Part One-Streets of Cairo
Ziva David and Jenny Shepard had first met in Cairo, several years ago. At the time, Ziva had been working various special ops for her father, Jen doing the same as an NCIS agent. They were partners, albeit unlikely ones, and learned to trust eachother. That trust had been confirmed pretty much forever when Ziva saved Jenny's life, nearly getting herself killed in the process.
As far as anyone else knew, Ziva and Jenny were just partners back in the day. But to eachother, they were much, much more. In the apartment that served as their safehouse in Cairo, they both spent many nights, in separate rooms, thinking about the other, dreaming about what it would be like to be more than just partners. For Ziva, this was nothing new. She had been intimate with her partners before. More importantly, she had had sexual relationships with many women before. Jenny, on the other hand, had only ever before slept with one partner-Jethro, in Paris. And if anything was to become of her and Ziva, it would be her first time with a woman. The only thing holding Ziva back was that Jenny was, or at least appeared to be, a straight woman. Jen was too confused by Ziva. Mossad had trained her well, to spy and kill and send mixed messages. Jenny had no idea what to think of half of what Ziva said. She only knew what she wanted to make of it.
One night in Cairo, the night before Jenny would almost die, she and Ziva witnessed an explosion, that left two of Ziva's informants dead. They went back to the apartment; Ziva was seething. They had been working together for nearly a year at this point, and still Jenny found herself surprised at the depth and intensity of Ziva's anger. She spent about an hour revising plans with the younger agent, and by the end of that time Ziva was nearly back to her usual amount of control. Jenny had delicately shifted the conversation, and within another hour the two were drinking cheap red wine, straight from the bottle. They talked and drank, and Ziva let the combination of the alcohol and her battling emotions take the best of her. Surprising both Jen and herself, she leaned over and delicately kissed Jen on the lips. After a second, she broke away, moving back only slightly. Jen had been far too shocked to respond, and Ziva had misinterpreted it as Jen not wanting the advance. Jen must've registered the hurt in Ziva's eyes, and put a hand on the back of Ziva's neck and pulled her in to kiss her again. The sensation of kissing this woman was, for Jen, even more than she had bargained for. She felt the intense heat rush through her as Ziva kissed her deeper. Ziva's hands moved to Jenny's hips, Jenny's around Ziva's back, and they gently moved back down on the bed, Ziva above Jen. Then, somewhere in the distance, something like a shot rang out, and there was another explosion. Ziva shot upright into a sitting position, Jen quick to follow suit. What they had mistaken for a gun report was the firing of a missile from a shouldered launcher, and it had exploded in the hills less than a kilometer from them. There was massive panic and screaming in the streets, and Ziva knew there was nothing she could do. Whoever had fired the missile would be dead within 20 minutes, thats how things worked around here. She glanced over at Jen, who met her eyes sadly. Combined with the attack earlier that day and this one now, it was official; Cairo was no longer safe. And sadly, Cairo wasn't the best place to continue to act on the feelings that had been building silently between them for months, and had finally come to the surface that night.
The next morning, which was in reality only a few hours later, the pair began to execute the plan that they had began to formulate the previous night, before the wine came out. They parted in an open air market, Ziva moving into a crowd she could easily blend in to because of her ethnicity, Jen moving closer to where there target was supposed detonate a bomb strapped to his chest. Ziva's intel had said that the group that this terrorist belonged to generally weren't technologically sophisticated enough for there to be a dead-man's switch on any bomb they used. A head shot would stop the suicide bombing. The plan was for Jen to wait until he was about to detonate, and then shoot him twice in the head, double tap. Ziva would be close enough to her at that point to protect Jen from any frightened or wayward shooting in the aftermath, simply by eliminating the shooter. Ziva was at a vantage point where she could see every move Jen made, spot and cover her. Jen was going to use her red hair to her advantage, pretending to be a clueless tourist, buying food to take to Gaza later in the day. Jen spotted their target, and signaled Ziva just like they'd planned. Ziva began to make her way towards Jen, never taking her eyes off the red hair that stuck out so much on the streets of Cairo. Jen put her hand in her jacket pocket, discretely enough that she could have been reaching for a wallet or a cell phone, and closed her hand around the grip of her Sig. Ziva was about twenty feet behind Jenny now, gripping her own pistol. In that moment, a young man, biking across the crowded street, accidentally bumped into their target. The target panicked and whirled, opening his jacket. He was holding something Jenny hadn't planned for, a semiautomatic. Goddamnit, suicide bombers don't need guns! Jenny later remembered thinking. She was still in act of raising her gun, but she was less than a second too late. A round slammed into her chest, just around where her lungs were. At that second as well, Ziva's training took over and she took the terrorist down with a head shot, and then threw caution to the wind, forgetting completely about crowd control. She ran over to Jenny, and keyed into her handheld a contact who knew the local paramedics and could get them there fast. In a panic, she held both hands over Jen's wound and shouted curses in Hebrew and Arabic and other languages Jen didn't have it in her to place. Ziva couldn't believe she couldn't have stopped this from happening to Jenny. Jenny, who just yesterday she had been hiding her love for, afraid it wouldn't be reciprocated. Last night, Ziva had finally worked up the nerve to find out. And today, Jenny had just been shot. And in that moment, even though some rational part of Ziva knew it wasn't her fault, she knew that she'd always blame herself for not taking that bullet, for not pulling the trigger a second earlier, for not turning over the op to another team after the explosion last night, for not doing SOMETHING that would've prevented Jenny from being gunned down. In that moment, Ziva David hated herself more than she ever had. She truly thought that the woman she loved would die there, in a Cairo marketplace that had just been thrown into a state of panic.
Jenny heard the shot and saw the muzzle flash before she felt the impact of the bullet. What she didn't feel at all was falling to the ground, her gun flying out of her hand and skittering across the cobblestone ground of the marketplace. Her limbs seemed to lock up as she heard another shot right after the first, but didn't register where it came from. Her vision blurred as her mind and body went into shock, she hardly saw Ziva drop to her knees where Jen had fallen. She barely heard Ziva's frantic yelling, in the language of a place far from Jen's home. But she felt pain, at first, anyway. In what felt like years but may have been under a minute, her vision started to go black and silence began to engulf her, coming at her from every side.
Story Notes:
I've always wondered what actually happened in Cairo, where Ziva saved Jen's life. I've been playing with this idea for a while now.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Ziva and Jen were partners in Cairo, and Ziva saved Jen's life. Partners, though, doesn't even begin to describe them.
Chapter End Notes:
I've always wondered what actually happened in Cairo, where Ziva saved Jen's life. I've been playing with this idea for a while now.