Callen is not a man given to tears, or to emotional declarations or anything of the sort. He is an agent, through and through – strong in mind and body and soul - and he knows enough to keep his secrets close. He knows the danger of trust, of opening yourself to anyone at all because everyone is thinking of themselves first and in this world that he lives in it is often the people on the ground who are trampled over. So he keeps his secrets close and his emotion is tightly locked away in a little box that sits on his fireplace. No one has ever seen that box, not even Sam. Sam knows what is in there, but not because Callen ever said – Sam just knows because he is Sam. At least, that is Callen's explanation for it. Hetty is Hetty and Sam is Sam and they need no other explanation.
So Callen is not a man given to tears, but on some rare nights his house is empty enough and dark enough and lonely enough that he cries. Not loud, sobbing tears – but the kind that spill gently over in sad release. He cries for the people he couldn't save and the family he never knew and the people he's lost along the way. And one night, one night after he has spent an entire week being just ten minutes too late or ten minutes too early, and the bad guys have escaped and the good guys have died and even Deeks has taken to fierce silence during stakeouts – he goes home and writes two words, that spill over and run out in dark ink across the paper until he has filled a whole page.
I cried. Doesn't every child cry? I was a little boy stranded in an unforgiving world, and I didn't know my parents or my sister or my name or my history or anything. I was just a lonely child with nothing. But I gathered together the pain and the tears and I soldered them to my childish courage and I vowed to become something more – to force myself upon this angry world until I was not afraid anymore. And I did.
I moved through home after home but loved no one and by the time I turned eighteen I was not afraid. So I took up a gun in my hands and learned that protection of others is important but comes second to keeping our own secrets, and it felt like a familiar lesson; familiar enough that I slipped into story after story and lived a dozen different lives and believed my own lies in a way few others could. I was damn good at it.
I cry. Doesn't every man cry? But I am not a man like every other man, because I cause death as often as I grieve for it, and I run towards the evil things in the darkness while forcing everyone else to run away. I stand alone against an angry world, holding tight the lessons I learned as a boy and the courage I have discovered within myself.
Except, I am not so alone now and lately I have been learning how to add genuine care to my strength, learning how to be afraid properly. The world cannot conquer me anymore, because I have stood against it a thousand times and won on my own merit, screaming to the storms in defiance for the little boy who was too scared to live. The world cannot conquer me anymore and so it is time to set that quest aside, and I think this partner here with me now will teach me how to do that. If I can only let myself learn, he will teach me how to love.
He writes the words for the little boy inside him who needs to hear them, and it is only after he has finished that he notices the page is splotted with tear marks. It feels fitting, so he folds it up into a neat square and puts it in his little box of emotion on the fireplace mantel, and lays down on his bedroll to sleep. He dreams that night of Joelle, of her standing at the edge of the ice rink looking at him with something other than anger in her eyes, and forgiving him with her words - and his heart throbs loudly in his chest because he doesn't know what to do with it. But it is just a dream, so he remembers that he is learning to love others and Sam's advice runs through his head and he musters up his courage and speaks. He speaks as Callen and not anyone else - Callen who is an orphan and an agent and strong and weak and confident and insecure…he tells her that he doesn't have a name and it is a small truth but it is a truth nonetheless so it feels like a step in the right direction.
He wakes up at three in the morning to a call from Hetty letting him know that Kensi and Deeks have seen movement on their stakeout. He wipes the sleep and the dreams from his eyes and his mind and drives away with Sam – and today they get there in time. The bad guys are caught and nobody dies and all that is left to do is the paperwork, so he tells his teammates that drinks are on him; they go out together that night and Deeks is the loudest person in the whole bar and it feels right.