Author's Note: Heyo - this is my first NCIS LA piece. I quite adore the characters, but I'm not sure I yet have their voices down just yet. Please consider this an early effort and it feels right, great. If not, well hopefully next time I'll nail it. The more eps the better, right?
This takes place after 1x19 - Hand to Hand. There's a tid bit of coarse language, but nothing too forewarned though, I love bringing on the angst and the mental torment. ;)
Feedback is always appreciated.
It's a few minutes after the sound of bullets hitting walls – and various other solid and not necessarily solid objects – finally stops when she comes around the corner and sees that it's not quite over after all.
She feels her body (she's willing to call it her instincts) take over for her shocked mind and then there's a blinding blast of light, an echoing cracking noise and a small, but not unpleasant jerk in her hand.
And now it's over.
One man is alive. The other isn't.
Both because of her.
She looks down at the body on the ground, taking in the perfectly round bullet hole in the back of the would-be killer's skull. A tendril of bright red liquid seeps away from him, snaking its way across the ground, towards her steel-toed boots.
The benefactor of her excellent shot, her often partner and always teammate G Callen turns to her. He offers a small uneasy smile, part of it nerves, part of it sheepish glee that somehow – almost inexplicably – he's once again, survived.
"Kensi," he breathes, just a hint of disbelief in his tone. He looks like he wants to hug her, but he doesn't dare move. "Thanks."
She nods and offers a smirk that she doesn't feel. "Anytime."
He puts his foot out and nudges the body, taking in the precise nature of the bullet hole (and also, though he wouldn't admit it to anyone, verifying that his attacker is indeed dead. In his world, one can never be too safe). "Nice shot."
She shrugs, doesn't reply, simply re-holsters her Sig, already thinking about the sit-down she's going to have to have with Nate when they get back to HQ.
Because per Hetty's rules, no matter how clean the kill, every dead body requires some one on one time with the team shrink Nate Getz. It's just how it is and really, there's no point in trying to get out of it so she figures she might as well just go with it.
Go with it and dance the dance.
"That your blood?" Callen asks her, pointing to the sleeve of her white shirt. He takes half a step towards her, reaching out a hand towards her.
She glances down and sees a fine spray of red drops going up her left arm. She runs a hand across the bulletproof vest she's wearing and touches her sleeve. She shakes her head. "No. I don't know who it belongs to…" her voice trails off as the uncertainty hits her like a sledge hammer.
She has no idea who this blood belongs to.
God. Oh, God.
He's about to say something, but stops when they both hear footsteps approaching. Suddenly, her Sig is out again and whatever frantic thoughts she'd been having slip away.
Yeah, instincts is probably a good word for it.
"Everyone okay?" a voice calls out to them. "Kensi? G?" They both exhale when they see Sam Hanna barreling towards them like a scared mother bear. His eyes are wide and worried. They share a look of amusement and then Callen nods.
"We're fine, Sam," he answers. "I almost wasn't." He motions towards her and then towards the ground. She fights back on an urge to fidget uncomfortably. She can feel both of their eyes on her and it's more than a little unsettling.
She wants to remind them that she's been doing this awhile. No big deal.
There's no point in even trying. These two, they respect her, think the world of her, but they still protect her like a little sister. Often much to her annoyance.
She changes the subject, "Did we get them all?"
"Yeah," Sam replies. There's something hanging in his voice, something that suggests that there isn't anyone else alive out there.
Then, as if remembering, "Wait, what about Deeks? Is he…"
"No, he's fine."
"Good," she answers. She tries to keep her voice flat because she knows where they'll go with even the slightest inflection.
She needn't have bothered; they go there anyway.
"So you are interested," Callen announces, seemingly wholly satisfied with himself. He's been on about this idea of her having a thing for their LAPD liaison for weeks. Sam isn't much better.
"No," she shoots back immediately. "I had just forgotten for a moment that he was here with us." She re-holsters the Sig again, but leaves her hand on the butt of the gun. Just in case.
"Uh huh," Sam grins and she fights back an urge to slap them both. Sometimes having your only family be the people you work with can be a giant pain in the ass. They know far too well how to push your buttons.
She gives them both a pointed glare and then steps past them, on the way out the door.
"I don't think she liked you saying that," she hears Sam tell Callen.
"I'm just trying to help her see the light," Callen answers.
She rolls her eyes and then exits outside and – much to her continued annoyance - is immediately blinded by a flash of sunlight.
"See the light," she mutters to herself.
Apparently she had forgotten that it was still morning in the City of Angels.
It's easy to forget that when you're trying to make sure you hit your shot, she thinks.
Hit it or the bad guy probably will.
She reminds herself that the bad guy is dead and Callen isn't.
She did good.
She did her job.
She'll still have to talk to Nate.
