Three dollars and some change

Hrm, backstory. Okay, it's a little like this:
Ziva came to NCIS three years ago. TOny has been there for years. The team was Gibbs (team leader), Tony, Ziva and McGee (as the requisite computer geek), with Abby and Ducky as support. They all fought crimes etc. for those three years. The NCIS director at the time was Jenny Shepard, a former lover/partner to Gibbs in Europe and who had worked with Ziva in Europe as well (the bit in the first part about Jenny/Ziva is just me).

In the season five ender, Jenny was in LA with Ziva and Tony as her protection detail, when Jenny found out that she was being followed by some Russians from back in the day when she and Gibbs were partners. Jenny ditched Ziva and Tony to go deal with the problem on her own. Ziva was certain something was up, while Tony was all up for a free day. Ziva kept pushing and eventually she and Tony went to track Jenny down.

In the meantime, Jenny is looking for information at this little diner in the middle of the desert with Mike Franks, a former NCIS agent and Gibb's former boss (he was a random character). Jenny knows that this is her last stand. While Mike's out back looking for water, a car drives up to the diner and disgorges five heavily armed men. All we see is the front of the diner, and hear the sounds of a gunfight.

When Ziva and Tony finally find Jenny, she's dead. And she took the gunmen out with her (Franks got the remaining two). Her death is covered up by Leon Vance and Gibbs after the fact for reasons I'm still not 100% clear on.

Back in DC, the day of Jenny's funeral, new NCIS director Leon Vance calls Gibbs' team into his office and disbands them, sending Tony out as Agent Afloat on the USS Reagan (a promotion, really, but not in the context), ships McGee to the cybercrimes unit and kicks Ziva off the team (as a Mossad officer, she was only ever really on loan) and ends the show by giving Gibbs files for his new team members.

That's where we are now. I started this story in that 'verse half an hour after the meeting.

My rational here is that Tony is furious at himself for refusing to see that Jenny's behaviour (*very* out of character for her) was indicative that anything was wrong, and refusing to listen to Ziva (who is almost always right in things like this), and at being only a few minutes too late to save Jenny. In the end, Tony lost his family (the NCIS team) and most of that blame could be put right at his feet. Never mind that Jenny ditched them intentionally and walked into the diner knowing how it would end. Doesn't matter. Tony's still guilting himself, and Ziva was the one who was with him and is the easiest output for his anger (if one can call it that, we get more on that in future chapters of the story)

And that's the longest comment ever :)