One

Jennifer Shepard glared at the laundry basket in front of her, it had never occurred to her that having kids would mean a never ending pile of laundry, she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't been constantly doing laundry. Her glare disappeared when Ava cooed from her blanket on the floor and squealed at the toy in front of her, she would do laundry every minute for the rest of her life if it meant getting to hear that sound.

It had been two weeks since her world had been turned upside down, two weeks of learning how to be a mom, two weeks of getting Jake and Kelly settled in at school and learning how to cope with being away from work.

Their meeting with SecNav two weeks prior had ended with her and Gibbs both being put on leave, hers had been listed as a personal leave while Gibbs had been put on medical leave while his shoulder healed. His doctor had given him permission to remove his sling the day before and Gibbs would be allowed to return to desk duty the following Monday, Jenny would be discussing her return to work, and the terms of it, with SecNav on the same day.

Gibbs had been correct in his assumption that SecNav would do whatever necessary to make the name Svetlana Chernitskaya disappear, while Gibbs and Jenny had both received a slap on the wrist and a warning that they would be on probation for the next six months they had gotten off relatively easy. Jenny sighed as she thought of the entire mess, twenty minutes before their meeting with SecNav, Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo had called with the news that Alexander Chernitskaya had hung himself in his holding cell. It had made the entire nightmare that much easier to make disappear but Jenny couldn't help but feel bad about how everything had ended.

She was brought out of her thoughts by the sound of Ava giggling on the floor, she looked over her laundry basket and grinned at the baby who had her foot grasped in her hand, a wide grin on her face.

"What're you doing Monkey?" Jenny cooed.

She placed the folded onesie she was holding in the laundry basket and stood up, stretching out as she did so.

"Why are you allowed to call her Monkey but you get mad when I call her Bug?" A gruff voice asked from the living room entrance.

"Monkey's are cute, bugs are not." Jenny replied, rolling her eyes at her old partner.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs raised an eyebrow at her and Jenny watched him as he walked by and carefully picked Ava up off of the ground. She could tell he was enjoying having both of his arms available, he hadn't been able to hold Ava until the day before and it had been killing him to not be able to cuddle the baby.

"Who was on the phone?" Jenny asked as she picked up the laundry basket.

"My dad, he wanted to know how my doctors appointment went." Gibbs replied.

Gibbs' father had stayed with Jenny and the kids while he had been in the hospital but had had to leave the day after Gibbs had gotten home, it had been a tense day and half while both the Gibbs men had been in the house but they had survived relatively unscathed. Jackson Gibbs called to talk to his grandchildren at least twice a week and made sure to talk to Jenny at least that much, Gibbs managed to limit his contact with his dad to once a week but it was still more than they'd had for twelve years.

"Have you heard from Mike?" Jenny asked.

Mike Franks had stayed for another three days after Jackson had left but then had returned home, leaving Gibbs and Jenny alone to get used to being new parents.

"He's fine, Leyla and Amira are fine too." Gibbs replied as he brushed Ava's wispy hair out of her face.

"That's good, can you put her down for her nap? I want to finish up in Dani's room."

That had been the other major change in their lives, after a lot of discussion between themselves, their social worker and Kelly they had decided to take in Jenny's daughter. It had been two weeks of insanity trying to get ready for the day, none stop activity had meant that there hadn't been time for a face to face meeting with the teen. They had had a few awkward phone calls and Jenny knew that Kelly and Dani had been texting back and forth but that had been it. Dani was scheduled to move in the next day, giving them the weekend to get to know each other before everyone returned to work and school.

"Go ahead." Gibbs replied with a nod, "I can handle Bug."

Jenny rolled her eyes and made her way out of the room, she deposited the laundry basket in her room before crossing the hall into the room that would be Dani's, after much debate they had decided that Dani would take Gibbs' room and he would move into the guest room since his room was a bit bigger than the guest room and his room had been bare and easier to remodel compared to the guest room that had been customized by his team. Not to mention that even though it was never said aloud they both knew Gibbs slept on the couch more often than not anyway.

