A/N: This is just one of those stories that somehow wrote itself. I wanted to add some present-NCIS Tiva, if for no other reason than to attract more readers (I know how y'all love your Tiva), but there really wasn't any logical segway for that in this story. So I'll just have to trust that you can take it as-is. (: Also, I don't know exactly how old Ziva was in relation to Tali, but I'll place them here about four years apart, with Tali at about 12 and Ziva at about 16, though it really isn't that important. Also, obviously, I don't have much to go on as far as Tali's characteristics are concerned, so I may have taken some liberties. This is a one-shot. It isn't of much consequence, but ought to be worth reading, anyway, for maybe some character insights. And it also includes Ari. :0
I don't know much Hebrew, and not nearly enough to be able to write fluent dialogue in Hebrew, so I've gone ahead and put all the dialogue in English. We can all just pretend that we have nice English captions in our heads, okay?
Please review.
Thank you, and enjoy!
------------------------------------------------
Pandora's Box of Sins
------------------------------------------------
The doorknob was hot when she twisted it open, so hot from sitting in the sun that it nearly scathed her; but the pain of it was insignificant. She was fuming. She slammed it shut behind her and moved through the kitchen, through the darkness of the hallway where no lamplight shone, and thundered through the doorway to their bedroom. Tali looked up from her bed, the book in her hands fumbling down and out of her grip in her surprise.
"Ziva!" she said. It was a sound of shock, but so quiet that Ziva barely even heard her. "Shouldn't you be at shooting practice?" Tali asked.
She shook her head and the blood on the collar of her shirt felt hot.
"They sent me home. I was too distracted to hit any of my targets," Ziva said. She gripped the edges of her shirt and pulled it off, over her head, and flung it on the floor. Tali scrambled off the bed and lifted it up, holding it to the yellow light of the window, gasping.
"But there's blood…"
"Yes, well…I did not want to leave, and I got into a fight with a…colleague."
"You always have so much blood on your clothes," Tali remarked in quiet awe, running her thumbs across the red, dimpled surface of the shirt. "It can't be good for you to bleed this much."
Ziva stalked to her dresser and ripped open a drawer with so much force that the dresser nearly tipped towards her, and its legs smacked hard against the floorboards. Tali flinched. Undeterred, Ziva began to rifle through the clothing inside, fuming. The sound of her colleague's condescending voice grated against her mind like a needle struggling to find the right groove on the surface of a broken record. Her fingers got caught up in the drawstrings of some tattered old jacket and she tore it up and out of the dresser, pitching it across the room.
"It is not my blood," she said, and turned back to the drawer. She lifted one clean blouse up indiscriminately from the slew of clothing, and pulled it over her head.
A quiet, startled chirp escaped Tali. She clicked her tongue and shook her head, but said nothing.
Ziva turned to face her, smoothing out the front of the new shirt across her abdomen. "What?"
Tali said nothing.
The battered dresser groaned as the weight of its still-open drawer teetered, drawn so far from the frame that it threatened to fall and spill out across the floor. Ziva absently slammed it shut.
"Oh," she hissed, closing the distance between her and her sister and snatching the bloody shirt from Tali's hands. "Right, you do not approve of what I do. But when father does it…" she raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, "it is not so bad. You give me grief, but you would never contradict him."
The blood from the shirt had seeped out and smeared across Tali's palms. She stared transfixed at the patterns of red imprinted on her hands, the little grooves of her palm where it settled in thin, gleaming threads; expanses of blood on her fingertips that were quickly cooling in the air, fading to rust. "I don't like it, either," she said, her voice soft and almost apologetic. "I just don't like all that blood."
Ziva crossed her arms across her chest. "There would be more blood if we did nothing." She shook her head, then, and looked away as if to dismiss the entire exchange. "Well, you will understand when you are older."
Tali nodded absently. It was not in her to argue.
"Good," Ziva said. She balled the bloody shirt up in her hands and stalked across the room to her bed. She sat heavily on the edge and swung her feet up, crossing them on the mattress beneath her.
Beams of pale amber light cut across the floorboards of their bedroom, giving glow to the shroud of dust particles that had been uprooted from the drawer during Ziva's frenzy. They glittered, little tufts of dust and lint, floating in the air. In the wake of their voices â€" Ziva's like hot glass and Tali's like cotton â€" and the thumping of booted feet on hardwood, the room was suddenly very quiet. Ziva shifted awkwardly and leaned her back against the wall running adjacent to her bed.
