Title: The Charm Bracelet
Warnings: AU! Slight Ducky/Gibbs if you go looking for it (but I didn't write it that way...)
Summary: Gibbs has a charm bracelet for each of his children.
Rating: K+ for pure fluffiness.
Word count: 593
Shannon had bought him the golden watch chain before he went on his last deployment. She added a little girl head charm and had "Kelly" engraved into it with the year of her birth added below.
He wore it everywhere and everyday while he was gone, looking at it often. In a war rugged land it was his one and only saving grace. Than the news of their deaths reached him, and he had the year engraved on her charm before putting the chain away. And the painful memories that went with it.
Then, years later Tony and Abby came into his life and they slowly tore down the bitter walls he had built around his heart. Tony with his constant chatter, love of movies and desperate need of approval (and discipline) and Abby with her happy attitude, goth looks and her need to someone to listen (even when it was sometimes painful to listen to her babbling...)
The chain, after a year and a half of fighting it, made a reappearance and two new charms where added, one with "Tony" and one with "Abby" and their birthdays below their names.
He began wearing the charm again, not telling anyone the symbolism behind it but he knew that it was there. On the nights when they finished a bad case and he worked on the boat, he could feel the chain against his body even as the alcohol worked its way through his body.
And than Caitlin "Kate" entered the scene. It took Kate a year and a month before she gained her own charm. She was the serious to Tony's clown.
About that time Timothy "Tim" became his. He was timid and smart and computer wise, everything that Gibbs was not, but somehow he still managed to gain his own charm.
Than they lost Kate and he was once more forced to add another date to a charm. Losing Kate almost tore his children apart. Tony started drinking and went after a new girl each night, Abby stopped wearing her make up and her blaring music changed into deafening silence. Timothy started doubting his place again and almost left.
That's when Jenny decided to force a new daughter on him. Ziva. She earned her charm six months into her "new assignment." And even after she left and everyone thought she was dead- except her four siblings you understand- he refused to add that second date to her charm. He knew she was still alive out there somewhere.
He doesn't know that I know this, but there's nothing that happens in this building that I don't know about.
Which is why, watching his kids, sit by his hospital bed I pill out the chain to show them how much they mean to him.
Tony and Kate's charms are first, the twins and the oldest. Always competing against each other even in death. Than Ziva, the second oldest, always pushing bounds and picking on everyone else. Tim, the "troubled" middled child, than Abby the spoiled youngest who everyone else takes care of. Kelly's is last and its in that moment that it finally dawns on them- he loves and cares about them as much as he did his own birth daughter.
And none of them would have ever had it any other way.
The End