. "This time, it will be beautiful."

xoxo

"I dream of a future with you."

She stares, dumbfounded, at him, and his wide-eyed appearance tells her that he's shocked himself just as much.

He stammers, "I mean, um—"

A finger against his mouth shushes him.

She swallows. "If I had to draw on a slate…"

He nods.

She seeks courage from it. "It'd be drawn the way you pictured it."

His cheeks tint pink. She gives him a shaky, terrified smile, and then she feels the ticklish brush of his lips against her finger.

xoxo

The tentative kiss swallows the I love you hovering on the tip of her tongue.

His hands are warm against her body, and she can't help feeling as if something has clicked into place.

He inhales and exhales in tandem with her.

He chuckles when the ends of her curly hair brush against his bare neck. She laughs and loses herself in the scent and taste and feel of him.

His heart goes thumpthumpthump with a rapid beat when she finally pulls away to rest her hands on his chest. She can almost hear it.

His embrace is tight and the depth of his eyes is home.

xoxo

When the elevator jerks back to life, she has already resumed her place right beside his shoulder.

"Still think thoughts do not move the Earth?" he teases, and she giggles as she plants an elbow into him.

"Yes," she insists, and she softens. "But then, perhaps actions do."