A warm breeze swept through the streets of Washington DC, the looming chill withering away as the day went on. The winter months were coming to an end; spring was on the horizon, and the city's occupants were more than ready for the newfound warmth to overtake once again.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs stood in his basement with a sander in his hand, rounding off the end to his Sunday by working on his newest boat when he hears soft footsteps making their way down his staircase. He knows the pattern of her walk well enough to not spare a glance at her.

"It's to nice of a day to be inside, Jethro." She says, tone like but chastising.

"Not spring yet." He tells her, setting the sander down on his work bench before grabbing a towel to wipe the sawdust off from his palms.

She leans against the railing of the steps, watching intently as he patters around and rearranged his mess of tools back into their respective places.

"I forgot how dreary winters here could be," she tells him, "it had been a while since I'd seen a proper snow."

He glances over to her, finally initiating proper eye contact between the two. There's amusement dancing around in hers, and it takes a good bit of self control to refrain from smiling.

"Thinking about going back to California, Jen?"

A soft laugh comes from her, "Not in a million years. Besides, who's going to keep you warm in the winter?"

He cracks at her words, finally letting the chuckle he had been holding in go free. She laughs again to at the sound.

When they had returned to DC, two weeks after the events that took place in California, they had set her up with her own apartment for her and the girls. While he made it know they were more than welcome to move in with him, she was insistent that having something that belonged to her, and was in her real name was important. He didn't argue that.

In truth, the space between them was more than needed while he tried to navigate his feelings towards her, and the secrets she had kept from him for so long.

It had been just over a month of her living in the apartment when he found her making her way down into the basement late one evening, a bottle of bourbon in her hands and eyes filled with unshed tears.

The nights they had spent apart since then were few and far between, but there was an unspoken boundary neither were trying to push. They had jumped into something too quickly before, and neither were willing to make the same mistake again.

The girls rotated where they stayed. Some nights it would be in his spare bedroom, others it would be by themselves in her vacated apartment. Sometimes they disappeared completely. He let them come and go as they pleased.

"I think Iris might come over for dinner." She tells him, taking a few steps closer to him as he finishes organizing his tools.

"No Ivy tonight?" He questions.

Jenny shrugs, "She's out with friends."

He had known that she was much more of a party goer than she had led her mother to believe, but that was a secret for him and her sister to know.

Bonding with the two of them was a challenge in some ways and exceedingly easy in others. They confided in him at times. He suspects it's an attempt to build trust between them. Ivy was more mischievous than he guessed, but Iris - ever the more responsible - was a troublemaker in her own right. They were more like Jenny than he thought.

On cue, the sound of the front door slamming shut echoes throughout the home.

"Anyone here?" Iris shouts.

Jenny grins, staring at Gibbs with a wide smile as she yells back to her daughter, "Down here!"

Iris had only made it partially down the stairs before stopping, leaning over the railing in a similar fashion as her mother did only minutes before.

"Hey Gibbs," she says, "how about when you finish that boat, you make your next project a new car for me? Mines about beat."

He lets out a laugh, placing his hand on the small of Jenny's back and leading her gently towards the steps, "I'll get right on that, kid."

Iris laughs at his words, and hastily makes her way back up the steps, newly cropped hair bouncing against her shoulders as she does.

They're halfway up the steps when Jenny abruptly stops, turning on her heel and planting a chaste kiss against his lips.

He responds almost immediately, grinning against her as he does.

"What was that for?" He asks, placing a hand against her hip.

She smiles, "I'm just happy this is my life. Here, with you. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we're here, and our daughters are here, and we're all safe, and I'm so grateful."

A/n: Thank you all for reading. I debated having this story go one for longer, but I decided that this was the note I wanted to end it on. This was a story I wrote when I was in middle school, and I picked it back up almost ten years later to re write it. It's not the best thing out there, but I liked the idea of redoing it for fun.

That said, here is a quick disclaimer:

FanFiction requires you to suspend your disbelief to a certain extent. Not everything you read/write will be totally believable, but such is the fun of FanFiction. It allows people to write out moments they wished for. Not everything will appeal to everyone, but that doesn't mean you should ruin the experience for others or put writers down because it's out of the realm of possibility in the media you're writing about.

Keep on keeping on guys, another story is on the horizon.