It was stupid.
Completely inappropriate on so many levels he's reluctant to even think about, and he can't believe he lost control, let it get that far; put himself and Kensi in this situation.
Except – G Callen doesn't do stupid. G Callen doesn't lose control; he is coolly analytical and unperturbedly pragmatic in the worst of situations. Most of the time. He's not sure what it was about that night – maybe it was the way she slid out of his car in those heels, the line of tattoos coiling up the sleek length of her legs, teasingly curving under that dress that left little to the imagination but just enough to remain completely tantalizing, or the way she looked at him in the bar –but it sent an unanticipated jolt of heat straight to his insides. He could barely keep his eyes off her the rest of the night.
He's known Kensi for years. Long enough to acknowledge and accept the fact that she's gorgeous and deadly, and could likely kick his ass on a good day. Long enough to concede that although there was a level of attraction, shimmering somewhere deep and out of sight, he had worked with her long enough not to have done something about it long ago. He likes to believe that initial attraction has been replaced by something much more tangible – a mutual respect and understanding, a bond forged in fire between teammates.
But when he saw the way she looked outside the club that night, the knee-jerk reaction to the scumbag that had pulled a knife on her, he knew something was off. Kensi was a pro; she didn't let her composure slip for anything, and he just couldn't get that shocked glint in her eyes out of his head for hours afterwards. The thing was, they had gone through such a shit storm in the recent years and months – starting with Dom, to Moe, to Hetty and Romania, to Jada and Sudan – that he was sometimes surprised to find that his team was still standing, still operating cohesively as a unit after everything that this job had thrown at them. His team. After witnessing Sam fraying around the edges after Sudan, he couldn't afford to have any of his people miss a step; to not have their feet firmly planted and heads in the game.
He told himself that was the reason he found himself driving onto Kensi's street past midnight, the reason he picked her lock and slipped inside her apartment. He wanted to check up on his agent, make sure she cleared to operate the next day. It was his job.
Until he saw her standing in her tiny kitchen in nothing but a towel, looking somehow stripped down and more exposed than he'd ever seen her before, without the layers of armor and camouflage she normally donned for the office. He took in the smooth expanse of her skin, the inky swirls of pattern standing out starkly under the muted lighting of her apartment, and felt his mouth go dry. When she told him the reason behind her uneasiness that night, the way she felt tainted with the marks of other men after operations like these, he had felt a sharp surge of guilt in the back of his throat, at the decisions and role he played in sending her into operational situations like that. Yet a part of him still marveled at her admission, at the knowledge of what she was entrusting him with. In that brief, crazy instant, all he had wanted to do was erase those other marks on her, expunge them and make her forget – replace them with his own. The intensity of his desire paralyzed him momentarily, but before he could react she was already reaching for him, running teeth and tongue along his skin, and then he couldn't focus on anything but the feel of her body, her mouth, against his.
If he had any room in his head to think he'd be stunned at the explosiveness between them, the trail of sparks her hands leave against the bare skin of his chest as she unbuttons his shirt, the haze of absolute want that clouds any logical, rational part of him, that narrows his focus to only her. He loses himself in the scent of her skin, the heat of her mouth, the scrape of her nails against his scalp.
Afterwards, as he felt her muscles relax under his touch, her eyes flutter closed and her breathing even out, he had gotten up carefully and let himself out. He had driven around aimlessly through empty LA streets for hours, trying to sort through the tangled mess in his head, before he landed back at OSP just as dawn was breaking, tingeing the horizon with a hazy, ruddy glow. He was still trying to figure out what he would say to her when she breezed in shortly after, Sam and Deeks following close behind. His eyes caught hers briefly over the heads of their two teammates and she met his gaze impassively before the op, as it always did, took precedence over anything else.
It was stupid. Fucked up beyond belief. Shouldn't have happened. But the funny thing is, even though he can brand that night as a mistake, he can't bring himself to regret it. Even now, two weeks later, he still finds himself thinking of it constantly, remembering the way Kensi felt under him, the softness of her skin, the look in her eyes as she came apart around him.
It isn't his intention to pretend it had never happened. He means to talk to her, address it, but there never seems to be the right moment to pull her aside as the cases roll in, as she leaves to chase down leads with her partner by her side. Then Granger decides to drop a bombshell across their desks and Kensi is being accused of murder, and everything else goes straight out the window. The knot Callen has been intending to unravel suddenly turns into a convoluted, jumbled mess, but this is the kind of situation they had all been trained for, and the team rallies together to disentangle what they can from a case that was bound inextricably to the past of one of their teammates.
Because one of their own was under attack, which meant they were all under fire, and nobody, nobody, messed with his team. He knows what they did for him when he had taken off to Prague to chase after Hetty: turned in their badges, put their careers on the line without a second's hesitation and followed him unquestioningly to the other side of the world. They were too late for Dom, but because of that they had made sure to be there for Hetty, for Deeks, for Sam, and he'd be damned if he didn't get Kensi out of this unscathed, with her badge and reputation intact. He can't accept anything less.
