So this is. Late. This chapter is the promised focus on Kensi and Sam, ft. bonus Nell and Eric. These are the other two duos that the storyline is gonna follow. So, to recap, G and Deeks, Sam and Kensi, and Eric and Nell. Last chapter was G and Deeks, the other four are here, and next chapter we bop back over to the first two.
Thanks for your patience, please leave me a review if you have thoughts!
The Art Of Lost Causes
Dark Blue 'Verse – Part Two – The Boiling Point
There's something at work here
There's something at work here
There's something at work here
Chalk circles all around your body
Shiftless inside your guile
Will lay the card
That tears apart
What used to be your life
- The Twilight Singers, 'Be Invited'
The moment Sam pulls to a park behind Kensi, he's out of the car and headed towards her. She meets him half way, and they both start talking at once.
"Was that-"
"Did you see-"
They both stop dead, staring at each other and wearing identical concerned, confused expressions.
"What were Deeks and Callen doing leaving together in Callen's car?" Kensi asks. Sam shrugs helplessly.
"I don't know, I haven't heard anything from G today. You?"
"Nothing from Deeks, no." She shifts where she stands, folding her arms and frowning. "Something's off. They wouldn't just leave without telling us." Slowly, a look of angered realization creeps across her face. "Hetty."
"If anyone knows what's up, it's her," Sam agrees, and leads the way into the building, walking directly over to Hetty's desk with Kensi shortly behind him.
Neither Sam nor Kensi are impressed by or happy with Hetty's instructions to work together while Deeks and G traveled to Pendleton for their half of the investigation. However, much as she had done with G, Hetty hadn't taken kindly to being questioned about this. Even more so than usual, she shut down the first hint of an opinion that what she's decided isn't the best thing for the team and ordered them both out of her office and to work.
Meeting back by their desks, Sam and Kensi look at each other in a thick, uncomfortable silence. They are relieved of the responsibility of coming up with the words to ask each other just what the hell exactly is going on here when Nell and Eric show up.
"Did Hetty bring you up to speed on the case?" Nell asks, trying to sound casual and failing miserably.
"Yeah," says Kensi, frowning. "Did you get a chance to talk to Deeks and Callen before they left? Did they tell you why we're all being split up like this?"
"We had... a few moments of conversation, yes."
The longer they stand there, exposed in the open area of the ground floor of the building with Hetty's office just near enough for just how good her hearing actually is to be a question worth considering, the more antsy Nell and Eric both look. Taking this in and quickly noting the source of their anxiousness, Kensi makes an executive decision.
"Well," she says, faux-brightly, earning her strange looks from her coworkers. "I don't know about you three, but I could use a cup of real coffee. There's nothing we can do on our end until Deeks and Callen get to Pendleton, and that'll be another two hours at least, so I say we have time to grab some drinks and maybe a bite to eat. Anybody else want to join me?" It's the pointed look on her face when she makes eye contact with all three of them in turn that prompts Sam, Nell, and Eric to all agree and follow her out the door.
The coffee shop Kensi leads them to is about a block and a half away from their office, a nondescript little place with more privacy afforded at its corner booths than most shops have. It's practically empty, which Sam counts as a plus. He orders first then settles into his chair with his back to the far corner, able to see every inch of the dimly lit room from his vantage point. One by one, he watches Kensi and the two analysts order then follow him over to their table. There's a beat of silence after all four of them are seated wherein they all seem to be waiting for someone else to say something first. Obviously this plan goes a whole lot of 'nowhere', and eventually, Sam takes the initiative, turning to Nell and Eric intently.
"So? Did you talk to them before they left?"
Nell and Eric exchange a look, and Nell answers.
"Well. Sort of?" At Sam's 'seriously, get the point, I'm starting to get impatient' look, Nell shifts in her seat and is about to start talking again when the barista approaches the table, carrying a tray with four drinks balanced on it. An uneasy silence lays over their group until the young woman finishes unloading and leaves, prompting Nell to start talking again.
"I tried to tell them what was going on but I couldn't say anything about it in the building, and before we could talk to them outside of it, Callen and Deeks had to leave for Pendleton."
"Wait, why couldn't you tell them inside the building?" interrupts Kensi, more confused than ever. The way she sees it, the longer Nell talks the more questions and the less answers she has.
"Well cause if Hetty overheard us telling other people about it, then me, Nell, you two, Callen and Deeks, we'd probably all be out of a job, and then assassinated in a clever yet discreet-"
"Eric!"
The blond tech raises his hands placatingly. "Sorry, I take it back. Probably not assassinated. The fired part, though, that stands."
"What do you two know that Hetty wants kept a secret so bad you think she'd fire us all if we knew about it?" Kensi demands, thoroughly finished with not knowing what's going on.
Eric and Nell exchange a look before Nell speaks. "They're... They're investigating her. Hetty. They're investigating Hetty."
In an impressively – and possibly, under other circumstances, amusingly – coordinated move, both Sam and Kensi sit abruptly back, wearing identical expressions of shock, though for two very different reasons.
To Kensi, who views Hetty as such an untouchable monument, this out of the blue announcement has completely thrown her.
Sam however is surprised not by the news of the investigation itself. Certainly not when it had been him that initiated it to begin with. No, what surprises Sam about Nell's information is how fast the proceedings have got underway. When he and Michelle had told Jethro Gibbs about what was wrong here, when they asked for his help in saving G and everybody else they knew from Hetty Lange, Sam hadn't really expected anything to happen, much less this soon.
Except that Nell knows about it, so something has happened. Is happening.
