While she was dying

A/N: This is another sad JIBBS oneshot. This 'genre' is all I ever write for JIBBS now because I love it.

This one takes place while Jenny is dying from her gunshot wounds in the diner when someone shows up to stay with her in her final moments. We all know who she wants! There's only one person who loves her more than a friend or 'Mommy.'

I hope you've got tissues, Angels because you'll need them.

She can feel death closing in around her, like a strong hand wrapping around her throat and squeezing her windpipe, cutting off her air supply. This is the way she'd always wanted to go: in a hail of bullets, quickly, with a certain silver haired and blue eyed agent beside her. She wanted to go quickly with one bullet going directly to her heart but no, she has to suffer slowly and painfully. Pain ripples through her as her own blood pools around her. She can feel herself fading slowly when the sound of her name being screamed, faded and from far away, reaches her ears.

"JEN!"

There's only 2 people in her life who call her that: Ziva, the young woman she came to love as a friend and sister and Jethro, the man she travelled the world with and has loved for the past 9 years. But only Jethro would scream her name like that, in pure anguish and agony. She lets out a loud cry of pain as she's moved onto a lap, pain reawoken throughout her body.

"Jen, hold on for me okay?" She hears Jethro beg tearfully. She sighs slightly, feeling blood coating her lips. "I..I can't." She gets out before slipping a blood covered hand into his, Jethro squeezes her hand, not saying anything about her bloodied hand.

"Yes you can, Jen. You're Jenny Shepard, the girl who took a round to the thigh, the girl who walked with glass in her foot for two weeks and didn't say anything, you're the girl who has been shot at and stabbed more times than I care to admit, you're the girl who became the first female director of an armed federal agency, you can do anything, including fighting to stay alive, you haven't come this far to die from a few bullet wounds, just a little longer, Jen, please." Jethro tells her. She's laying with her head in his lap so she's staring up into his bright blue eyes, the eyes that can decipher if she's hiding anything from him, and for the most part, he just has to look at her to know she was hiding something from him. She knows she has to at least lie to him in order to make her impending death somewhat easier for him to accept. 

"O...okay, Jethro, I'll h...hold on." She tells him as she watches tears roll down his face. She's never seen Jethro cry before and she hates it that she's making him cry. She can feel her blood pouring from her various wounds, covering her, her clothes, the floor and now Jethro. Jethro squeezes her hand tighter as she lets out a high pitched whimper, much like a dog does when it's kicked. "You'll be okay, Jen. I promise." He whispers to her even though it's her and Jethro alive in the diner, well she's alive for now.

She smiles up at her former partner and lover. He's always been good at convincing her that everything will be okay when 90% of the time it's not. A laugh, and blood, escapes her lips.

"D...don't l...lie to m...me, Jet...Jethro." She says in a raspy voice, her voice becomes weaker and weaker with each word that she says.

"I'm not lying, Jen, you're going to be fine. Much like DiNozzo didn't have permission to die, neither do you, not today, not for a very long time." Her former boss barks at her in the voice she hasn't heard him use since her probie days, it's nice to hear it one last time. She sighs again and nods her head, a smile spreading across her blood stained lips.

"Jethro, I ha...have some..something to t..tell you." Her voice is fading quickly, it's so quiet that pretty soon, even Jethro won't be able to hear what she's saying. Jethro leans his head to her lips so he can hear what she has to say. "Tell me, Jen, I'm listening." He encourages her.

How can she tell him she still loves him as she is dying? It won't change anything between them. Telling him she lives won't heal her gunshot wounds, or her illness but he deserves to know before she dies right in front of him, he deserves at least one happy moment to remember her in her final moments.

"I...I love you, L...Leroy Jeth...Jethro Gi... Gibbs. I've ne...never st...stopped... l...loving y...you" She say to him before his lips cover her own blood stained one in what will be their last kiss. The one true love of her life pulls away from her lips, his own now covered in her blood. "I love you too, Jennifer Shepard, always have, always will." Her former Marine says, tears she's been holding back spill from her rapidly fading emerald green eyes. 

"I'm sorry about Paris." She whispers as she feels Death closing in around her again. Even though they've both apologised about Paris: her leaving, him not running after her, she feels like she had to apologise one last and final time. Jethro shakes his head. "No, don't be sorry about Paris. Paris, Marseille, London, Serbia, Positano, Prague and everywhere else we went together was the best time of my life because I was with you, the love of my life." He says with tears once again falling down his face and falling on her blood soaked hair, his voice fades out slowly, muffled, sounding as if he's underneath water.

Darkness starts to creep the edge of her vision, she can feel her skin growing cold, her face draining of colour. She's staring up at Jethro, her true love, the love she would never marry or spend forever with, but at least she's spent the last hour of her life with him.

"I love you, Jen." She sees his lips moving and can just about read his lips before her life drains out of her, death winning, leaving her a colding corpse in the arms of her former partner, lover and agent.

Leroy Jethro's lips and ice blue eyes are the last thing Director of NCIS Jennifer Shepard sees before death takes her away from this world.

NCIS Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs knows his former partner and lover is dead when the light goes out of her emerald green eyes. He lets out a howl as he buries his face in her colding chest, sobs wracking his body. The former marine knew that she wouldn't make it, that much he knew, but he didn't know she'd give up so easily, if he knew Jennifer Shepard, and he did, she wasn't a woman to give up, she was taught to fight until she couldn't anymore. He thought she had a hell of a lot more fight in her but maybe he was thinking about her from 8 years ago when she would put him on his ass.

"I love you, Jen, I love you." He says through his sobs, kissing her cheek, her forehead and finally her cold, bloodstained lips. He can't believe how cold she is already after only being dead a few minutes. He doesn't want to let her go, leave her alone in the diner but he needs to call someone, preferably Ducky, tell them that Jen is dead, he knows it'll destroy the good doctor, and the 'kids' especially Tony, Abby and Ziva, he has to be an agent, not a grieving man who just watched as the second love of his life died in front of his very eyes but be an agent can be damned for a little while.  

He can be agent Gibbs later, right now he just wants to be Jethro. He presses another kiss to her cold lips and sighs, nothing he does will bring her back. He couldn't save her from the fate she had succumbed to.

He couldn't save Shannon and Kelly from the car crash that claimed their lives, he couldn't save Tony from getting the plague, he couldn't save Kate from Ari's bullet, he couldn't save Paula Cassidy from getting blown up, he couldn't save Jen from death. She was his partner for a long time and he couldn't save her.

He couldn't save the love of his life from death. 

Who is he if he couldn't save his partner and former lover from getting shot and dying in the middle of nowhere with only him to witness her die?

A\N: This is longer than the handwritten version because I added the Gibbs POV after I finished writing Jenny's. As of now, this is the only other completed JIBBS oneshot I have to publish. I have another one to finish but it's very messy and I have to sort it out.

Hope you're having a happy New Year, Angels. Enjoy.