She looked across the room, finally settling enough to really take stock of her sister, who had not moved from her spot standing by the door â€" and, in fact, was still quite focused on staring down at her sullied hands. The hem of her pale yellow sundress, light and clean and lacey, swept airily five inches from the floor. Rapidly losing steam â€" but growing indignant at the fact that her temper was falling so soon â€" Ziva wondered at the sight of her sister, so calm and still. It made her uncomfortable. She was too ill at ease when things were so quiet. Almost beyond notice, a strange sense of jealousy swept through her, for she knew that she could never be so peaceful, that it simply was not in her.
"What are you doing?" she called, and was almost grateful for the fact that her voice was too loud.
Tali slowly tore her attention away from her hands, and allowed them to fall back down to her sides. "What?"
Ziva frowned.
"I asked what you were doing."
Tali did not answer. She merely furrowed her brow, the vacant and hypnotized look in her eyes replaced by a sharp, calculating awareness, and glanced down at Ziva's hands, where the bloody shirt was wadded. For a moment she stood staring, indecisive, before finally she came forward. Her bare feet were so soft that they nearly floated across the floorboards. She reached out tentatively with one hand to take the shirt from her sister.
Ziva pulled it back against her.
"What are you doing?," Ziva asked.
"Let me wash it."
"Why?"
"Because there is blood on it," Tali said bluntly, and went again to take the shirt; she grasped it by the sleeve and tugged, but her grip was so lax that it barely budged.
Ziva twisted away towards the foot of her bed and out of Tali's reach. She needn't have pulled the shirt away, because it merely fell from Tali's fingers as Ziva moved. "No. I will take care of it."
Tali's empty hand fell back to her waist. She looked at her sister and smiled, her eyes so wide and dark and gentle that Ziva began to feel sorry for yelling at her. She really did mean well, Ziva knew, and it was simply her misfortune that she happened to be around whenever Ziva went on a rampage.
"I don't want to fight with you, Ziva. I just want to help now." She shrugged. Wide ringlets of long, dark hair fell limply across her shoulders, and her bangs came lightly down like feathers across her brow. Ziva found herself smiling at the sight of her sister, for no real reason at all other than the simple fact that Tali's smile demanded a smile in return. "Besides," Tali continued, "I don't have anything else to do."
But Ziva didn't move. She was uncomfortable with the idea of handing the bloody shirt back over to her little sister, suddenly; she was sorry that she had ever allowed her to hold it in the first place. It was her mess to clean up. Tali had never spilled blood, had never broken someone's nose or fired a gun or brandished a knife, and so it was not her responsibility to justify anyone's violence by scrubbing the gore from the laundry. She should not have to face a sin that didn't belong to her.
"No," Ziva said, standing and moving back over the dresser, which almost seemed to shrink back in fright as she neared it. "I will take care of it." She made no move to touch the drawers, but stood eye-to-eye with her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. She hadn't noticed before that she'd received a number of scrapes and bruises in her earlier scuffle. Nothing severe, no amounts of blood like the amount she'd left on her colleague (or on her shirt), but a bruise dotted the line of jaw just to the left of her chin, and a welt (from the butt of a gun, she knew without having to recall), had began to form above her temple; the skin was pulled taught across a swollen knob where the gun had smacked against her skull, the mark so new that it was barely even noticeable, but upon inspection she suspected that it would grow larger in time. The impact had been so violent that she thought perhaps this time the knob would break the skin and scar her face.
Her eyes moved in the mirror and she noticed Tali watching her from over her shoulder. Turning, she smiled and cocked her head to one side. "I did not mean to yell at you. I'm sorry. Now," she glanced out at the window on the far wall, where the light coming in had intensified, thick and warm, bleeding across the windowsill like corn syrup. "Why don't you go out for a bit before it gets dark? I think that I passed Dunia Matin and her brother playing on the corner. You should go join them."
Tali's brow creased for a moment and the corner of her lip quirked upward.
"Did they see all the blood on you?"
Ziva laughed. The sound was short and loud, and it put them both at ease. "Probably, yes. I might have frightened them. Perhaps you should go and tell them that I'm alright."
