A/N: This is a little bit different than what I usually write. This is my favorite song on Demi Lovato's new CD, Unbroken; and when I heard it, this plot bunny bit and wouldn't let go.
It's slightly AU, but bare with me. There's slight Jibbs at the end, but this is mostly Jenny-centric. It deals with some domestic abuse, and alcoholism. There is some language.
It's three in the morning here. I apologize for any mistakes ahead of time.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but bits of the plot.
Four years old with my back to the door
All I could hear was the family war
A small child stands outside the door to the living room, her crimson hair up in two messy pigtails and her hands over her ears. Her mommy and daddy were yelling really loudly, and all Jenny wanted was for them to stop so that she could go in and watch her show on the television.
"Damn it, Bonnie," her daddy said, his voice loud and booming, a slight slur in his words. "Why can't you just listen, for once?"
"Jasper, you're being impossible!" her mommy cried, her voice desperate and tired, and Jenny frowned. She just wanted her mommy to smile—she never smiled anymore.
"Impossible?" her daddy asked, his voice becoming even louder, and Jenny shrank even more into the wall, her palms flat against her ears, but she still heard every sound.
"Jasper, don't raise your voice- unless you want Jenny to hear," her mommy said, and Jenny crept down the hallway, not making a sound.
She just wanted her mommy and daddy to be happy.
You're selfish hands always expecting more
Am I your child or just a charity ward?
"Jenny."
The little redheaded girl was now twelve, a blossoming girl. She was a rising star in her class work; her teachers were continually impressed with the child. She was polite, intelligent, a model student.
But they didn't know that she hid from a fractured home life. Her father drank, excessively, and her mother was a shell of the beautiful woman she once was. So, she threw herself into her schoolwork, trying twice as hard as every other student to be on the top.
To impress her father so he wouldn't lash out.
"Yes Daddy?" she asked, her voice steady as it left her throat even if she was quaking on the inside.
"How are your grades shaping up this semester?" he asked, a glass of scotch in his hand as he looked down at the papers on his thick mahogany desk, a cigar burning near his left hand.
"I'm top of the class again," she said, a genuine smile touching her pale cheeks- and she hoped maybe, just maybe, he'd bestow a compliment on her this time.
Instead, he frowned, still looking at the paper in front of him. Her heart fell to her toes, and her smile shut down, leaving behind merely the ghost of an expression.
"I expect this all the time, Jennifer," her father said, his eyes never leaving the sheet of white paper to meet hers. "You must be the best."
"Yes Father," she said, the loving term of daddy not even coming to her mind to use. There was no love radiating from the man sitting behind the big desk. "Of course."
She walked out of the room, and it was a long time before she smiled again.
You have a hollowed out heart
But it's heavy in your chest
I try so hard to fight it
But it's hopeless
Hopeless
You're hopeless
"Jasper, are you drunk?"
Fifteen year old Jenny cringed whenever she heard her mother use those words.
Because they were often the first words she heard when she got home from school, and her activities, and the last words she heard before she went to bed at night. And she was sick of those being the only words her mother said to her father anymore. And she was tired of only hearing her father's rude, scathing replies in response to her mother's inferences.
She was the only girl in her grade whose parents fought over her dad's drinking. And she hated it.
She barely talked about her family in school. Everyone else at her pricy, private school talked about family vacations to expensive, nice places, or new toys or gifts.
All Jenny thought about was how school vacations were spent making sure her father didn't drink himself into oblivion, or hit her mother.
"Bonnie, leave me alone," her father would reply, brushing over her questions. "I would prefer to leave the interrogations at work, please."
This time, though, her mother was putting up a fight.
"You also don't have a fifteen year old daughter at work, Jasper," Bonnie replied, her voice sharp and crisp, cutting through Jasper Shepard's drunken armor. "You need to shape yourself up. You need to start acting like a father, not a drunken buffoon."
Jenny hid herself further in the stairway, making sure she couldn't be seen. She knew her father's eyes must be glowing with rage; they always did when her mother crossed a line her father didn't like.
Jenny winced at the stinging slap she heard her father give her mother, and she squeezed her eyes shut tightly at her mother's muffled cries. Covering her mouth with her hand, she moved silently to her room, locking the door behind her.
The next day, her mother's make-up was thicker on her left cheek, but Jenny didn't comment.
No one would ever believe that Bonnie Shepard, the woman of pearl necklaces and peach sweaters and perfect hair would be the victim of domestic abuse.
Especially since her husband was Jasper Shepard.
Oh father
Please father
I'd love to leave you alone
But I can't let you go
Oh father
Please father
Put the bottle down
For the love of a daughter
Oh
Jenny was seventeen when she came home to her father drunk and her mother gone.
He held a half-empty bottle of vodka in his hand, and he had clearly already consumed something else before he'd started in on the vodka. Jenny swallowed, setting her schoolbag by the front door and stepping hesitantly into the smoke-filled study.
"Dad?" she asked, coughing at the cigar stench. "Where's Mom?"
"Store," he said, the word dripping from his lips in a slur.
"Dad, you've had enough," Jenny said, easily taking the bottle from his loosened hands and locking it into the liquor cabinet. He protested, but was too drunk to do anything.
Clumsily, since he was so much bigger than she was, Jenny helped her father to one of the large armchairs, setting him in it. She covered him in a blanket, chewing on her lip as she watched him groan.
