This is just a thought that I've been entertaining...hope it doesn't suck! Maybe Jenny-centric, heck if I know. And very, very, very, very angsty and depressing and everything else that makes me actually cry a little. Review please!

K for Kids

Jenny Shepard didn't want kids. Rather, she knew that it was far too late in her life to have any.

Most would immediately comment on how she wasn't that old. And how if she really wanted any there was other ways in which didn't require the use of her body. Adoption. Baby Mama's.

Still a no.

Why? We would ask so curiously, when in her reality the subject was anything but light.

Because of my job, she anwers, this time truthfully. We pass it off as that she works too much. Our minds want to accept that. So we move on, ask for the waiter to please bring us more breadsticks, and change the conversation to a more open matter.

And later that night, as Jenny gets into an empty bed, her thoughts go back to our conversation topic, and the real reasons she doesn't want kids.

Once upon a time, she was thrilled at the thought of a white picket fence future, filled with soccer games, recitals, and a man to kiss her when she came home everyday. Hell, even a dog would have been a nice touch.

And then her Father, whom she depended upon emotionally to be her one and only rock, a sanctuary in her times of need, was taken from her. He was murdered in cold blood, and then she had nothing, no one, and on top of it all, they had declared it a suicide.

It was a slap in the face, a punch in the gut, and she made the decision the moment the death certificate was signed to take matters into her own hands. To get the revenge her Daddy deserved.

She was so driven. She thought about it more than anything else, and all those previous thoughts of dogs and fences were thrown out the window. Jenny enrolled in FLETC, went through the motions, all along thinking of how it would feel to put a bullet in Rene Benoit's head.

And then she met a man who changed everything. He hit her like a ton of bricks and actually made her focus on something other than death.

And his name was Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

Being his probie was not enjoyable, let me tell you that. And she was a woman, too. The chauvanistic bastard could treat her like shit and then offer to help her get out of a car, becuase that's just the way her was.

And she loved it.

He pushed her in ways she never thought possible and then when they were assigned to Europe as partners, he pushed her in a very different way.

Safe to say they were intimate by the second night.

When she was with Jethro, really with him, almost all thoughts of The Frog were gone from her mind. And a few months into their relationship, she actually let herself daydream about a future other than the one chosen. One that included everything she ever wanted before her father...

It went on like this for a few more months before she realized they had been like this for almost a year. This close, this beautiful.

But the skeletons she had always seemed to rattle at times, scaring her shitless in a way she never imagined. And that's why she never told him. Fear. Just like how she later guessed he felt about his daughter, his first wife.

The day Morrow called about a job promotion that could put her well on her way to where she had previously wanted to be, she accepted it without hesitation.

And just like that, the kids, the white picket fence, went poof.

After she left Jethro, children were never thought about. It just wasn't an option anymore.

Only after she had become director, watched him with that little boy, seen their 'daughter' on the bullpen screen and finally suceeded in killing that damned man had she felt the remorse. The pain, in which only came with a loss so severe you couldn't put a name on it.

She had lost a future, and she had chosen it.

That's what hurt the most.

But even like now, as she lay in bed, darkness surrounding her, did she have the real ability to dream, one she thought she had lost long ago.

Jenny dreamed of a little girl with red curls and blue eyes that could pierce your soul. A baby boy with a scruff of dark hair and sparkling green eyes.

And there, thinking about what a future she just might of had, she began to cry. Sobs wracked through her body that she just couldn't control, as she mourned for something never possesed. It was almost as bad as losing her father, leaving Jethro.

But to think all of this could be triggered by a simple conversation topic? Well, I would have never guessed that at all.