NCIS One-shots

Birthday Blues

Gibbs x Male!Reader (NO Y/N)

Warnings: Case Talk, Angst, Past Trauma, OC Death, Fluff

Summary: Your birthday had always been a day you wanted to avoid bringing attention to. Until a team of highly-trained investigators found a more relaxed way of celebrating.

The day you live to regret every year had arrived with a vengeance.

You haven't always hated your birthday. You used to count down the days leading up to it with excitement as apposed to the dread that is now present. The prospect of having friends and family around for your special days used to be the event of the year. May twenty-first used to be almost as magical to you as December twenty-fifth. But that was a thing of the past. Now, and for over a decade, the pomp and circumstance was the exact opposite of how you felt on this day. Such was to be expected when it made you feel even more like half a person then you already feel all the time.

A freak accident on the train tracks when you were nine had left you alone in a world you were used to exploring with your identical twin brother. Your parents' constant attempts at distracting you from the loss was what lead to the over-the-top birthday parties and week-long road trips to Disney or Universal. All of which angered you. They never even acknowledged that it was "the twins' birthday" or "the boy's day" Instead it was "Eli's Day" or "Your day" Your parents never even talked about your brother. Your mother would rather pretend that you were never a twin, even hiding away any pictures to the contrary. Your father was too busy drinking his own guilt from the event away to even have an intelligible conversation.

Klaus Andrew was his name. And his gravestone has been preeminently engrained into your mind. Every year on your birthday, You would sneak out of your second story window, shimmy down the drainpipe, and run across town in the dead of night to the church's graveyard. In the second row from the back, about halfway down the row, your heart would feel whole for the few hours you spend talking, praying, and then sleeping under the granite-etched face you haven't seen since you screamed while the doctors stopped compressions in front of you. With your parents were still on the way from their jobs, completely unaware of what they were about to walk into.

When Klaus first died, you would sleep with a hand-held mirror propped up on his pillow of the bed you shared. Neither of you liked sleeping alone. Leading one of the rooms meant to be your separate bedrooms to be you shared bedroom while the other was refashioned into an indoor playroom. You would stare into the mirror for hours at night, even talking to the mirror, trying to trick your mind into thinking Klaus was right next to you.

As time went on, you started to manipulate your face in different way to try and guess what Klaus would have looked like at random stages in life. You also developed more healthy coping mechanisms, no thanks to your parents. You used to sit out an extra outfit for him. Or pour him a bowl of cereal. Or slept with an outfit that smelled like him. As an adult, you still have and sleep with the teddy bear he used to carry everywhere. The same bear you had hidden in your closet when the day of his funeral came, wanting at least something to remember the brother Mom pretended didn't exist by. When you weren't sleeping, Teddy sat on your bedside table. It wasn't destructive and didn't hurt anyone. So, your therapist said it was about as healthy ad a coping mechanism could get. It didn't hurt that your Boyfriend didn't seem to mind at all.

Now here you sit, cross-legged on the barstool, staring once more in the mirror. Once more wondering if Klaus would look like you had he been given the chance to grow older. On the other side of the locked bathroom door, Jethro was sleeping soundly. His eyes darting ever so slightly in response to his dream. Work didn't start for another hour or so. Jethro only took ten minutes to get ready in the morning, so he could afford to sleep in. You, on the other hand, took over a half hour on your hair alone.