Even as Kensi cuts off contact and strikes off irrationally on her own, while he refocuses his own investigation and steers the rest of the team to take logical, methodical steps, he understands all too well the motivation that lies behind Kensi's every decision; sees all too clearly the demons that are hounding her. She was fighting not only for her life but for the truth itself, and it was a burning hunger and desperation that kept her moving forward, reaching for those tantalizing answers that had been frustratingly elusive for so many years but now were within her grasp. After all, hadn't he done the same, dropping everything when he got so much as a whiff of a clue to his own mysterious past?
"Nothing is worse than not knowing," he tells Sam, and his partner turns to him with a knowing glint in his eyes.
"What if the answers you find aren't the ones you're looking for?" Sam questions sagely.
He tries to explain to his partner the best way he knows how that for Kensi and himself, simply finding those answers was enough. The search for them had shaped their childhoods and molded them into the people they were today; it had in many ways been the driving force behind every decision they had made as adults. It was the reason they got up in the mornings, donned their badges, slipped into the skins of others so easily, faced flying bullets, and got up to do it again the next day. All in the hopes that one day, they would wake up and find that precious thread to pull, the one that would unravel and bring the curtain down to finally reveal those truths they had sought their whole lives. For Kensi, that day had come, and he knew there was nothing that would stop her from pursuing that thread to the ends of the earth if she had to. It was why, Callen realizes with dawning uneasiness, on some level he understands Kensi even better than he understands his own partner. It's a thought that catches him, gives him pause, one he files away to be examined more closely another time.
When they put the pieces together at last and reach Julia Feldman's house, Callen has never been more relieved to see Kensi whole and for the most part, unhurt. She's wincing in pain as she comes down the stairs but her eyes are bright and there's a look of triumph in the cast of her head and shoulders. Peter Clairmont is lying prone at the foot of the staircase and that's when Callen realizes the full extent of what Kensi has just gone through, from living in uncertainty and frustration for so many years, to finally finding her father's killer, only to find the strength to walk away from him, leaving him alive and trusting that she would find justice in the system. He doesn't think he's ever respected her more than at that moment.
But when Granger abruptly shoots and kills Clairmont, a part of Callen can't help but be fiercely glad for Kensi. For never having to wonder anymore. For never having to be disappointed in the system. For the closure he hopes she'll find in this, the closure that he might never find himself.
After, when she finally gets back from having her ribs checked out and her debrief with Hetty and Granger, Kensi walks into the bullpen and her teammates are there to welcome her.
"How does it feel?" Sam asks.
Kensi furrows her brow slightly. "People keep asking me that."
Callen looks at her, notices the strain that still hasn't left her body, the shadows still clouding her eyes.
"That tends to happen when they care about you," he says to her, surprising himself. He wonders if she catches the undertone behind his words, the emotion he didn't mean to let slip.
For the first time in what seems like weeks, Kensi meets his eyes fully, shoots him a tiny smile. It does a funny thing to his chest.
"Well, I guess I know that things will never be the same for me. Strange," she muses.
"That's also a good thing," Sam says, grinning.
Callen glances at Deeks, who has been uncharacteristically quiet, leaning against his desk. He knows better than anyone what the bonds of partnership mean in situations like the one Kensi just went through, and he suspects that if Kensi reached out to anyone when she was on the run, it would have been Deeks. Callen doesn't begrudge him that; he would have tried to be there for Kensi if she had come to him, although after everything that has happened between them he's not exactly sure where – or what – they are at the moment.
He shares a quick look with Sam, and they take their cue to exit.
"See you tomorrow, Kens," he says as he brushes past her, giving her the space to sort things out with her partner.
It doesn't occur to him until he's in his car about to turn onto his street that Kensi's apartment is still a mess, and that she would in all likelihood go see her mother tonight. For some reason he can't explain, the thought of her coming back late, alone, to a ransacked apartment doesn't sit right with him. He debates internally for a few minutes, then pulls his car around with a sigh and heads back to the freeway.
Twenty minutes later he finds himself jimmying her lock and thinks wryly that he's quickly making a habit of this.
When Kensi comes home hours later, she finds Callen in her kitchen, rinsing and drying her dishes. She leans against the counter and watches him in silence for a few minutes before speaking.
"When Dom – the night we lost him – I went to his apartment and washed his dishes." She nods at the plate in Callen's hands, her eyes faraway, and he arches a questioning eyebrow at her.
"Even though I knew he wasn't coming back, that he wouldn't ever see his apartment again, there was something weirdly comforting about knowing that there wouldn't be a pile of dirty dishes lying in his sink."
