Kin of the Child (Patreon)

I'm still struggling, but I need something fun... something goofy.  I don't know if I'm going to keep going with this, but... maybe?  What do you think?  BTW, this would be part four of the Kin series, but you don't have to keep up with all the clan relationships to read this one.

Tony tightened his hand around his daughter’s. He might not be an NCIS agent anymore, but nothing erased decades of experience and a finely tuned gut. And right now, his gut was telling him that something was wrong. 

Worse, the something in question was subtle enough that Tony couldn't quite get a finger on it. The previous week when a pickpocket had decided that a single father distracted by a hyperactive child would be a good target, Tony had spotted the danger right away. And once he spotted it, he turned and looked the guy right in the eye. Without saying a word, he warned that man that Tony was not an easy mark. He never would be. 

He had a weapon secured in a holster on his hip and another in his boot. He had decided to expand on Gibbs's rule 9; he had a total of three knives on him. Tony's prime directive was that single parents had to protect themselves. After all, if something happened to him, Tali would be alone. 

Tony still didn’t believe that Ziva was dead. She'd always been to wiley, too aware of the need for an exit strategy and too careful about making sure that the exit strategy was ready to go at any given time. However, whether Ziva was dead or simply unwilling to come back, it made no difference in the practical sense. He and Tali had each other and no one else. And that was why Tony had grown even more paranoid. He had not reached this level of paranoia since he'd been in undercover with the Philadelphia mob.

“Abba?” A childlike voice called. Tony reached down and scooped his daughter up, careful to keep her on the left side so that his gun hand would be available.

“It's fine, my little cherry blossom,” he said in a teasing voice. 

“Not a cherry blossom,” she protested as he knew she would. 

“No?” Tony jostled her a bit on his hip, but he kept his eyes on the street. “Then what are you? Maybe you are an apple flower.”

“No.” Tali had an edge of frustration in her voice now. Tony started walking faster.

“Then maybe you are a lily.”

“No!” She twisted her mouth into a frown.

“Maybe,” Tony said slowly, trying to divide his attention between their game and the street, “Maybe you're a tiger cub.”

Tali laughed and clapped her hands excitedly. That earned her approval. She had been such a little girl when Ziva had gone missing and yet she was still her mother's daughter in all the ways that mattered. Hopefully Tony would not have as difficult a relationship with his daughter as he had had with Ziva herself.

Tony had loved her. Or at least he had been closer to being in love with her than he had had with any woman since Wendy. 

He trusted Ziva at his back, and there were very few people that he could say that about. But he did. He trusted her to be at his side against gun runners and terrorists. He trusted her to be able to defuse a bomb or to stay at his side while he tried to. He trusted her with things that he had never trusted a woman with before, but he couldn't trust her as a woman. 

He couldn't trust her to be faithful to him, as she had proved more than once. He wished that Rivkin had been the first, but he hadn't been. More than once Tony had seen her with some some acquaintance from Israel. His gut wouldn’t allow him to ignore the truth, and his pain and her betrayal became open wounds, ones she wouldn't even acknowledge.

“We have a history,” she would say about her visitor, as if that excused her lack of fidelity. 

Or no, that wasn't quite fair. They had always been very careful to avoid any hint of commitment. If anything, Ziva was more afraid of commitment than Tony himself. That had surprised Tony until he met Eli David. At that point, it was entirely too obvious why Ziva had trouble trusting men. 

He knew that he loved her father and that she always sided with her father. He suspected she'd even given her father classified Intel out of NCIS files, although both Gibbs and Jenny had been very quick to order him away from that sort of investigation or accusation. Tony knew that Gibbs had no problem playing the vigilante, and he suspected Jenny was cut from the same cloth. He could imagine both of them slipping Israel a little intel here and name there. 

Those two would use Israel to take care of the political masses that American politicians with their preference for human rights and trials refused to take care of. The thought nauseated Tony. In his heart he always had been, and always would be a cop. Acting that far outside of the law would never be a possibility for him.

He tightened his arm around the precious, squirming bundle in his arms. But his daughter would not be raised around that sort of moral ambiguity. Between Ziva and Gibbs, Tony had a belly full of ambiguity—enough for a lifetime. And Tali with her insistence that she was a tiger cub, a lion, a ninja… 

Sometimes Tony wondered how much the girl remembered of Ziva and whether Ziva had ever called Tali her little ninja the way Tony had once referred to the mother. Ziva was a ninja. She had been a little girl who wanted to be a ballerina who had been twisted and warped into a weapon by her father. And Tony was going to be the sort of father that reversed that. He would take a little tiger-cub ninja girl and teach her that it was okay to be soft, to be loving. He was going to teach her that she had a right to be anything she wanted, and if that was a ballerina, then she should twirl until the stars twirled with her. 

And if she truly wanted to be a ninja, he would grit his teeth and deal with that when the time came. But he would never push his little girl into the dark places that Ziva had gone. He would not be Eli David.

“Abba what wrong?” Tali asked.

“Nothing, baby.” Tony walked a little faster. He wished now that his hotel was in a nicer part of town, but he wasn't working. He needed to make sure his money lasted. And sadly, the Pacific Northwest was about as expensive as Paris had been.

“Eema?” Tali asked in a painfully hopeful voice.

“No baby,” Tony told her. “Not mama.” 

As always, Tali's face twisted into a resigned sadness that broke Tony's heart. He knew Ziva was alive. He had seen signs, first in Paris and then when he went to visit the farmhouse in Israel. She had left breadcrumbs on her trail, but either the breadcrumbs were not meant for him, or she had overestimated Tony's skills because he wasn't able to follow her trail. For one second, he thought he’d seen her in Cairo, her long braid sweeping her back. But he blinked, and she was gone like a mirage.

If he were kind, he would've told Tali that her mother was dead, and provided the excuse for Ziva's long absence. However, he couldn't lie to his daughter. Besides, sooner or later, Ziva would return. He believed it. Tony just wasn't sure how he is going to handle it when she did.

Tony turned onto a street teeming with tourists who had just gotten out of a local theater. He hurried through the crowd, pushing past older women who frowned at him and muttered under their breaths. When he came out the other side, his gut was screaming a little less. 

Maybe his paranoia was finally starting to take its toll. Maybe he should add a fourth knife to the collection he carried every day. It was equally possible he needed to get therapy. A little part of Tony wanted to pick up the phone and dial Gibbs’ number. At one point, he’d trusted Gibbs to fix anything.

However, in the end, Gibbs was no more faithful than Ziva had been. He had abandoned Tony after Jenny’s death, emotionally abandoned him after Rivkin's. 

He had blamed Tony for everything that had gone wrong in the squad room, and the worst part was that without Tony, Gibbs and his team were doing just as well as ever. And maybe that's why Gibbs had betrayed him in the last and most final way. Gibbs had never asked him to come back. There were jobs Tony could have done, jobs that were less dangerous than field agent. Tony had thought that after he'd been gone a month or two that Gibbs would call him back and ask him to work with the team from the office—to be an analyst or an interrogator. Hell, he could've taught at FLETC. Instead, the phone never rang.

That was the betrayal that Tony couldn't forgive, and that was why Tony had to take care of himself and his daughter. He checked the crowd as they reached their hotel, but he couldn’t see any source of danger. Maybe it was time to get the hell out of Cascade Washington.