Jenny glanced around the room and smiled at all of the hard work that had been done, Kelly had been discreetly asking Dani what she liked to help Jenny decide how to decorate the room and Jenny only hoped that Dani like it. The room had been painted a medium grey, the bed frame was a black metal that matched the black desk that was sitting under the window, the room had a very bohemian feel compared to the modern-rustic feel of the rest of the house.

Jenny reached out and straightened out one of the fun patterned throw pillows that Kelly had picked out, they had left Kelly's room relatively bare when she had moved in, allowing her to personalize it herself and they planned to do the same for Dani but both Jenny and Kelly hadn't been able to help themselves when they had seen the pillows.

"It looks good, Jen."

Jenny smiled and turned around to find Gibbs standing in the doorway, "is Ava already asleep?"

"Yeah, once she had her bottle she was out like a light." Gibbs replied, "you should go take a nap, you look tired."

"You really know how to flatter a woman." She responded dryly.

"Not what I meant and you know it, just figured now would be a good time for you to relax for a bit."

She would never admit it but he knew Jenny wasn't sleeping, he could hear her wandering around at night, checking on the kids or making sure the doors were locked and even when she wasn't wandering around he was willing to bet that she was laying in bed awake. He could see how tired she was all the time even if she tried to hide it, what he couldn't figure out was if it was stress from everything that had happened in the last month or something that had been ongoing before that, or a combination of both.

"I was thinking about going over to my place, I want to make sure everything is okay over there." Jenny replied.

"Isn't Noemi supposed to be taking care of everything?"

"She is taking care of everything, but my house goes on the market on Tuesday and I want to make sure all of my pictures and personal belongings are packed up."

Jenny had left the majority of her stuff at her brownstone when they had moved into Ducky's old house but after much debate she had decided to sell her house and needed to move the rest of her stuff.

"Are you still dropping stuff off at my place?"

She would be selling a lot of her furniture but there were a few items that she couldn't bear to part with that she would be storing at Gibbs' old house until she could decide where she wanted to put them.

"Stan said it was fine if I brought some stuff by next weekend." Jenny replied.

When Special Agent Stan Burley had been temporarily reassigned to DC to help the MCRT out while Gibbs was on leave Gibbs had offered Stan his old house since no one else was living there. It had been a win win for them, giving Stan a place to stay while giving Gibbs peace of mind that the house was taken care of.

"Why don't you nap and then go to your place tonight?" Gibbs suggested.

"Is there any particular reason you are so determined that I need to take a nap?" Jenny asked, she placed her hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow at him.

"Just don't want you to wear yourself out." Gibbs replied with a small shrug.

"You do just as much as I do on just as much sleep and you never complain, what makes you think I'm not capable of doing the same thing?"

"Not saying you're not capable, just saying that there's a lot goin' on." Gibbs replied carefully, "we have two kids, three soon and a baby, that's a lot."

"I'm aware that it's a lot, Jethro, but we're managing just fine, you need to stop worrying about me." Jenny stated gently, "I want you to treat me like you always have, not like I'm going to break at any minute."

Since the day in interrogation when all of her biggest secrets had been laid out in front of Gibbs and his team he had been treating her like she was made of glass, his team had been unusually quite around her and Gibbs had been walking on eggshells. She knew they were treading carefully for fear of upsetting her but the constant pitying glances and questions of 'how are you doing?' and the avoidance of anything pregnancy or death related were noticeable and getting old really quickly.

"Things are different than they used to be." Gibbs pointed out as his shoulders slumped slightly, "a lot has changed in ten years."

"No, a lot has changed in the last few weeks." Jenny corrected him, "you started walking on eggshells as soon as you found out about my pregnancy, you treat me like I'm going to fall apart any second and I'm not, I'm fine, Jethro."

"You're not fine, Jen." Gibbs stated quietly.

"How do you know I'm not fine? How exactly do you know how I'm feeling? You're good but you're not that good, Jethro." Jenny replied bitterly, "you have no idea what I'm feeling."

"You're right, may not know what you're feeling but I know what I'm feeling."

His voice was barely above a whisper and Jenny was sure she had heard him wrong until she looked at his face, gone was the usual blank mask and in it's place was a look she had never seen on him before.

