A/N- This story has been 'in progress' since June...! It's technically my second story, started as I was finishing The Air We Breathe, and long before work began on A Promise Made or Ninguna Abandonado... Unlike A Promise Made (a writing journey I don't wish to repeat!) I have actually already written the ending. I've been struggling with the middle though, and so it's just been left,and left, and left... I figured if I started publishing the first chapters, I might get the incentive I need to finish the middle...

Once again, I am trialing a slightly different style, and once again the story focuses on my favourite characters, Callen and Sam. So here it is - The Cell. Now I'm committed to completing it ;-)

CHAPTER ONE

Callen and Sam ran in companionable silence, side by side. An unlikely pair to the casual observer, but the strong bond between the two men was subtly evident from how they comfortably kept pace together, each instinctually aware of where the other was at all times. Down the hill, along the board walk. Slowing to a walk by mutual silent agreement as they reached the sand, both breathing hard, sweating. Sam's silver trailer in the distance glinted almost golden in the low morning sun, like a fire on the horizon. A temporary home, a life on hold.

"You're out of condition," Callen teased.

"Yeah?" Look who's talking," Sam responded gruffly. He hadn't put as much effort into keeping fit as he used to. What was the point? There was no point in anything any more, with Kam and Aiden both off at school. Just him and his trailer by the water. And Callen, every now and again, rolling in like the waves on the sand to check up on him. He usually managed to be absent, but Callen had caught him setting off for a run this morning, and so here they now were.

"I'm just saying'," Callen continued. "Too much sitting around, watching the fish. It's not doing you any good, big guy."

"I'm not the one who needs to keep up with the bad guys," Sam retorted. "Not any more. Doesn't matter if I'm 'out of condition'!"

"You're really not coming back?" Callen asked, turning serious now. He missed his partner. They all did. They'd all expected Sam to have returned to work by now, though there was a tiny part of Callen, deep down, that feared he never would. His loss had been too great.

"I can't, G. Not now. Not after…" Sam broke off, falling a pace behind Callen to hide his momentary loss of composure. He still couldn't talk about losing his wife. He hoped one day he'd wake up and it would all be a bad dream, but like a disturbing recurrent nightmare, every new day was cruelly the same. Empty. Alone. And it was his fault. How could he come back from that?

Callen shook his head sadly. This was why, this was exactly why he was a tribe of one. No weak link for any of the bad guys to target to get at him, no thank you. "Not today then. Maybe tomorrow." He remained outwardly optimistic and upbeat, though even as he spoke he thought about the moment those tables had turned, the moment Sam had lost his 'glass half full' optimism. The moment he cradled his dead wife in his arms.

"Not ever, G."

"Okay." Callen left it alone, for now, still walking in the direction of Sam's trailer. "How about you show me round that new tin can of yours? We can get ourselves cleaned up and head out some place for breakfast."

Behind him, Sam grunted.

"Oh don't be like that," Callen cajoled, turning to face his partner, to see how much persuasion he would need to use to inflict yet more of his company on Sam – and what he saw turned his world upside down, right there on the deserted beach. Sam was being more or less supported by two bulky, muscled men, his head lolling down to his chest, a large contusion above his right ear showing where he had been hit and knocked half unconscious.

"Don't move, Agent Callen," a third man said warningly, holding a pistol which he had aimed at Callen's chest. He had the slightest Russian inflection in his cultured voice, and Callen shook his head in confusion. Where the hell had these men come from? How could he have dropped his guard so much that neither he nor Sam had noticed anyone else around?

"You're coming with us," the pistol man told him.

"I don't think so!" Callen responded, trying to make eye contact with Sam, trying desperately to gauge whether his partner was truly incapacitated, or whether it was a play and Sam was waiting for a signal from him to act. He could take on one or two, but not all three, not with one waving a gun around while the other two had Sam in such a hold. What he might risk to save his own skin was different when he had Sam's life on the line too.

"I think you'll find you are," the man with the pistol told him, nodding to one of the large men holding Sam. Before Callen could even open his mouth to argue, Sam was bent over, coughing, as one of the well-muscled men delivered a fast, powerful punch into his abdomen.

"Alright!" Callen exclaimed hastily, raising his hands in surrender. "Alright. Leave him alone. I'll come with you!"

"We thought you might," the pistol man replied, grinning nastily. Turning to his colleagues he said "Take them!" And that was the last thing Callen was aware of as he felt the pistol viciously connect with the side of his head and he crumbled to the ground.