Callen nestles the plate carefully in the drying rack and turns to face Kensi fully, meeting her multi-colored eyes, bringing her back to the present. "Kens, you made it. The day's over," he says firmly. "You're home."
She looks at him and nods tersely, before glancing around her tidied-up apartment. "I thought you said you were going to see me tomorrow?"
He shrugs. "I didn't want you coming back home to a pile of dirty dishes."
Her lips twitch and she looks around her apartment again. "How bad was it?"
"Let's just say you owe me for my services."
"Oh really?" Kensi crosses her arms defensively and jerks her head in his direction. "So is finding you breaking into my apartment going to be a regular occurrence now?"
He's trying to figure out if she's legitimately annoyed but then she smiles softly at him and he returns it with a quick smirk.
"How was seeing your mother?"
Kensi doesn't question how he knows where she was earlier, just gives a slight shake of her head. "Strange. I think it's going to be strange for a while, and we are probably both going to need some time to get used to being in each other's lives again. But it's a good thing, I think."
Callen observes her for a few moments, attempting to gauge her state of mind. Her shoulders are slumped and she looks exhausted more than anything else, and any adrenaline or sense of conquest she had been carrying around earlier has long since drained out of her. He knows the meeting with her mother must have taken another emotional toll, and though he is genuinely happy that she's reconnected with her mother, a sharp stab of envy passes through him at the thought that she had the reunion that would always be denied to him.
Kensi suddenly grimaces and clutches her side, and Callen is beside her instantly, supporting her shoulder. She's unsteady on her feet and leans into him instinctively as he guides her slowly into her bedroom.
"Let's get you to bed," he murmurs into her hair, and Kensi puts up no resistance as he helps her pull her shirt carefully over her head. He bends forward to inspect her bound ribs briefly, running his fingers tenderly over the bandages, and he feels her breath catch faintly before she nudges his fingers out of the way, her own fingers unbuttoning her jeans. She slips them off her legs and crawls into bed without a word. Callen covers her with her comforter and hesitates a second before he edges onto the bed after her, settling on top of the covers.
Kensi is out almost as soon her head hits the pillow, and he watches her steady breathing, the tension easing out of her features as she slides deeper into sleep. He only intends to make sure she is comfortable and safely asleep before he leaves, but four hours later he jerks awake to Kensi's violent thrashing.
She's still asleep, but her arms and legs are convulsing across her sheets and her eyes are flickering rapidly beneath tightly shut eyelids. "Dad," she mutters, "Dad – no, please, don't – Dad!"
Kensi's skin is clammy under his touch and he finds himself wondering exactly how many times she relives this particular nightmare. He shakes her lightly and she snaps awake instantly, eyes wild.
"Kens," he says softly, touching her face gently. "You were dreaming. You're home, it's over."
She stills and focuses on him, taking deep breaths. He brushes strands of her hair off her forehead, sliding his fingers down to her arm, holding her securely.
"You okay?"
Kensi wrenches away from his grasp and shifts onto her side, hair tumbling across her face. "Fine," she bites out.
He looks at her for a few seconds and is just about to ease off the bed before she turns around and grabs his hand.
"G," she says, and in the dimness of her bedroom he can clearly read the unspoken request in her eyes. An undercurrent of understanding passes between them. He knows too well how it feels to dread sleep, of feeling powerless to control the nightmares that haunted him during those unconscious hours and sometimes would bleed into the harsh reality of day. But he had trained himself throughout the years and these days he found sleep more elusive than anything else, and it was the way he preferred it.
However, tonight wasn't about his own demons, so Callen squeezes her hand and settles himself back against the headboard. Kensi lets go of his hand, but she presses her leg against his solidly, the heat of her seeping through the layer of blanket separating them, and doesn't move.
Callen doesn't fall back asleep. He watches Kensi's breathing eventually steady, the slow rise and fall of her chest, and wonders how she will feel when she wakes up. He wonders if the answers she's finally found will look any different in the light of day, wonders what will fuel her fire, push her forward, now that she's found what she's been searching for all this time.
When streaks of pale light begin to filter into Kensi's bedroom, turning the outlines and corners of her furniture into an indistinct grey, he slips off her bed and shuts her bedroom door softly. In her kitchen, he puts on a pot of coffee for when she wakes up, and leaves quietly out her door. He'll see her in a few hours at OSP, and whatever this was between them – whatever was going on – it could wait a little longer.
As he pulls away from Kensi's apartment and turns the street corner, he catches sight of the front of Deek's car pulling up to the curb he just vacated in his rearview mirror, and Callen smiles inwardly. Kensi's partner would undoubtedly wake her up, needle her incessantly, force food down her throat, and give her a ride to work. Even though she would hate the extra attention, and as much as she didn't need it and would complain about it – there would be no doubt that her team had her back.