Disclaimer: It all belongs to DPB, aside for the characters that you don't recognize, who belong to me.
XXX
It was Sunday and they both woke up late. Noon for Abby, eight-thirty AM for Ziva. Abby arrived at Ziva's apartment half an hour after she woke up, dressed in the lightest black cotton sun dress she owned and carrying a black lace parasol. Ziva had been poking at her computer, trying to understand the scribbled notes McGee had given her on MS PowerPoint. Abby didn't knock. Ziva had never given her a key, but Abby's youth hadn't been spotless by any means, and picking a lock was just as easy as searching for a key in the depths of her purse.
"You shouldn't try to sneak up on me," the Israeli said calmly, pinning Abby to the carpet, hands restrained above her head.
"Damn. I knew you were kinky," the Goth smirked up at her, fluttering her spiky eyelashes and pursing her blood red lips.
Ziva almost blushed, but carefully controlled it. "You like that idea?" she asked instead.
Abby stretched elegantly, and without any warning she flipped Ziva onto her back, switching their positions. "Hell yes."
Ziva laughed, tilting her head back. "Not that I'm not glad to see you, Abby, but did you have a specific purpose coming here?" She noticed that the pale woman smelled strongly of sunscreen and peppermint.
"Yes." Abby rolled off of her, bouncing up and perching on the computer desk.
Ziva pushed herself up on her elbows. "Did you spend the night with Tony?"
Abby's eyebrows shot up. "What?"
Ziva held up her hands. "Not-- Not like that. It's just that whenever you spend the night there, in a completely non-sexual context... Well. He's the only member of the team that has mint shampoo, yes?"
Abby grinned and tucked a wisp of loose hair behind her ear. "You're observant. Yes, we watched horror movies last night. And don't tell anyone else about the shampoo, it embarrasses him. I slept with him, too."
Ziva stared at her. "You slept..."
"Yep." Abby paused, and then made a big show of looking shocked and horrified. "Why, Ziva David! Get your mind out of the gutter! We slept together. Literally. In the same bed." Abby grinned impishly.
Ziva fell back on the carpet. "My mind tends to migrate to the gutter as soon as you and Tony are mentioned separately or apart to save time later."
"I'm gonna take that as a compliment."
"Take it how you will," Ziva half shrugged.
Abby jumped up without warning, snapping her parasol open. "Get up, we're leaving."
Ziva obeyed, amused by the other woman's energy. "How much blood is running through your caffeine stream?"
Abby strode toward the door, long chain earrings swinging. "Much too much." She held open the door. "Come on." Ziva smiled at just how much Abby sounded like Gibbs.
XXX
"Where are we going?" Ziva asked when Abby dragged her over to her hearse and pushed her inside.
"Out," the Goth said mischievously before walking around to the driver's side door. The sun was out in full, but there was a light breeze, which succeeded in keeping the heat from becoming stifling.
"You have creepy neighbors," Abby observed as soon as she got into the vehicle. "That man? The one in apartment 8D? He asked me if I was selling drugs when I walked past him on the stairs."
Ziva tried not to laugh. "He's a clinical psychologist."
Abby cringed. "I saw the agency psychologist once. The first and only time I went, she asked me if I was suffering from a case of the Mondays. I told her I was going to burn down the building. I think Tony even stole her stapler for me later that day."
Ziva blinked. "I honestly don't believe I will ever understand you."
"Good." Abby's foot pressed down on the gas petal, the black car whipping down the street. She drove like Gibbs on morphine, which was like any other person on a major adrenalin high and possessing a death wish.
"Do you intend to make this a regular occurrence?" Ziva asked after a few minutes.
"What?"
"Breaking into my apartment and kidnapping me."
Abby nodded. "mmm. Yes." She turned on the CD player, blasting piano and drums and a wailing female voice, preventing Ziva from saying anything else.
XXX
"A street market?" Ziva asked when Abby parked and turned the key to the off position.
"Sort of. It's China Town. I have a bunch of friends here, and I love Asian culture. I spent a year in Japan right after high school."
Ziva arched an eyebrow. "How many languages do you speak?"
Abby counted them off on her fingers. "English, French, ASL, Spanish, Japanese. Five. All learned by necessity."
Ziva gave her a questioning glance, and she elaborated.
"French, English and ASL when I was growing up so I could talk to all of my family. Spanish in high school, ‘cause I needed a filler course, and Japanese when I was in the country." Abby grabbed her purse, keys and parasol and swung open the door. "Ready?"
XXX
When Abby had said that she knew a lot of people, she hadn't been kidding. She didn't speak the language, but the many men, women and children that came up to say hi spoke fluent, if accented, English. By the time Abby found a coffee shop and refueled her addiction she was literally skipping down the street, hauling Ziva along by the hand as she chattered on too fast for the Mossad officer to follow. She had only seen Abby so dominating and energetic once before, when she had shown up outside Ziva's door at ten on a Saturday night and informed her that they were going clubbing. While she would never admit it, Ziva really did enjoy the loss of control that she felt when Abby got like this, the way she was just swept along in the girl's wake and didn't have to worry about work or any of the other many things that made her life stressful.