"And that you haven't killed someone."
"Yes," Ziva said, "and that I haven't killed someone."
Tali licked her lips very quickly, almost as if to prepare herself for what she was going to say without giving herself the time to rethink it, still smiling.
"You didn't right?" She asked. "I mean, you didn't kill anyone."
Ziva took the question in good humor. But the mood of the room had shifted very slightly. Something had tipped their sense of humored relief and apologetic smiles over and awkwardly off balance, like a compass being turned away from North by just a millimeter; the needle groping to find North again. Though nothing palpable had changed between them, they both observed the strange solemness which laced Tali's questions with a beat of humbled silence.
"No," Ziva said. "I did not kill my colleague."
It was an honest answer, but it was not quite the answer to the question that had been asked. Ziva considered it a forgivable lapse, a merciful equivocation on the truth. Tali might not have agreed with that justification, but she did not object. Her smile broadened and she sighed, "Good," before moving towards the door to fetch her sandals. As she came near the doorway and began to kneel, her hands going immediately to brace her weight against her knees, Ziva gasped and jerked forward. Startled by the noise, Tali looked up, but did not move.
"Tali!" Ziva groaned, kneeling down to her sister and taking her hands up in her own. Tali looked down. Across her knees, on the part of her skirt where her hands had gone to brace herself, two large smudges of red stood out in stark contrast on the pale yellow fabric of her dress. Her hands. Ziva cupped them in her own and shook her head very slowly.
"I forgot," Tali said, "about the blood on my hands…"
"Oh…you've ruined your dress."
"You ruined your shirt," Tali observed, and her eyes held Ziva's, as if that made it fair, made them even: Ziva had spilled someone's blood on her blouse and, unwilling to let her sister make it better, had spilled blood on her as well.
Ziva frowned, looking away. She was ashamed of herself, but part of her was rapidly welcoming the sense of exasperated defensiveness that was coming over her again. "You should not have taken it!" she snapped, and stood, pulling Tali up with her by her hands. "You shouldn't have touched my shirt, I cannot be blamed for…" she looked down again at the blood stains on the dress. Something broke in her heart. But she was angry, and anger always took precedence, and maybe that was the only thing that separated her from her sister. She sighed, exasperated.
"Well, come on." She began to drag her sister out from the bedroom and into the hall, where the light from the window could not reach and the corners were crowded with shadows and the dust of shadows.
"Where are we going…?" Tali asked.
"I have to clean you up. If father comes home and sees you all covered in blood, he'll think that it was my fault."
As if it wasn't.
And Tali hurried behind her sister, her bare feet catching on the edge of the rug laid out in the hallway.
------------------------------------------------
Later, when Tali's hands were clean and her dress was in the wash (though there wasn't much hope of salvaging it after that, Tali had insisted that they at least try to get the blood out), the night came in and stole the light from the house â€" what little light it had possessed, and Ziva found herself pacing the hallway. Her temper had been soothed, but the embarrassment of being sent home early from target practice still weighed heavily on her mind. It was unacceptable. It was mortifying. She dreaded the lecture that her father would surely have in store for her, but needn't have worried, because he did not return home that night. His secretary called at midnight and told her that he was traveling out of the city on an urgent matter and would be gone until morning.
As she placed the phone back down onto its cradle, she heard a noise in the kitchen; the nervous, fluttering sound of a chair being pulled back from the table. Cautiously, she came around the corner to the kitchen, and saw him.
Ari.
He looked up at her from the table and she caught his eye and held it, and it seemed to her that he was not looking at her or in her but rather past her, at the wall to her back and the chasm behind it, with the dark, half-lidded gaze of a sun-weary snake. It was not so much that he disturbed her. He was her brother, and she loved him and respected him; it was merely the fleeting sense that there was something foreign about him. She had always related far more closely with Ari than she did with Tali, and felt some inherent, soulful connection with him, as though he could understand the chaos in her better than anyone else, because it was a chaos that he had inherited, too.
