Ok, so I've hit a block writing my other story. I jumped on to the fanfic website and read some of my favourite stories, … again and found a recurring theme. Hetty knows when the people in her teams have feelings for one another. What if she likes to play matchmaker? Starts when Deeks leaves for his undercover assignment at the end of season 1 and mentions references to other episodes thereafter. Hett's POV mostly.
Hetty was sitting in her office as the members of her team came in. She was watching them. Looking for signs that all was not well. She saw Callen and Sam behaving like they always do, joking, serious, angry at the other for reasons known only to them. Then she saw Kensi come in. She was watching the two guys she thought of as brothers, but not really joining in with their banter. As she sat down, Hetty noticed that she looked over at the desk that was next to Sam's. It was empty at the moment, because their latest member had gone undercover for the LAPD a few weeks ago. It had been empty for some time before Detective Deeks had joined them. Dominic Vale had been a good young agent that had been on the rise to great things before his capture and death. Hetty saw the look of concern that crossed her junior agents face as she just looked at his desk.
Good she thought I knew Miss Blye would like him. Ever since Deeks had popped up on her radar a few years earlier, she was wondering how he would fit in with the rest of her motley crew that were the best in the country. It was luck that one of their cases had intersected with one of his. And the first meeting between the two, oh, she couldn't have come up with a better one even if she had a year to do it. Miss Blye pretending to be the marines girlfriend, talk about improvisation.
A whistle from the top of the stairs announced that a new case had cropped up and Eric was calling the team up to tackle it. Hetty looked up in the young man's direction and thought You're next, Mr Beal. She got up and headed to the ops room.
Then the case where they found Deeks. Hetty could see that him being missing and then when they found him hit her hard. When they got the dirty cop, Deeks' boss and he stopped himself from shooting him, it was because of Kensi. Turns out he likes her too. No one else would have been able to stop him. Hetty found them on the surveillance cameras after they got back to OSP. They were in the locker room first until Kensi pulled him into the kitchen area and cleaned up his cuts and bruises. Hetty was sitting at home at this point and watched as they made their way up to the roof. She smiled as the two of them sat beside one another, not to close but enough to offer comfort by proximity.
She found Nell Jones working for a company that really didn't appreciate her skills. She brought her on to help Eric with the technical and surveillance side of operations. She noticed that He was getting more and more work and not getting any more help. She thought that the two would be a good match, until Nell thru the party for her. With the party long finished, all the other staff had since headed home, Hetty included. She happen to pass her computer that was flipping thru the cameras at the OSP when something caught her eye. She backtracked and watched as Nell picked up balloon after balloon and was corralling them in a cage made of tables and chairs. Every time she dropped an armload off and turned her back in search of more, Callen took a bunch of them out and left the room. Nell dropped another load in and Callen came back and dropped in the balloons he had 'killed' with a pair of scissors. Hetty was by now in hysteric fits of laughter, sitting in front of the screen. She watched the routine for several minutes until he picked up a couple more and fled as Nell came back a little soon.
She must have realised that her pile of balloons was not getting any bigger as she looked up and tried to figure out if the air-conditioning was causing some of the balloons to escape. She walked around her corral, trying to figure out where they were getting out from and crashed in Callen, who was returning to deposit more dead balloons and get some others. Hetty nearly fell out of her chair at the look on Callen's face at being caught. Always the first one to pick up a tail or notice when something is not quite right, he was shocked when the two of them collided.
Being the gentleman that he is, he helps her to her feet and checks to make sure she was ok. Hetty sees her nod her head and then spot the deflated balloons on the floor. She looks at Callen and asks him something. The microphones are in the wrong place for Hetty to hear the words but she can guess, as Callen dips his head, nods and shuffles his feet, his hand behind his back. He looks up at her and she just shakes her head, places a hand on his arm and motions toward the penned balloons. Callan pulls out a pair of scissors and grins. The two make short work of the rest of them and round up the few remaining stragglers.
Well I didn't see that coming she thought. Nell and Eric must be too much alike to be together.
As the weeks continue, Hetty sits in her tower and looks down at her team, well in her office or at home and on the computer. She sees the groups of Kensi and Deeks, Callen and Nell grow closer and notices that it isn't affecting their work.
If anything, in the case of Miss Blye and Detective Deeks, it helps in their undercover work as they can predict each-others moves and don't have to say anything unnecessary that could tip off a mark. A subtle look, a small gesture, offering to pay, is all it takes for them to go off in different directions and get the bad guy. And after a hard case, she has seen them lean on each other and head for the roof if the day isn't over to patch each other up and offer comfort.
With Nell and Callen, she sees that Nell has Callens' back when he is playing one of the many rolls he is good at, the kind that calls for him to be flirty with the women in a bar. Nell never looks at him but on what is happening around him; threats or other things that could pose problems for the mission. Things that Callen could miss because his mind is elsewhere. Hetty notices that every word he is saying is not for the woman in front of him, but the one in his ear; and Nell knows it. She blushes, smiles, stifles a laugh, all of which he knows is happening. A sudden move made by the mark behind Callen and Nell lets him know, simply by calling his name.
What a team she thinks to herself after watching how Kensi and Deeks catch another bad guy, simply because she smiled at him. They had been following a mark and he had rounded a corner and was now sitting at a table of a small café. Taken by surprise that he was right in front of them, Deeks unexpectedly wraps Kensi into a hug and pulls her into a chair. Sitting on his lap, she looks at him in quiet anger as a waiter comes over to them. Taking the other seat, Kensi puts her back to the mark and drinks her coffee. After a couple of minutes it looks like the mark is about to get up. Kensi hears a scrape as the chair is pushed back and smiles at Deeks. Deeks understood and started to pretend to be mad at her, standing up, waving his arms around and saying the most absurd things. Kensi uses his anger to step backwards, as though in fear, trips and lands right onto the table in front of the guy; where she pulls her gun and says "NCIS", with Deeks coming up doing the same. Even though it is frowned upon, relationships between agents can be quite beneficial. She reads the mission report and sees that neither one of them mention the fact that all it took was a smile.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, never saw it coming. She was watching from the ops room as Callen was again in a situation where he was surrounded by beautiful women. Nell was in the ops room and was feeding him information about what a mark was doing. She glanced at him on the screen and saw a tall brunette from the bikini contest they were monitoring standing in front of him. He was making small talk and was on the verge of getting up to get a drink as an excuse to get away from her when Nell said one word "Callen." He spun round the moment he heard Nell say the first syllable and caught the mark before she got more than three feet. Turning back to the woman he said "Sorry, I'm into shorter red haired women with pixie cuts." as he pushed the prisoner to a waiting car. Despite their age difference, the two of them get on very well. Nell accepts what he has to do in situations like this, and he can even turn his back to a mark; extraordinary.
Thinking back to when she first started the OSP, Hetty realised that she had become quite the matchmaker, setting up more than a few people over the years. While she herself may never marry and have children, she had come to think of all those who worked for her, her family. And with the field team partnered up, she knew that they could handle anything that came their way. Now all she had to do was find a partner for Mr Beal.