Not wanting to betray just yet that he knows more about this than any of the other three people around the table would possibly guess, Sam schools his face carefully into a mask of confusion and takes a drink of his coffee.
"Can you elaborate?" he asks, setting it down and folding his arms, leaning against the table.
"Yeah, what the hell does that mean?" Kensi demands, considerably less calm about all this than Sam is, probably due to the surprise announcement being an actual surprise to her. "If that's what's got her acting so weird- weirder, you really need to tell us everything. This could put Deeks and Callen in danger, Nell, if Hetty's not on top of her game-"
"I'm getting there!" Nell interrupts, her voice rising up into a near-shout.
Silence. Sam and Kensi stare at the young woman in concern while Eric mainly just looks like he wishes he could get up and run. Nell shifts and fidgets and breathes too fast, and Kensi shoots a glance towards Sam, wondering if they're going to need to call an ambulance, or if Nell is about to have a panic attack, or of she's just going to detonate .
(Something about all of this, this whole situation, everyone in this circle, feels so explosive to Kensi, feels so much like a bomb.)
"Just..." Sam says slowly, patiently. "Just start at the beginning. It's alright, Nell, just tell us what happened with Hetty. Tell us what Hetty's done. From the beginning."
So Nell takes a deep breath and does exactly that. She starts at the beginning.
She starts with a few nervous, rambling sentences about beginning a new job, about her new boss who seems to take a shine to her right from the beginning. A woman who knows things about things, dangerous things that no one asks questions about because why pull back the shades and shine light into the shadows when Hetty has it all taken care of. Nell's voice takes on a slight tremble when she speaks vaguely and distantly about projects she worked on once upon a time because Hetty asked her to, because that boss who likes and trusts her so much made a special request, 'if we can just keep this between us, Miss Jones'.
As Nell's soft voice goes on, Eric staring down at the scuffed finish of the table, Kensi and Sam start to think. They think about Hetty Lange, about the thousand tiny little ways she crossed lines every day, wound her fingers through the puppet strings of their lives andpulled , things they could never afford to spend two seconds considering the implications of before.
"It was me," Sam says finally, breaking the silence. Every head in the room swings to look at him where he has sat mostly silent throughout Nell's laying out of the investigation's focus, right up to the wall they'd hit regarding the source of the inquiry to begin with. "I started the investigation into Hetty. Actually, Jethro Gibbs started it, but he did it because I asked him to."
Despite the solemn nature of the their secretive cafe meeting, Sam spares himself a half a second to bask in having stunned all thee of them into silence.
"Why?" asks Kensi when she gathers her wits back about her enough to form coherent words. "When? Why ?"
"I'm sorry did you not just hear everything Nell was saying? Something scary is going on here and whatever it is, Hetty is right at the middle of it. She's a dangerous person, and someone needs to do something about it, especially after that weird crap I dug up about the similarity between some of Hetty's personally handpicked agents and Callen," Eric says, looking like he regrets saying it moments after the words leave his mouth, but bulldozing right on anyway. "There's too much correlation between those files for it to be a coincidence, even if I believed in coincidences, which I don't, and then what you and Deeks overheard between him and Hetty? I don't know what the hell is going on there and yeah, if it's innocuous, we'll all lose our jobs and I maintain we might totally get whacked, but to me at least? That'll be worth it on the off chance we're not wrong, and Hetty is up to some messed up stuff."
Nell looks like she's about to be ill, but nods along with what Eric is saying. For her part, Kensi looks like a beehive has just been cracked open right in front of her face. Sam just looks like he always does when backed into a corner and considering his options.
"We need to tell Deeks and Callen," Kensi says after a while, looking up from her coffee around at Sam, Eric, and Nell. "They should know about this, if they don't already." Nell shakes her head, indicating that no, as far as she's aware, the only people who know about it are around this table. Kensi nods, having figured as much, and turns to face Sam specifically. "Speaking of Callen, did you ever talk to him about what Deeks and I overheard the other day?"
Sam sighs. "Not really. He blew me off. Said everything was fine. You know him. G could literally be on fire and still keep insisting everything is totally fine."
That is going to have to be an issue tabled for another day, however. There are more immediate problems at hand, starting with the phone call to the missing half of the field team. Afraid that their absences en masse might be noticed if they all stay out too much longer, Eric and Nell have decided to head back to ops, run interference for Kensi and Sam if necessary. While they walk down the street, Kensi and Sam head to Sam's car, sitting there looking at each other for a moment before they make the call.
"Are we sure this is a good idea?" Kensi hedges, folding her arms uncomfortably. Even though she is the one who brought up the idea of calling their partners to begin with, she now is unsure that's entirely advisable. "I mean, if they haven't killed each other already, do they need to be worrying about this on top of the case and whatever is going on with Callen. It might be more than they should be taking on at once."
"Would they ever forgive us if we kept it to ourselves?" counters Sam, it being clear that this is a rhetorical question, one they both clearly already know the answer to.
"Fair enough," says Kensi. "Alright. Your phone or mine?"
"Yours. If I know anything about him, G is driving, and I don't want to cause an accident."
Kensi pulls out her phone and dials Deeks' number, holding it up to her ear. It rings for a short time before he answers. Right in the very beginning, Kensi thinks she hears a near-silently muttered 'thank god' but she can't be sure.
"Hey, Kens," Deeks says brightly, though Kensi's level of familiarity with his mannerisms and vocal patterns tells her he's tense, on edge.
"I'm putting you on speaker, Sam's with me" Kensi tells him, pressing the button and holding the phone between herself and Sam. "Can you put yours on too? This is something we all need to discuss together."