"Hey," she hears LAPD officer Marty Deeks say to her as he approaches.
"Hey," she answers back.
"You okay?"
She gets sick of hearing that question after awhile, but she's kind of used to it as well. They all ask each other it after every raid, every bust, every fight.
It's all just part of the dance.
She forces a smile – maybe even makes it slightly flirty (and hopes that Sam and Callen are still inside and don't see it). "Yeah, good. You?"
"Yeah, good."
Ah, so he knows the dance, too.
They share another almost polite smile, the high sun above Los Angeles blinding them both.
Absently, she reaches into her pocket and extracts her sunglasses. She slides them on and closes her eyes.
There are patterns in NCIS Special Agent Kensi Blye's life that she knows and understands well.
Some of them are personal routines – the whole getting up in the morning and getting going kind. Most days, she does that before she's even all that terribly clear of who she is.
She's not a morning person and anything more than five plus five before ten AM is likely to be a daunting task, but her patterns and routines, her body and mind knows them well and executes them flawlessly.
Giving an after-action report, that's another routine for her.
It's a whole "okay and then what" kind of situation.
She lays out where they were, talks about positions and vantage points. She recalls how many gunshots she heard, says she's pretty sure she fired about six bullets all said. No, she answers, she's not sure how many kills she had.
Ballistics will answer a few of those questions later on, but it hardly matters because she is certain of one thing – she had at least one kill.
"All right, good. I want you to speak to Nate," Hetty tells her, like it's the first time they've ever had this conversation.
Automatically, she nods. "Of course," she replies, voice quiet. Her head is just a bit lower than usual, intentionally avoiding Hetty's eyes. There's a deep concern in them, she knows and it's a worry – a very simple and human emotion – that she can't bear to see.
This is part of the dance, too. Their specific one anyway.
Their relationship, it's unlike anything she's ever had before and while in some ways she gravitates towards it, in many others, she hides from the parental intimacy it promises.
"Unfortunately, he's not here today," Hetty continues. "He's been asked to testify in a case so he'll be out of the office for the rest of the afternoon."
She looks up, just a bit thrown off. There's never been a time before when Nate wasn't immediately available for their "conversation". "So, what do I do?" she asks, aware that she suddenly sounds very young.
"You take the rest of the afternoon off. Enjoy the sunlight."
"Oh."
Somehow that option had never occurred to her.
"Is there a problem?"
She doesn't answer for a moment, probably because she can feel Hetty's eyes on her, intense and piercing. Quite involuntarily, she adjusts herself in her seat- crossing and re-crossing her legs a few times before finally settling with leaving them open and stretched out.
"Ms. Blye?"
"No, no problem."
It's very clearly a lie, but Hetty's no newcomer to this particular box step.
"Good, then I will see you bright and early tomorrow morning."
"Sure."
She gets up slowly, still a bit uncertain. This isn't the way the routine goes and being off pattern bothers her more than she cares to admit.
"Kens," Callen calls out as he and Sam come down the stairs. They've both changed out of the clothes that they were wearing down the raid. She realizes that she's still in hers. She looks down, sees the specks of bright red blood across her sleeve.
Suddenly, she wants the shirt - and whoever's blood is on it - off her.
Now. Right now.
Somehow, she controls herself, doesn't let anyone see that's close to freaking out. She can feel panic rising through her, but forces a smile that's a bit too wide and large to be real. She feels like she's done that a lot today.
"You guys on the bench, too?" she asks, trying to keep her tone flip and easy.
"Yep," Callen answers. "Want to grab some lunch? Sam's paying."
Sam gives him a look that says that that's news to him. Callen simply shrugs his shoulders.
"Pass," she replies and it surprises everyone in the room. "I mean," she adds quickly, "I was thinking of going down to the beach and working on my tan."
It's an utterly preposterous thing for her to say and no one believes it for even a moment, but they let her have it.
After all, she's let Callen get away with declining an offer of drinks after a mission on the pretense of having to watch some TV show or another.
And Sam, well his excuses are even flimsier.
"Well if you change your mind, we'll be down at Jerry's Deli," Sam tells her and his eyes are big and still full of that deep understanding of what she's going through. On one hand, she's thankful for it, but on the other, it makes her feel weak and like a child playing in a sandbox far too big for her.
She hates that feeling.
Hates, hates, hates it.
"Okay," she tells them. "If I change my mind." She doesn't add that the chance of that is slim to none. She doesn't need. Then to Hetty she says softly, almost inaudibly, "I'm going to go get out of these...clothes."
She doesn't wait for Hetty to acknowledge her, just turns and heads for the stairs. It takes everything she has not to run up them.
It takes everything the others have for them not to call after her.
But they all respect her too much for that.
Because this is part of the dance as well.