"You hungry?" Abby asked suddenly, pulling her over to a bench under a tree heavily laden with dark green leaves. "I forget that normal humans need food sometimes."
Ziva had noticed Abby's tendencies to partake in passively self-destructive behavior, most often in the form of no sleep, food or working for literally days straight. It worried her, moreso after their relationship began. From the very start, from the moment that Abby had told her flat out that her natural hair colour was red and allowed Ziva to fully comprehend all the implications of that seemingly innocuous statement, Ziva had known that whatever they had would not last forever, maybe not even until the end of the year. It was just something that she had to deal with; Abby wanted things that were bad for her. Caffeine, cigarettes, on some particularly bad occasions a raiser blade, Gibbs. At first Ziva had thought she could change her, but Abby had lived with the same attempts by many other people for her entire life, and was adept at avoiding them.
"I ate before you came," she told Abby.
"Excellent!" Suddenly, the bright green eyes lit with a spark that Ziva could only describe as evil. "Tell me, Zi-va," she annunciated the first syllable like Tony sometimes did, "Have you ever been bowling?"
Ziva stared at her, and finally came up with the only thing that she could think of that would forestall what she knew was coming. "I can't bowl."
She knew almost immediately that this had been the wrong thing to say. "That's fine! I can teach you! I'm in a league and we play at six, but we'll have a couple hours for me to show you the basics before I play. And then you can watch all of us make idiots out of ourselves, and I can show off my pretty girlfriend that none of them believe I actually have."
Ziva winced inwardly, having no desire to be shown off as a prize to all of Abby's sure to be strange friends. She would have objected, but the Goth was already moving, jumping up from the bench and heading back toward the car. Sighing quietly, Ziva followed after her.
XXX
It was delightfully cool inside the building that housed the bowling alley, a nice change from the heat that had gotten progressively more intense throughout the day. For a Sunday afternoon it was fairly empty, with only a child's birthday party down at the far end, and a group of teens in the lane next to theirs. Abby requisitioned shoes, and before she knew it, Ziva was standing on the lane, letting Abby show her the proper and best way to send the ball where she wanted it.
"It takes a while to get the hang of it," the other woman said after Ziva's third gutter ball in as many throws.
"I'm trained to kill someone from over a hundred feet. My aim is excellent. This shouldn't be so hard."
Abby dropped a light kiss on her cheek, and darted back for another ball.
XXX
"My God, Abs, who is that and is she available?" Ziva studied the pale young man standing in front of them intently. His midnight black hair was pressed flat to his head and hung to his shoulders, and if she wasn't mistaken he was wearing eyeliner.
Abby put a protective arm around Ziva's waist, pulling the shorter woman against her in a very obvious show of possessiveness. "No, Gem. She's all mine."
He blew out a breath. "Damn. You're one lucky woman."
Abby grinned. "I think so!"
The next two to arrive were a set of twins, one male and one female, both dressed in completely black suits, with ties that were patterned with, not surprisingly, bloody skulls.
"Ryan and Kadi Smith," the woman introduced. Their hair was as black as the rest, but the dark tone of their skin made them look much less dead.
"We're programmers with Info-tech," Ryan explained when Ziva asked about the suits. "There's no rest for the wicked, unfortunately, not even on a Sunday. And what, may I ask, do you do?"
Ziva wondered if every single one of Abby's friends was going to hit on her. Kadi seemed to read her mind, and mock whispered to her "I don't like girls, if that makes you feel any better. Neither does Matt, but he might not show up tonight. He said he might have to work a shift for a friend."
Matt did, in fact show up, and Ziva found herself laughing right along with the rest of the team as they played, enjoying observing Abby interacting with a group of people that wasn't made up of her co-workers.
"Just throw the damn ball!" Abby called to Ryan, jumping up and down in place.
"Is anyone doing anything after this?" Gem asked during a lull between games.
"Yes, but if you're suggesting going out for alcohol after we're done I can cancel," Kadi replied cheerfully.
"Shiny," Abby said brightly.
"You just wanna get her drunk," Matt accused, smirking at Abby who smirked right back.
"You implying there's something wrong with that?" the lab tech retorted. "She's cute when she's drunk. She gets all shy and it's adorable."
Ziva shifted awkwardly. Kadi threw her a reassuring smile, and maneuvered the subject away from drunkenness with ease, to Ziva's great relief.
XXX
The bar that they chose for the post-game escapades was noisy and crowded, though not nearly to the amount that so many of the clubs Abby dragged her to. The music wasn't too loud, though that could have been the fact that she just couldn't hear it over the voices and clink of glass on wood and glass.
"You still intending to get me drunk?" she asked Abby, pressing up against her in the booth. Abby grinned, and tugged Ziva's hair, tilting her head back to catch her in a short but intense kiss.
