The time battered but kindly nurse looked up as he entered with a warm, tired smile.

"Hello there. Who are you looking for?"

He looked around the gleaming white reception of the hospital with years of built-up distaste. Rubbing a hand through his hair which was now liberally sprinkled with grey, he was astonished at the sudden sadness that ripped through his stomach. It had been years, decades even since they were as close as close could be. They hadn't kept in touch as much as he would have like the last couple of years but, he reasoned, such is the way of the world. Clearing his throat, he handed his creds over to the seasoned medic and murmured his instructions. A cloud of knowing sadness, albeit it second hand, rumbled across her eyes. She stood and beckoning him with a finger, walked him down a hallway and then another and then another without a word.

She'd seen enough of these visits to know when to keep her counsel.

She left him at the glass plate door with a soft squeeze of the shoulder. He managed to shoot her a smile of gratitude before his lips failed from the strain. There were two other rooms on either side of the one he stood outside, five glass cubes in total. A transparent exhibition of the human condition. Birth, life and death… with very little in between. There were tubes he noted with a frown, so many damn tubes. They swirled around the bed like snakes, pushing just enough venom into their victim to make them wish for death whilst cruelly tethering them to life. Clearing his throat, he reached out and waved a hand over the automatic sensor and the glass doors swooshed silently open a moment later.

Death, he reasoned, had it's own particular aroma.

Moving slowly to the bed, horror dogged him when his throat constricted painfully. The figure in front of him was a shadow of its former self. Where once there was a commanding presence, there was now a siren of feebleness. Where once there was a strong, defined jaw there was now a small double chin born of too much medication for much too long a time. Despite this… despite the way the body can decline without reprieve, there was still a sense that the mind imprisoned in that body was alive. Biting his lip, he moved to the right-hand side of the bed and looked down at the face that belonged to the person who had once been the most important influence in his life. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and placed his warm hand upon the figure's cold counterpart. The effect was like gasoline to an open flame. The feeble figure stirred from its cocoon, no doubt knowing its movements were coming to an end. A second later, the paper-thin eyelids twitched feebly in an attempt to open.

Bright, piercing blue eyes beamed into the room.

The younger man felt the breath in his throat stagnate. Those eyes… those x-ray eyes… were as they had ever been. The eyes that had seen so much, suffered so much and given so much were as bright as the day they had come into the world. Somehow, this made their inevitable and imminent departure from the world all the more painful. It was as if the eyes were screaming that they weren't done… they weren't ready to close for the final time. The dark pupils dilated as they struggled to make sense of the figure staring down at them. Eventually, familiarity bloomed in the irises and a faint smile crossed the man's face. His voice, when he spoke, was everything the younger man needed to hear.

It was home.

"DiNozzo."

White teeth gleamed in a bright, broken-hearted smile.

"Hey, Boss."

An all too familiar snort of a by gone era, albeit much fainter, wafted into the glass box.

"I think you earned the right to call me by my first name at this point."

Tony shook his head, feeling the profound twinge of his advanced middle-age dog him as he did so.

"You'll always be Boss to me, Boss."

The blue eyes fluttered temporarily shut in acquiescence. The machines beeped methodically and melodically in the background. With every passing second, the vitals those machines decried worsened and worsened. Having been in hospitals often enough to have a working knowledge of vital readings, Tony knew their time was short, very short… the clock said it was eleven fifty five p.m.

"Boss, I-"

Gibbs, ninety-two and ready to hang up his earthly boots, shook his head.

"Hush. I called you here for one reason and one reason only and I… I ain't got much time left. I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to babble on about us not seeing each other much recently. I don't want to hear that, Tony. I…"

His pallor shifted from desperately white to deathly white as he struggled to stay alert.

Cancer was the one foe that had gotten the better of Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

"I wanted you to know something. Something I never told ya. Something I should have told you as often as I could but never did. I can't kick it with regrets, Tony. I… I've had a good run and I know I'm about to see Shannon and my little girl before that clock strikes midnight and that makes me the luckiest man alive… but I don't want to see them with the regret that I got inside of me right now."

Tony, to his horror, felt tears prick the back of his eyelids.

For all the ups and downs, for all the intermittent periods of zero communication when life got busy, he had loved the man in the bed before him as best he could and knew Gibbs had done likewise. They were difficult, complicated men and he saw his future in the older man's demise. Swallowing, he nodded and resolved to let the man dictate the course of his own stage exit.

"What didn't you tell me, Boss?"

Gibbs, drawing a deep, painful breath, looked him square in the eye with the force of his much younger self. He stared at the man who he'd first met as a boy in a man's body. He stared at the man who had brought meaning, real meaning, back into his life when he thought all meaning was gone. He stared at the man who had stood beside him in gunfire and hellfire and everything in between. He stared at the man he had always known Tony would become.

"That I'm proud of you, Tony," he said softly. "That I'm proud of the man you've become. That I can die easy knowing that you will continue helping the men and women who protect and serve this country and that you will ensure that when your time comes… there'll be another Tony to take your place…"

His torso deflated at his last syllable, his body sensing he had done what needed to be done. The machines began to beep in earnest, greedily sensing that their time was nigh. Tired eyelids fluttered shut as Tony grabbed hard working hands in his own, tears flowing freely down his cheeks. It was Gibbs' last words, whispered but clear, that tore his heart in two and stitched it back together in one fell swoop.

"You gotta go now, son. You gotta gear up."

….

Random drabble because I'm feeling melancholy. Not my usual style and this is literally a thirty minute job but what the hell.

Inks x

….