The one that says that sometimes when you're spinning in your head just a little, you just have to keep going for a bit more and most of the time, you'll straighten yourself out all on your own.
She's killed before. She'll kill again.
And they think that maybe it's not the kills that are bothering her, but rather the interruption to the routine that is.
They all dislike the routine, despise having to spend an hour talking to a shrink – even one they have a great amount of affection for as they do Nate – about how what they've done makes them feel.
But they accept it as the routine.
They embrace it.
They have no idea what to do with an interruption.
They have no idea what to do when the music stops and all there is, is the silence of their own thoughts.
She's relieved when she hears their footsteps – and their banter – moving towards the door to the alley. She waits a moment longer, until they're completely gone and then turns and slips into the locker-room.
She practically rips the shirt off, but before she can fling it away, her eyes catch on the blood splatters again. This belonged to someone who is in a morgue now.
Someone who will never see the sun again.
Slowly, almost reverently, she folds up the shirt. Neat and tidy. Her fingers trail gently across one of the blood specks.
She thinks to herself that maybe white shouldn't be the color of the day for a few weeks or so. Red either.
She sets the folded shirt atop the bench a few feet from the lockers and then turns back to her locker and continues undressing.
It's just after two in the afternoon when she steps out into the Los Angeles sun wearing jeans and a wife beater. It's almost unbelievable to her that so much has already happened on this bright and warm Southern California day.
She had arrived at work at six in the morning. The raid had happened at eight.
It's been a long day she chuckles to herself as she puts on her sunglasses.
She's glad that she brought her bike to work. Even happier when she feels the wind slapping against her as she flies down the 405.
She spends most of the afternoon being as aimless as she can get away with. Wandering up and down the Santa Monica Pier, acting like a tourist even though she could probably walk the pier blindfolded if she had to.
She ambles up to Third Street and sits for a show in the middle of the Promenade. It's a good performance and at the end, she leaves a twenty behind as a way to thank the dancers for making her not think about her crazy life for just a few minutes.
It's close to five before she finds herself sitting on the beach, a few feet away from the water. She takes off her shoes and digs her toes into the dark wet sand.
When two handsome young men pass her by with just a quick glance over, she's thankful for a moment that Los Angeles (and especially Santa Monica) is full of beautiful people.
Normally, she'd be up for a little flirting. Maybe even a little more depending on the mood. Right now, however, she's in full second date mode.
She thinks about the raid from earlier that morning. It had gone just as planned. She, Sam, Callen and Deeks had caught a group of sailors about to move fifteen million dollars worth of cocaine red-handed. The drug-dealers had fought back and well…it hadn't gone well for them.
Hooray for the good guys.
She thinks about coming around the corner and seeing an unaware Callen with a gun pointed at the back of his head.
She'd love to say that she had reacted immediately, but that'd be lying and she's determined not to lie to herself while she can feel the sun on her face.
Tomorrow, when she's in the middle of a complicated tango with Nate, then she can lie and say that none of this ever bothers her. Today, though, today she's going to try to be honest with herself.
She remembers her body freezing, suddenly refusing to move.
Maybe it was just for a second. Five seconds at most. Okay, three.
A freeze just the same.
She remembers the feel of her suddenly sweaty palm on the cold metal of the gun. She remembers thinking for just the slightest of moments that maybe she was losing her grip on it. Maybe it was about to fall from her hand...
Then Callen's would-be killer had slid his finger to the trigger of his own gun.
And there had been a loud bang followed by a body hitting the ground.
Thankfully not Callen's.
She digs her feet deeper into the sand, feels it seep between her toes. She slips a hand through her hair and pushes tendrils of it away from her eyes.
She thinks about her father, but then quickly pushes that away.
Thinking about him always leads to her doing stupid things so that she can stop thinking about him. It's a weird kind of self-destructive cycle for her.
She thinks about Dom. Wonders if he's still somewhere out there and isn't quite sure what she wants the answer to be.
If he's alive, maybe they can save him.
If he's not, then he's not hurting anymore.
And God she fears how much he's hurting right now.
She doesn't know what she's supposed to be rooting for, but either way, she hopes they can help him find peace sooner as opposed to later.
That he's out there – in whatever state he's in – it breaks her heart.
And it makes her return back to her father (where truly, all roads return to eventually). Once again, she retreats.
Too much pain. Anger. Hate.
Retreat. Retreat. Retreat.
Callen. Sam. Nate. Eric. Hetty.
The team.
She forces herself to remember their last night out. Turns her thoughts to a memory of Nate squinting at a teleprompter and singing a song that he had to know would get him mocked.
It makes her laugh and she feels a rush of warmth go through her. For a moment, she feels guilty for that feeling, but she sure as hell doesn't let it go.