"I'm not fine." He admitted quietly, he shrugged his shoulders slightly and ran a hand roughly over his face, "we lost a baby Jen, no one's expecting either of us to be fine."

"It was seven years ago." Jenny muttered.

"Losing a child isn't like losing a watch Jen, you don't get over it, hell sometimes you don't even get through it, you just learn to live with it." He stepped closer to her and hesitantly placed his hands on her shoulders. "you never dealt with it and I haven't had time to, but pretending to be okay doesn't make it go away, rule twenty eight."

"I don't need any help." Jenny whispered, "I'm tired of everyone trying to 'help', I'm tired of everyone asking 'how are you doing?' And avoiding certain topics."

"We don't do that." Gibbs argued.

"Ziva mentioned that one of the witness on the case they were working was pregnant and every single person in the room stopped talking and looked at me like I was going to have a breakdown right there." Jenny reminded him.

She looked up at him and he immediately recognized the flash in her eyes, the look she was giving him was daring him to argue with her, to try and prove her wrong. He understood her frustration and he knew she hated being pitied for any reason but he didn't know how to help her.

"I'll talk to them." He offered, "they just don't know what to say, or how to help."

"They don't need to say or do anything, you don't need to say or do anything, every time someone asks how I'm doing or avoids a subject just makes me remember. I don't want to remember Jethro, I just want to forget, I know that makes me a horrible mother but I just want to forget."

"You're not a horrible mother, you just want it to stop hurting." Gibbs replied with a small shrug.

He understood what she was feeling better than she realized, he had gone through it with Kelly and he was going through it again. Somedays, when he was wondering exactly how different things could have turned out, he wished the he had never found out about their baby, it would have been so much easier to live in ignorance but that wasn't how it worked and he knew it.

"I loved her, Jethro, I still do but…"

"But life would be a lot easier if it didn't hurt so much to remember the past." Gibbs finished for her, "wanting the pain to go away doesn't mean you love her less, doesn't make you a bad mom, it makes you human, Jen."

He took a chance and moved to loosely wrap his arms around Jenny, he gently pulled her against his chest and waited for her to fight it. Instead of fighting it though she simply fell against him and wrapped her arms around him tightly.

They'd had more casual physical contact over the course of the past two weeks but it had always been more the brushing of their fingers when they handed each other something or a small squeeze of the shoulder or hand if one of the was trying to reassure the other, nothing like the way Jenny was clinging to him at that moment.

"It might help to talk about it." Gibbs suggested slowly.

"You, Leroy Jethro Gibbs want to talk?" Jenny asked incredulously, her words muffled against his chest.

"I want to know about my daughter." Gibbs admitted quietly.

"There's not much to know Jethro, it's not like I actually got to get to know her." Jenny reminded him with a small sigh, "what do you want to know?" She asked after a minute of silence

"Did you feel her moving at all?"

"I felt her kick for the first time at sixteen weeks, once she started she didn't stop." Jenny said, she smiled softly at the happy memory and tried not to focus on the bad parts.

Gibbs rested his chin on the top of her head and gently ran a hand up and down her back, he waited for a minute to see if she would add anything but when she remained silent he spoke up again.

"What about you?"

"What about me?" Jenny asked, she left her cheek resting against his chest but raised an eyebrow.

"Did you have any cravings or anything?" Gibbs asked hesitantly.

He wanted to know but he wasn't sure which questions would upset her or be too personal.

"Bananas, I couldn't get enough of them when I was pregnant with both of the girls but when I'm not pregnant even just the smell makes me sick to my stomach." Jenny replied, "actually that's what made me suspect I was pregnant with Lillian, I started craving bananas."

"Lillian?" Gibbs asked quietly.

"They needed a name… for the death certificate." Jenny whispered, "I'd had a few names picked out but that one seemed to fit the best, it's derived from the word lily which symbolized innocence, purity and beauty."

"Did she have a middle name?"

"Elizabeth." Jenny replied quietly, "I didn't really have a reason for it, I've just always liked the name."

"Lillian Elizabeth Shepard, it's pretty." Gibbs stated.

"Gibbs."

"What?" Gibbs asked.

He looked down at her in confusion but her forehead was still resting against his chest.