But the look in his eyes made her heart pause and something clicked, very faintly, and she wondered, do my eyes look like that? And she thought that probably they didn't, and that probably she was no closer to him than she was to Tali, whose eyes were not clouded but clear and decisive and always too-kind, and that probably she was the median between her older brother and her little sister; half chaos and half peace. She remembered fighting with Ari as a child, and Tali's worried shrieks, his dismissive manner towards her. It hadn't been much of a fight â€" he had been all rage, tempered by some childish argument, and Tali had been all grief, so afraid that they would kill each other and leave her all alone on the curbside to tell their parents: "Ziva and Ari are gone now, they broke each other's necks over by the park. I wanted to stop them, honest, I tried, but it was like talking peace to a couple of scorpions."
And Tali had always been like a stranger to Ari, some unreasonable and confounding puzzle; in fact, the two of them were so different that they didn't even function on the same wavelength. Ari could not comprehend her optimism, Tali could not accept his cynicism. They rarely ever spoke. Refusing to acknowledge one another's existence was far easier than having to alter their respective realities to accommodate each other.
But the moment passed and the floor-clock, to her left, was pounding out its on-the-hour rhythm.
Ari spoke.
"I'm supposed to give you a gun today."
"What?"
He nodded, leaning forward to brace his elbows on the tabletop, his fingers coming together between them. "Father told me, the gun you've been shooting with isn't on your level and I ought to get you a new one. Said if I didn't, people would keep losing their teeth for mistaking your misses for poor aim. Said sooner or later, I'd be the one to send you home and then it would my blood on your shirt."
"I don't have poor aim," she said quietly, though it was more of a question than a statement. The strangeness of that self-doubt, though subtle, startled them both.
"No," he assured her, "you just have a bad gun."
"Oh." She looked around, then, at the edges of the table and back towards the counter-tops, searching with a muffled sort of excitement. He continued to stare at her, unmoving.
"Do you want a new gun?" he asked.
She stopped searching and looked at him.
"Well, yes. I want a new gun. The one I've got now isn't right for me, it isn't on my level."
"Father gave you that gun," he said, and she paused.
"So?" she asked carefully, confused and still a bit preoccupied with trying to discern where he was hiding her new gun, where he'd hidden her gift.
"So he gave you a gun, and there's no other reason for giving a person a gun but that it's the right gun for them, and that it will be of some use."
"It wasn't the right gun for me, Ari."
"Was it too complicated for you? Too heavy?"
"No," she insisted fiercely, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, but it didn't look to her like he was trying to insult; she would know when he chose to dig his claws in. It was a hard thing to miss when her brother decided to go after someone â€" it usually led to blood.
"Then it was too simple for you. It was below you, maybe meant for someone with shorter skills or less experience?"
"Probably."
He nodded very slowly, his gaze unwavering and still clouded, half-there. He was acknowledging some truth garnered from her replies, having tracked it down and cornered it, exposed its throat, and was now deciding whether or not he should strike. She knew these things because she knew him, but it bothered her that she hadn't been able to see his reasoning; what did he see? What crime had she committed herself to through her answers to his line of questioning?
He stopped nodding, though, and finally he looked away. He began to push himself up and out of his seat, the faint light of the ceiling lamp playing over the curvature of his face, pushing in at the shadows as he moved like bands of gold and black ribbon.
"Alright, then," he said, and moved away from the table. "You need a new gun."
He came back around the table in the dim light and from one end of the counter produced a little wooden box; the light of the room, hidden behind his frame as he had moved, did not come around to reveal the box, and his entire front was shaded, his hands on either end of the box disappearing into the shroud that had fallen over his frame. He held it out to her and she readily received it.
"What kind is it?" she asked and pulled the lid back. It strained soundlessly against two small metal hinges. The inside of the box was too dark, she found, and she twisted away towards the table where the light could reach it.
From within, sitting loose and light at the pit of the box, the gun gleamed up at her; gunmetal sleek, black, dark and menacing, but somehow thrilling to her. She beamed back down at it but dared not touch it just yet. "A Beretta," she remarked, "A .22."
"It's not a new one," Ari said from his place behind her. He sounded far. "It was mine. The first gun father gave me." There was something cynical about his words and she wondered if it was the same revelation he'd had a moment before, but was too distracted to care.
"I'm not supposed to have one of these yet, you know," she said from behind the lid of the box. "I don't think it's what father meant when he told you to get me a gun."