She barely notices the sun sliding away from her, barely sees the night coming on. It's not until she shivers a bit as a cool breeze sweeps past her that she realizes that she's completely lost track of time.
She stands up and shakes the sand off of herself.
She makes her way up towards the wood steps that lead back up to the Pier. She stops before climbing them and looks back at the water as it rushes the beach. It's peaceful even it's raw unyielding passion.
She turns away from it and that's when – right out of a damned romantic comedy movie – her ankle turns to the left and she ends up on her ass on the ground. Grimacing slightly, she slides a palm over her ankle and checks it. She's relieved to find that it's okay.
She's more embarrassed than hurt.
"Do you need help?" a voice asks from above her. She looks up and sees a handsome young surfer above her. He quickly breaches her personal space and puts his hand on her arm as if to steady her.
Suddenly, the very last thing she wants to be is alone (or just another pretty LA face) and so she finds the biggest smile she has in her and replies, "No, I'm...I'm fine. Just a klutz, I guess." Then she extends a hand to him. "Kensi."
He knows it's his lucky damn day and introduces himself as Jody or Jimmy or Johnny. After some brief conversation and some not at all subtle flirting, he suggests that hey, maybe if she isn't doing anything else tonight, maybe she'd like to join him at a dance club in Hollywood.
She doesn't bother telling him that they're already dancing.
She's pretty sure he wouldn't understand it anyway. She's also pretty sure she doesn't need him to.
He'll be a memory by morning, someone maybe she'll think of the next time she has a few hours to spend down at the beach.
Maybe, but probably not.
And she's just fine with that.
She sneaks into work a few minutes late the next morning, wincing when she sees Hetty waiting for her. She's about to stammer an apology, but stops short when she sees Nate coming down the stairs. She settles for sighing instead.
"Morning," Nate smiles. She feels the tension ebb away; he's disarming like that.
Still, the anticipation of their conversation stiffens her spine again. "Morning."
"Shall we?" he asks, gesturing towards his office.
She shrugs and follows after him(limping ever so slightly as her ankle protests a night full of crazy activities), fully aware that Hetty is watching.
His office is small and cramped – like every semi personal space in this mission is. He gestures to a chair and then settles himself into the opposite one. She waits a few moments before moving towards the chair, just to make the point that she really doesn't want to be doing this.
He gets it, flashing another smile.
"Stop," she says irritably, wishing she'd grabbed some coffee on the way in.
"Excuse me?"
"Stop with the whole trying to make me comfortable thing," she continues.
"Oh…kay. Sorry?"
She sighs again. "Don't be sorry."
He opens his mouth to speak, but stops himself, looking a bit uncertain.
She laughs.
"This is funny?" he asks, worry creeping through his eyes.
"Yes," she answers. "I mean no."
"Which is it?"
"It's a little of both."
"You lost me."
She's pretty sure he's full of shit. He's too good to not know what's bothering her.
But hey, she thinks, this is his part of the dance.
For a tall and lanky man with no rhythm, he's surprising good at his steps.
"You and me, we're in here talking about the same thing that we've talked about a dozen times before. Do you really think my answers are going to be any different than they were last time?"
He shakes his head, "We can hope, right?"
"Sure, but we both know that I'm just going to tell you the same things I always tell you. The ones you want to hear."
"What is it that you think I want to hear?"
"That's I'm okay."
"Are you?"
"Yes," she says, but they both hear the slight waiver in her voice.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," a little bit stronger this time, more defiant.
"Really?"
Now she's angry (oh he's good, she muses). "Yes, I'm fine. Fine!" She throws up her hands as if to punctuate her point.
"Okay," he nods. Then, "How was your day off?" He's looking down and around, as if trying to find something in this claustrophobic mess of a space.
She feels her irritation bleed away. "It was…it was nice."
"What did you do?"
"Went to the beach. Watched the sun set over the water."
"Nice." He motions to her ankle. "What happened there."
"Club in Hollywood."
"Ah."
"What's that mean? Ah?"
He shrugs. "Nothing. It was just...ah."
She doesn't believe him for a moment, but she also doesn't want to get him started down any other roads.
"How was your day in court?," she asks, turning the subject away from herself.
"Actually it was pretty…" he's about to say interesting, but stops himself when he sees her looking at him with just the slightest hint of amusement. He chuckles self-deprecatingly. "Boring. You know how it is."
"Right."
They gauge each other for a long beat, wondering who's going to take the lead.
"Okay," she says finally. "What do you want to talk about?"
It's a loaded question and to his credit, he doesn't jump at it like a dog chasing a biscuit. Instead he reaches for the file on the raid and flips it open. "I figured we'd go through your report."
"Okay."
"Okay."
They meet eyes and she smiles. He returns it.
Like two partners complimenting each other on a dance well danced.
-FIN.