"We'll see," she decided, and turned back to her talk of some new chemistry related discovery with Gem, who was a theoretical physics major, but was minoring in chemistry.
The plastic of the booth was sticky, the wood of the table stained and in Ziva's opinion, the drinks weren't that good. Apparently everyone else shared her opinion, because they hadn't been there half an hour when a general consensus was reached, and the entire group migrated to a Jazz club on the other side of town.
"I'm taking you everywhere today, aren't I?" Abby laughed, running a long finger along Ziva's wrist.
"It's interesting," the Israeli lied smoothly. In truth, she was feeling very much the outsider, and Abby had barely said ten words to her after her friends had arrived. In Ziva's mind, the entire thing struck her as very reminiscent of Tony's descriptions of high school.
XXX
"Abby used to spend her life in jazz clubs," Matt told Ziva when they were alone at the table. "The whole Goth/Punk thing only started when she was about twenty-two. She went to poetry recitals, book readings, every jazz concert that came to town, she was there. She was even writing a book. Let me tell you, the Abby you know now is very different to the one I knew back then."
Ziva tilted her head. "Different… in a good way?"
Matt blew out a breath between his teeth. "I couldn't tell you. I just know she went off, got her masters, and came back different. Right after that she started working at NCIS."
"Doesn't she also have three degrees?" Ziva asked, frowning.
"Yep. And a year in Japan – you're wondering how she squished it all in."
"Honestly, yes," Ziva took a sip of her drink.
"Well, all I can tell you, Officer David, is that you've got a brilliant girlfriend. And in the same breath I have to tell you that if you stay with her, she's going to drag you down and leave you a broken, burned out mess and you won't be able to blame her because she won't understand what happened."
"She's driven," Ziva said quietly.
"Exactly. She gets so focused on one thing that she'll forget about everything else. Eight years ago, I would have said that there was a good chance you'd be that one thing. But now? Now that she's so deeply involved with her job, I don't think you have a chance. And that'd be fine if you were equally devoted to your job, and understood when she didn't speak to you for three weeks, but I'm getting the feeling that you'd like somebody a bit more devoted than that." He gave a rueful shrug. "'sides, nobody likes to play second fiddle to that boss of hers."
"Gibbs?" Ziva arched an eyebrow, though the observation didn't surprise her in the least.
"That's the one. I guess you'd know him, he's your boss too. She's creepily loyal to him. We keep telling her to sleep with him and get it over with, but she just ignores us."
"They haven't already—"
Matt shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."
Ziva sighed. She was used to things not being stable, to people not being faithful or reliable. Anyone who was forced to shoot their own brother was sure to have a few issues of their own to work through before they were ready to be the stable person in a relationship. "I can't leave her."
Matt grinned fatalistically. "I know. It's her curse. People get so devoted to her they'd do anything. I know, last year, some ex of hers got so nuts he actually went through her mail."
Ziva laughed. "With Abby, that doesn't even surprise me. She is the strangest person I know."
"My ears are burning," Abby's husky voice spoke from right behind Ziva, as the Goth wrapped her arms around the other woman's shoulders.
Ziva tilted her head back to smile up at Abby. "We were saying very evil things about you."
Matt grinned. "Yep. How you kill small animals in your spare time and boil them in stew."
She gave him the finger. "Wanna head home, sweety?" she asked Ziva, running her hand through the flyaway curls of Ziva's hair.
"Separate?" the seated woman asked, batting her eyelashes.
Abby pulled her up. "Not if you keep that up."
There was a sudden vibration at Ziva's hip, and she reached down, pulling out her pager. "Arrgg," she moaned when she saw the number displayed.
Abby sighed overdramatically. "Don't tell me, let me guess. Gibbs."
"Tony, actually, which is just as bad."
Abby grabbed up her jacket and purse from the chair, signaling to the twins and Gem that they were leaving. "So much for a night of actual sleep. See ya, Mattie. Work calls."
Ziva gave Matt a quick smile as she followed Abby from the restaurant. The temperature had dropped dramatically over the course of the evening, and the wind whipped at their legs, and Abby shivered. "I so need to change. You wanna wait for me or do you want me to just drop you off?"
They got into the car, Abby driving. "Drop me off, please," Ziva requested, not wanting to listen to Abby theorizing about what gruesome scene could be awaiting them as she was prone to do.
The car ride was quiet as Abby tried to avoid the seeming influx of bad drivers on the road. They arrived outside of NCIS HQ, and Abby pulled to a stop. "I'll see you later," she said cheerfully.
"That you will," Ziva agreed, stepping out of the car.
Abby was about to drive away, when Ziva held up a hand, leaning back through the open window. "Abby. I love you."
Abby blinked at her.
"Yeah."
The hearse took off, and Ziva was left standing in the parking lot feeling cold.
Story Notes:
Set before the episode Bloodbath.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Sunday afternoon fun, wierdness and angst with Abby and Ziva.
Chapter End Notes:
Set before the episode Bloodbath.