"I know. But you'll like that one. It's very…" she could almost hear him smiling, "…very Ziva." She knew what he meant by that, and it made her smile, too. She was quite proud of herself, after all; and clearly thrilled by the fact that her father could see her usefulness, her talent, so strongly that he would replace the bad gun he'd mistakenly given her (and surely that had been a mistake and nothing more, she would not or could not dwell on it) and demand that it be replaced with something better, deadlier, more suited. A gun that her brother had been given. It was Ari's gun, and now it was hers.
When he spoke again, he sounded even further from her. She tore her gaze away from the gun in the box and turned to look at him, but he was clear on the far side of the room, edging towards the door with his jacket shrugged over his shoulders.
"I trust you know how to use it," he said.
"Yes." That was a half-lie; she knew that she would learn to use it.
"Good. Be sure to show it to father before you go to shooting practice tomorrow."
"Why? It was your gun, I'm sure he's seen it."
Ari shrugged.
"He doesn't know it's the gun I decided to give you," he said, "and you know how he's gotten...hardly has the time to see me anymore, unless it concerns you. And he has not the patience to deal with me. He'll receive the news better if it's delivered by you." He didn't sound bitter. His eyes were dark and slow, small divots of tar beneath the low bridge of his brow â€" he seemed clumsily aware, as if some fumbling in the darkness had revealed to him a long-hidden secret, ammunition, a hidden pathway and a suit of armor.
Later, far away, he would call upon their father and begin a slow dissent from his function as a son and brother; later, he would draw upon this experience for the knowledge that his father had trusted him, first and foremost, that Ziva was a backup plan, the one with the crappy gun just to keep her busy until duty called. Later.
He was edging out the door.
"Be careful with it, Ziva." He paused, and added sloppily, "And tell Tali that I send her my regards." So formal. He could never deal with Tali himself.
When he was out the door and gone, Ziva turned back to the gun. She was hesitant, at first, to close the lid on it again and conceal it from her eager sights, but eventually set her hand upon the plank of wood and shut the box, nearly shivering at how smooth and cold the lid felt beneath her palm. She shuffled back to her bedroom, flicking the kitchen light off as she went.
In her room, in the darkness there, she moved towards her bed but paused as she passed something sitting limp on top of the dresser. The bedroom was silent, the night outside thick and dark from the clouds which had come before the sky to conceal the moon. But she looked closer at the curious object, squinting in the darkness, and was barely able to discern the patches of darkness on a stark white fabric: the bloody shirt she'd forgotten earlier. She reached to take it â€" to do what? â€" but a voice broke through the night, quiet and soft, but so unexpected that she nearly dropped the box with the gun in it on her foot.
"Ziva?" Tali asked, bleary from sleep. Ziva turned to catch the outline of her little sister propped up in her bed in the corner. Somehow, in her excitement, Ziva had forgotten that she would be there, sleeping. Tali's eyes were gleaming, despite the lack of light; her hair unkempt and loose about her shoulders, her nightgown a brilliant white against the darkness of her blankets, the darkness of the room.
"Tali. You should be sleeping." She turned back towards the dresser, but made no move to take the shirt. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that the box was in her hands, that there was a gun inside; she was suddenly very ashamed of it without knowing why.
"I heard you and Ari talking in the other room," Tali said, "I thought he was father, at first."
"Father isn't home," Ziva said.
"I know. It was Ari." Her voice was softly imploring, some hint of woeful knowledge heavy in her words â€" she could never assume the worst of Ari (it simply wasn't in her), but his presence always troubled her. The fact that she had mistaken Ari for her father was a sign of something deeper, some link between the two men that she had picked up on, and Ziva guessed that the link was not a good thing. She thought that probably it was something very bad, some dark similarity in their mannerisms and tone of voice, and Ziva wondered if Tali had ever made the same connection between herself and their father. She found herself hoping that she hadn't.
"Yes. But he's gone now, he just came to give me something." The box in her hands seemed very heavy. She twisted closer to the dresser in sudden fear that Tali would see it and ask after what was inside; but realized silently that she had just admitted to it, that she'd set her sister up to ask what Ari had left and now she would have to tell her that there was a gun in the box.
"Oh." Tali didn't ask. But it came to her mind, anyway, that Tali was wondering and that it would be wrong not to tell her. That it would be like lying.
But she didn't mind lying, as long as she could pretend that it was just a simple equivocation.
"So, then. Go back to sleep," Ziva said, still not moving, "I'm sorry we woke you."
A moment of silence, and then, "What kind of gun is it?"