"Please, Daddy, you need to stop this," she whispered, her voice breaking. "If you love me, your only daughter, you'll stop this, for me."
Her only response was a loud snore.
It's been five years
Since we've spoken last
And you can't take back
What we never had
Jenny was twenty four when her father spoke to her after five years.
They'd had a falling out when she was a sophomore in college after she'd called him out on breaking her mother's wrist when he was drunk. He'd denied it, and they'd stopped talking- not that they'd talked much before. She still called her mother, and subsequently learned more about him through her- but that was it.
Her dad called her the night before she was meant to receive her bachelor's degree from college.
The conversation was short, almost business-like. She was almost positive her mother had put him up to it because she was sick of them not talking.
She didn't believe him when he said he was proud of her. She knew he didn't care; he was too wrapped up in himself to notice her accomplishments. She knew this.
But she accepted his words without a fight.
She just knew she couldn't trust a thing he said.
Oh, I can be manipulated
Only so many times
Before even I love you
Starts to sound like a lie
The words were foreign, leaden on her tongue. They'd rarely been spoken towards her father in her household; only her mother had received those three words from her.
But her mother was dead now, killed by cancer, and her father needed someone- or at least, he needed someone until he could drown his 'sorrows' in a bottle.
She swallowed, drawing up the courage to say those three words.
"I love you," she said, her voice not much above a whisper outside of the hospital room where the nurses were attending to her mother's body. Her dad barely noticed, shrugging slightly as he stared at the ground- probably trying to decide which bottle to consume.
The words burned like fire in her throat, and that's when she realized those words felt like lies- those syllables felt like falsehoods.
And she realized that that truth didn't really hurt as much as she thought it might.
You have a hollowed out heart
But it's heavy in your chest
I try so hard to fight it
But it's hopeless
Hopeless
You're hopeless
Oh father
Please father
I'd love to leave you alone
But I can't let you go
Oh father
Please father
Put the bottle down
For the love of a daughter
The house was silent when she pushed the door open. But the light was on in his study, and she found him there with a bottle, drowning himself in the alcohol.
Not a surprise.
"Dad, you should get outside," she said, leaning against the door jam. He shrugged, lifting the bottle up and taking an effortless sip- like he was drinking water instead of scotch.
"Don't want to," he said, looking at her with watery green eyes- only of the only traits they shared, both physically and personality-wise.
"Dad, please," she said, and he shook his head, looking back into the fire. "For me?"
She didn't know why she thought that would work- because, not surprisingly, he shook his head again.
"I just want to be alone, Jenny," he said, and she sighed, pushing off of the doorframe.
"Fine," she said, turning away. "You can be alone all you want. I'm done, Dad. You're hopeless."
Don't you remember
I'm your baby girl
How could you push me out of your world
Lie to your flesh and your blood
Put your hands on the ones that you swore you loved
"You hit her, Dad!" Jenny cried, throwing up her hands.
Another night, another argument.
"You don't know anything about my relationship with your mother, Jenny," Jasper replied, defending himself. "You were only a child."
"I wasn't a child when I was fifteen, Dad, and watched you slap her!" Jenny countered, her normally pale face flushed in anger. "You hurt her- and you were supposed to love her!"
"You don't know anything Jennifer!" her father roared, his face red with anger and annoyance. "You can't understand anything- and it isn't your business to! I loved her!"
Jenny opened her mouth to speak, but her father's palm connected with her face before any words could leave her mouth. Holding her stinging cheek, she looked at her father, tears coating her lashes and filling the corners of her eyes.
Without a word, she turned and walked away.
She wasn't his daughter anymore.
Don't you remember
I'm your baby girl
How could you throw me right out of your world
So young when the pain had begun
Now forever afraid of being alone
Her father was dead- killed either by his own hand or an enemy's. Either way, a part of her was glad the nightmare was gone.
She'd settled into NCIS easily- and she'd settled into her boss even easier. He was handsome, rugged, breath-taking. She connected with him so easily- she didn't know what it was, but something drew her to him.
But she didn't want to fall in love with him- she couldn't have a love like her parents; she couldn't have what her father called love. She wouldn't survive it.
But Jethro was so different- he was everything she could ever want. But something held her back, wouldn't let her give him that vulnerability.
And she knew it was her father, and his memory.
The nightmare that haunted her footsteps.
Oh father
Please father
I'd love to leave you alone
But I can't let you go
Oh father
Oh father
Please father
Put the bottle down
For the love of a daughter
For the love of a daughter
Jenny stood at the grave sight, looking at the headstone.
It was practically barren; it merely gave dates and an untrue description of the man her father had been. She swallowed, her eyes tracing the block lettering of her father's name. Her chest hurt a little.
She had come here to give her father up. To let his ghost be at peace, and rest here- to save herself from going insane from the devil on her shoulder that held her father's voice.
"Goodbye, Father," she said, her voice so soft even the wind couldn't carry it. "I've got to let you go now. I hope the bottle isn't haunting you still."
She stood and let the words soak into the grassy ground in front of her, let the meaning reverberate throughout the plot. When she felt it was sufficient, she turned, and walked away.
Wrapping her fingers around those of her silver-haired lover's, she squeezed gently.
The love of a daughter just hadn't been strong enough this time.