AN: I started this a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I'm also not sure if I'm going to write a follow-up or not so it's currently marked as in-progress.
Keeping His Promise
Jethro knew his mood wasn't going to improve when even sanding his boat couldn't clear his mind. The bourbon wasn't working too well either. He knew he should be sleeping; he had a funeral to attend tomorrow. But there was a woman who wouldn't leave him alone.
He'd almost told her that day.
Her first day back and the words "I missed you, Jen" could so easily have been the words he longed to say. Just one quick change to the verb and six years of denial would be down the drain. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing.
When she'd given her answer, "Don't make this difficult" he'd seen a glimmer of Paris in her eyes, a glimmer of Marseille and London and Positano. A glimmer of something that said maybe—maybe—her answer was a professional white lie; that the answer he was looking for would break through if he just pushed a little. Maybe if he hadn't been preoccupied with finding his agent's killer he would have.
Maybe the glimmer was nothing more than wishful thinking. Maybe the answer she'd given had been her final one. Maybe she said "No off the job" and meant it.
He wasn't going to find out.
"You lied to me, Jethro," a familiar voice complained. "You broke your promise."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jethro answered aloud to the empty basement.
"Don't give me that, Leroy Jethro Gibbs," the young redhead said as she stepped from the shadows. "You know exactly what I mean."
"If you're here to tell me I screwed up with Jenny you're a little late, Shannon."
"Don't you remember the night Linda left you?" his first wife continued, ignoring the interruption. "When you emptied a bottle trying to forget that she said you were a lost cause as a husband?" Jethro winced at the mention of his first ex-wife but he kept quiet. "You were sprawled on the floor in this very spot when you swore on my grave and our daughter's that if you ever met a woman you could love like you loved me you'd never let her go."
Jethro closed his eyes, remembering the moment. It was one of the few things he could recall clearly from that night. He'd been even more intoxicated than he was now.
"She left me."
"And you just let her walk away? I think that falls under the category of letting her go."
"Maybe she wasn't the one," Jethro said, more to convince himself than Shannon.
"Do you really believe that?" Shannon asked the question rhetorically. She already knew the answer.
"You wouldn't have done that," Jethro countered. Shannon smiled sadly.
"You're right, Jethro, I would never have left you. But Jenny did and even though you'll never admit it there's a part of you that loves her for it. In many ways that woman is my opposite and that's exactly what you need. You saw Linda and Diane and Stephanie in terms of me but you never looked at Jenny that way."
Jethro knew she was right. Shannon hadn't been capable of hurting him. Jenny, however, could hurt him at just the right moment. When pain was what he needed to remind him of his humanity.
"Where were you six years ago?" he asked grumpily. How much happier would he have been if he'd known Jenny was the one? Would that knowledge have been enough to make him find her?
"You didn't know all this back then," Shannon explained easily. "It took a lot of thought for you to figure this much out, Jethro. And you were blind-sided in Paris; it's not as if you'd considered any of this before. You knew you loved her but you didn't know why until the day she walked back into your life. I'm dead, after all. I can't tell you what you don't already know."
Jethro looked up to respond but his dead wife was nowhere to be found. His eyes took in his basement again as if he had only just entered the room. He glanced from the frame of the Kelly to the bottle of bourbon. And then, without bothering to put anything away, he crossed the room to the stairs. His destination was the sofa he spent his nights on when he wasn't passed out beneath the boat.
He had a funeral to attend tomorrow; he needed to sleep. And later, after Kate was laid safely to rest, he had a promise to keep.