Ziva froze.
"What?"
"The gun," Tali said, and it sounded like she was leaning forward on the bed, "I heard him say that you had a bad gun. So I guess probably he got a better one, right? Or father sent you a better one?"
Despite having committed herself to the lie only seconds before, Ziva was ashamed that she hadn't just admitted it, that Tali had figured it out. Screw equivocation, she thought, screw omission. I lied and I shouldn't have done it.
"It's just a pistol," Ziva said. Tali knew guns; they all knew guns, and how to shoot, because to be Israeli was to see guns and the effects of guns, and for any David, shooting came as soon as you could lift the gun above your knees.
But she didn't want to tell her little sister that the gun her brother had given her was a gun meant for making the act of murder as simple as 1, 2, 3; a gun meant to make the mess not so messy and the bang not so noisy; a gun meant to simplify and hasten the entire process of killing a person in cold blood; no mess, no fuss. A gun meant for people who could kill a man from the leisure of their car and then just as soon drive to the café down the block to grab an early lunch. A gun for people who killed as regularly as any other man might sweep a porch or stock a shelf. She couldn't say it. Even thinking about it in the presence of someone so timid and peaceful made her sorry that she'd ever held a gun in the first place. It was shameful.
Only around Tali.
"One of Ari's," Ziva added sloppily, "just a pistol he didn't want anymore."
"He had a gun he didn't want?" Tali said, flatly. It struck Ziva as a very unusual thing to hear her sister say. It was the closest thing to a real insult she had heard from Tali in a very, very long time, and she smiled in the darkness as a way of ignoring the bitterness of her sister's words.
"I suppose." No longer burdened with the secret of the box, she turned away from the dresser and looked at Tali, who had leaned herself forward with her elbows on her knees. Tali wasn't smiling. Tali was staring, and the darkness of the room made her nearly disappear beneath the shadows; were it not for that silk white nightgown and that gleam, the wetness in her eyes that always lingered as if she was always prepared to cry â€" for a cut, a stumble, a cheat, a death, she never really knew and never really wanted to know.
She thought again, fleetingly, of her girlhood scuffles with Ari on the curb. Tali's frightened face. Her pleas. That excuse, never really truthful, always ready on her lips for when her parents would ask how a quiet girl like her could've let her older siblings hurt each other: like talking peace to a couple of scorpions. And the tears in her eyes like maybe that was always in her mind, every time she looked at them, at their father, at this life they'd never really signed up for and never really dared to question.
It broke her heart to see it and it hurt her to think it, but Ziva couldn't look away from her sister because that felt like an even bigger shame than lying; like giving up on the one real chance any of them ever had. Like putting too much distance between herself and Tali, the fulcrum, the balancing agent, and dipping too close to the edge, where Ari was always waiting with his guns and his gifts that were really just more guns.
Ziva looked in her sister's eyes and for the second time that night she wondered if her eyes were the same as the eyes she was looking into, and for the second time, more woefully than before, she thought no, I won't ever have that look in my eyes, and it wouldn't come to her again for more than a decade, until she was far from that place and Tali was even further, that she could have that look, if she wanted it to be there.
"Go back to sleep," she said, forcing a smile, and Tali smiled beamingly back at her â€" gleaming in that glowing, youthful way â€" before nodded and laying back down. She drew the blankets up to her chin, and Ziva turned back towards the dresser. Her eyes caught the mirror, but the glass was dark, faceless, and she looked away. She carefully picked up the shirt where it lay on the dresser. It was courses, now, the blood having dried to a scaly rust. It would never wash out, now. She'd waited too long, and the stain was there to stay.
Wordlessly, she lifted the box and pulled the lid back â€" the gun winked up at her â€" and quickly shoveled the shirt in. She snapped it closed.
------------------------------------------------
A/N: Nepalese reporters recently stumbled across an old discovery in the world of genetics which indicates that people who leave reviews are actually 80 percent more likely to lead successful, fruitful lives. So if you love yourself, you really should consider adding a healthy review to every meal.
Thank you!
- Cricket
Author's Chapter Notes:
Long before NCIS, Ziva David was an angry young girl with a gun. Some sins cannot be erased by any number of years or any amount of regret �" a memory from a less-than-perfect childhood. One-shot, pre-NCIS character study. Ari & Tali included. Enjoy.