The car was warm as the unmerciful rain lashed against the windows. He squinted through the onslaught and saw that, to his complete lack of surprise, not a thing had changed. He gripped the steering wheel tight, the knuckles that were protruding through as white as his ashen face. His stomach gurgled unpleasantly as he sat motionless, the car idling around him. Letting out a jaded sigh, he closed his eyes so tight they burned and breathed deeply. This was to be no routine house call, no pleasant social nicety. He hadn't graced that doorstep in…many, many years. The familiar guilt all rolled up in a fat layer of anger reared its ugly head as he tried to gather his thoughts. He had thought the long drive to his destination would have provided adequate time to think about what to say.
He was wrong.
He was very wrong.
When he threw open the door, the familiar sights and smells of his troubled adolescence hit him like a freight truck skidding frantically off a freeway. He blinked in the downpour, memories, fast and hard flooding him like an unstoppable dam. He saw in the corner of his eye, the bench where he'd first met…her. His gut did an unpleasant turn as he turned his back on the best bench he'd ever witnessed in his entire life. The white picket fences, even in the torrential weather, were the personification of the American dream. Everything that had been sacrificed for him seemed to shimmer accusingly in those short, wooden spikes.
He ran a hand over them as he moved slowly forward.
A small but sad smile threatened at the corner of his lips.
They were still sanded down every year and repainted.
He opened the gate and heard its familiar squeak down in his very core. He had wanted to oil the hinges so it would go away, but his mother…for some reason his mother had loved it. And so the squeak remained and as he walked up the flagged stone path, he was glad. The door was as he always remembered, always open but never opened. His eyes fell down over the years of regret they had born witness to. The last conversation that he'd ever had on the porch he stood upon bellowed in his ear drums as the sharp knife of regret twisted in his gut.
That knife twisted even deeper when he remembered that this visit had to be forced upon him.
If it were left up to him alone, he knew he would have left it until it was irrevocably too late.
He knocked a sombre knock, not his usual impatient rap and found himself holding his breath like some class of an imbecile. Exhaling slowly, shaking his head at his own histrionics, he waited in mounting trepidation. A part of him and no small part at that…wished the door would never open. Wished the solid wooden frame of his youth, that he had slammed more times than he cared to admit, would stand resolute against him. Because then…then it wasn't his fault. He'd tried, failed and could go home to lick his wounds in peace.
With copious alcohol to boot.
But that was not to be, because that door did swing open and the man behind it couldn't disguise his shock. The two stared at each other, droplets of rain felling hard and fast from his sodden hair, neither speaking. The wind whistled between them as they continued to stare into their likened features. Eventually, the homeowner surmounted his shock and raised a brow, opening the door wider still.
"Jethro."
The visitor smiled a painfully poignant smile as emotions exploded like dynamite within him.
"Dad."
….
A/N: This is from a request on another story, looking for a take on the Gibbs/Jackson relationship and all the regrets that are there! It struck me as a really interesting idea! It'll go from here.
_Inks
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