"Lilian Elizabeth Gibbs, I wanted her to have your name." Jenny whispered, her voice cracked slightly but she swallowed and refused to let the tears that were welling in her eyes fall.

Gibbs fought to swallow around the lump in his throat and pulled Jenny tighter against him, he didn't know what to say.

"Thank you." He finally whispered.

"You've never beaten around the bush before Jethro, don't start now."

"What do ya mean?"

"If you want to ask me something just ask it, you've never worried if it was too personal you've never been afraid to ask questions, don't change that now."

She knew it wasn't fair to ask him to live knowing nothing about their daughter, even though it hurt to talk about her Jenny didn't want him to be afraid to ask about whatever he wanted to know.

"Don't wanna make it hurt more." Gibbs stated, reading her mind.

As much as he wanted to know everything she was willing to share with him he didn't want to bring her more pain, he could understand wanting to numb the pain by never talking about it and he didn't want to be the reason Jenny had to be constantly reminded of what she had lost.

"She was your daughter too." Jenny responded shrugging her shoulders, "you deserve to know about her."

"Maybe another day." Gibbs replied.

He didn't want to add more stress to what was already guaranteed to be a stressful and emotional weekend.

"You sure you don't wanna take a nap?"

"I won't sleep even if I lay down, what if I watched a movie or something?" She compromised, "I can go to my place Sunday or Monday morning after the kids go to school."

She knew he was worried about her, she knew he was aware she didn't sleep, even just looking at herself in the mirror she could see that she definitely didn't look like she had six months ago, she was tired and stressed all the time and it showed. She had lost a good five pounds in the last month which was very noticeable on her already petit frame, if she weren't so stubborn she would probably even admit to herself that she needed to slow down a bit but she just kept ignoring the near constant state of exhaustion and cloud of stress around her.

She could understand why Gibbs was worried about her, but she was worried about him as well. He had been trying so hard to make sure that he was helping out around the house and with the kids that he had probably pushed himself further then he should have while his shoulder was still healing, she knew that he was sleeping just about as much as she was and that they were both still struggling to figure out how their relationship, be it what it may, and raising the kids would work.

They hadn't had any major disagreements on how to raise the kids, Jenny had been pleasantly surprised to find that they agreed on most things, and it helped that the kids were all very well behaved. Even though neither of them voiced it Jenny knew that although they were excited to meet Dani and have her with them they were a bit apprehensive that it would throw off whatever semblance of balance that they had found.

"What movie're you gonna watch?" Gibbs asked.

Jenny's arms were still wrapped around his waist, albeit much looser than before, and he wasn't going to be the first one to pull away.

"I don't know, it's been awhile since I've seen Casablanca, or maybe The African Queen." Jenny replied.

"If you watch African Queen I'll watch it with you." Gibbs offered.

Jenny pulled back and looked at him in surprise, in the ten years she has known him they had watch maybe two movies together, both times they had been distracted by other things before the movie had even finished.

"And just what do you think you'll be getting out of this?" Jenny asked in mock suspicion.

Gibbs raised and eyebrow at her and smirked, "Get your head out of the bedroom Jen, I just wanna watch a movie with my old partner."

"Alright." Jenny agreed.

She dropped her arms to her sides and stepped away from him, she tried to ignore the slight awkwardness, they had never really been awkward around each other but she wasn't sure how to proceed after spending the last ten minutes just standing in his arms.

"Why don't you get the movie set up while I make some popcorn." Gibbs suggested.

Gibbs watched as she nodded and took a step around him, he watched her go with a small smirk on his face, it had been a long time since he had seen even a hint of her witty side, he had missed it more than he realized.

And I'm back! I hope everyone had an awesome summer, here is the first chapter of Today's New Friends! Literally nothing has changed so I still own nothing :( (otherwise Jenny would still be on the show or Gibbs and Jack would be together but anyways…) I hope everyone who is in school has an awesome, and safe, year and for the rest of you it's finally fall! (as a ginger who is allergic to the sun this excites me!) Anyways I love to hear from you guys so please please review! Also feel free to make suggestions for my prompt collection Semper Fidelis.

~Katie