A/N: I'm not sure where this came from, I just needed to write some serious angst, and I was sick of writing JD related stories. I'm very sorry for this, I just needed to get it out. Warning for coarse language. Please, review!
And I have now changed my username from primrose-lh to Scarlet-lh. Just pointing it out again.
Losing the Light
When she gets to his house, it is already dawn, the first rays of the sun tentatively creeping across the floor in the foyer as she opens the door. She hesitates in the doorway, hand trembling on the handle, then closes it behind her. Her lip is caught between her teeth, her hand curves around her neck. Eyes darting around the empty house. She looks lost, like a little child. Her hair is in a tangled mess, caked with mud and dirt, her face scratched and bruised. Wrist broken, her white shirt turned blood-red. Not her blood. Leroy Jethro Gibbs' blood. The very same Leroy Jethro Gibbs who just a few hours ago had saved her life at the expense of his own. He'd bled to death in her arms.
She looks away from the mirror on the wall, cannot stand to face herself. Walks through his hallway, stops at the basement door. Pushes the door open with her eyes closed, as though she hasn't yet decided if she can handle what's behind it.
But eventually she ends up walking down the creaking wooden steps.
Runs her hand over his newest project, it is not much, just a few beams. He hadn't done much. Maybe because they had spent most of their nights in D.C in her house; her bedroom.
She finds the drawing on the workbench, has to bite down on her lip to not scream. It's a beautiful drawing of a boat, the name Jenny written in slanting, black letters. She looks back at the wooden structure, then at the drawing again, and she makes her decision. She picks up a pen, adds a name next to hers. It now says Jenny & Jethro. She doesn't give a damn that it maybe not a suitable name for a boat. She vows she will finish his project, even though she doesn't know squat about boats. Even though the process might kill her.
She finds a bottle of bourbon and a sander, running sensitive fingertips over the rough wood. Sensations overtake her, and the bottle and sander hit the floor as she races for the stairs.
Wrenches the bathroom door open and throws up into the toilet.
She cannot handle it.
His bedroom, next. That's even harder, her eyes carefully avoiding the bed where they once made love. Her clothes and make-up still on top of the drawer. Sees a stack of photos, but doesn't touch them, not ready to see him yet.
She takes a shirt off a chair, presses her face into it and for just a moment it feels like she's back in his arms. She takes it with her, along with a worn Marines t-shirt.
She leaves, and locks the door behind her. He would have hated it.
She is surprised that she has managed to get back to her house alive; the way she had recklessly swerved through traffic would even have made Gibbs scared.
She attempts to head up the stairs, but her body is exhausted from no sleep in over twenty-four hours, and she stumbles and falls, hitting her side on the sharp edge of the step, but she doesn't feel the pain. She tries to push herself up with her broken wrist, but it folds underneath her, even though she is not conscious of the searing pain.
She catches her eyes in the mirror across the hallway. There's so much in her reflection, she can't even begin to describe what it is she sees. There's pain, blame, regret, disbelief, and a thousand other emotions she cannot name.
It's her fault. It is her fucking fault. Her idiotic mistake, his damn reaction to throw himself at her when he realized she was in the crosshairs.
If she closes her eyes, she can still feel his heavy body lying on her, his uneven breaths in her neck, his warm blood seeping through her shirt. She can hear her own scream in her ears, eventually drowned out by the rush of blood and adrenaline, the escalated beating of her pulse as she rolled him over. She sees his front covered in blood, his face pale; lips parted, eyes open and flickering, trying to focus his gaze on her. His blood slipping through her fingers as she feebly tried to stop it from escaping his body. She can still see his mouth moving, trying to tell her something, but she didn't listen – told him he'd be fine, and actually believed it herself. He would be fine. He'd have plenty of time to say what he'd meant to tell her. She was wrong. As his eyes glazed over, the last, shaking breath escaping him, she refused to accept it. Kept her hands on the bullet hole, kept whispering that he'd be ok, until Ducky's hand landed on her shoulder and in an unusually thick voice told her to let go. She collapsed. Her head buried in the crook of his neck for the last time, inhaling the scent of sawdust, coffee, blood and death. The combination made her feel sick.
Crawling up the stairs, practically dragging her battered and bruised body up to her bedroom, she feels a tremor behind her tongue, the sour taste of bile mixed with blood in her throat. Stumbling to her feet, she enters her bedroom on shaking legs, (they are going to fold under her soon) she grabs hold of the bedpost to steady herself.
She feels like a stranger in her own bedroom, it doesn't feel the same anymore without him. Her vision swims for a second, then she regains focus, at least for a little while. Sinks down on the tangled mess of satin sheets and pillows on her bed.
His things are still there, his jeans thrown on the floor under the window, discarded in haste, and a shirt tossed just as carelessly over a lamp. She doesn't have enough strength to remove them.
Slowly unbuttoning her shirt, stiff with dried blood (she tries not to think about it, but it is impossible not to), peels it off, strips off her jeans and doesn't look at the items. She might burn them later, or stuff them in a box somewhere where she doesn't have to look at them.
She finds a bottle of bourbon, also from two nights ago, opens it, sips it, but all it does is make her want to throw up again.
She switches to vodka instead; it takes away the pain without adding more. It burns its way down her throat, and wonders how much she has to drink until it numbs the pain. She's sure she will be dead before she reaches that amount.
She lets her body fall heavily back against the pillows, bottle in one hand and running the other through her dirty curls. She should shower, should wash away the dirt, blood and death that are still clinging to her skin, hovering in the air around her – suffocating her. But she doesn't trust her legs to carry her all the way to the bathroom.
Going to sleep is out of the question – every time she closes her eyes, he is lying dead before her. She picks dried blood from under her fingernails, the reek of death and him invading her nostrils, and she suddenly bolts toward the bathroom.
Throws up. And once again. Reduced to a crumpled, shivering, crying heap on the bathroom floor. She doesn't know when she had started crying.
She just wants this fucking nightmare to end. Because that's exactly what it is. A goddamned nightmare, because this can't possibly have happened.
She vomits again.
Stumbles back to the bed to find the bottle of vodka. Takes a mouthful to clear her mouth from the sour taste of vomit. She closes her eyes, pulls her lip between her teeth.
It doesn't feel real. She can't really comprehend what has happened.
It still feels like he's going to walk through that door any second, wrestle her down onto the bed and she will laugh, feel his muscles quiver as he holds himself up above her, his heart beat against hers, very much alive, his mouth capturing hers in a kiss that steals her breath away.
How can she possibly survive without his breath flooding her lungs?
The next couple of days are shrouded in a haze.
She drinks too much – vodka to numb the pain, coffee to stay awake. She wonders, if she goes to sleep, will she wake up?
Just getting through the day is a challenge; getting through the hour is an accomplishment.
Weeks, months, years later.
It doesn't go a day without her thinking about him, remembering, and crying herself to sleep.
The vodka has taken its toll on her, that and her self-hatred, no one really understands how much she blames herself, and one day her body cannot take it anymore.
Jenny Shepard dies alone in her bed, a photo of Jethro Gibbs crumpled in her cold hand.
Someone said: time heals all wounds. That person clearly had not lost the one you love more than life itself.
The End