Again, it's... well, obviously, it's late. I hope you like it, though. It took me a while to get through this one. I wanted to get it right.

Happy holidays everybody! I hope you're having a nice winter.


The Art Of Lost Causes

Dark Blue 'Verse - Part Two: The Boiling Point

Chapter Eight

It's not safe here anymore,
there's too much damage to ignore.
I've spun in circles, I'm confused.
If no one wins, does no one lose?
We never learned to bend,
so we break and break again.
And now we're broken in.
Too many pieces to mend.

"Too Many To Mend", Libby Weaver


After the first gunshot nobody is sure what they've heard. After the other three, though, there's no doubt what's happened. The sound of the shots, followed by a reverberating thud and an involuntary cry of pain, has Sam and Kensi jumping up out of their chairs, despite being several hundred miles from the source of the frightening sounds.

"G!" Sam shouts into his earpiece. "Deeks!" There is no way to tell what has just happened based only off that set of sounds, which has petered off now, into a disturbing, unnerving silence.

"What happened?" Kensi asks, unable to keep threads of panic from seeping into her voice.

This is the point at which Hetty walks in, appraisingly sweeping her eyes around the room.

"What's going on?" she asks, forgoing small talk and directly addressing Sam and Kensi, who are wearing identical looks of fear. As Sam continues to try and get and a response out of their radio silent partners, Kensi answers Hetty in clipped, anxious words.

"We were on comms with Deeks and Callen," she says, heart pounding against her sternum. "Deeks thought he found the missing flash drive. There were gunshots, and we heard what sounded like someone making a really fast impact into something very hard. We don't know who was involved with what, and neither of them have said a word since."

Just as it looks like Hetty is about to say something, the comms lines connecting ops to G and Deeks seems to explode in commotion. A burst of violent coughing, deep and gasping, tears out from one man, a string of... creative swearing from the other. Based on that, it is easy to pinpoint who's done what.

"Thanks for your input, Deeks," Kensi says, turning away from Hetty and focusing on the audio link.

"Where's G? What's going on? Why isn't he saying anything?"

It sounds like Deeks groans in response to Sam's rapid fire trio of questions, and the other person's coughing – G's coughing – ramps up to a new level.

"Has he been shot? G, were you shot?"

"Yeah." It's the first word G has managed to gasp out the entire time, and while it's good to hear his voice, Sam is in no way reassured by what he's said.

The coughing continues while Deeks's irritated, pained voice chimes in.

"He's wearing a vest, I think they just got that. I didn't see what – ah, shit, ow – I didn't see what happened. He's got a vest, I don't. So he pushed me down the freaking elevator shaft. I hit the wall pretty hard and it hurts like hell but I don't think I broke anything."

Relief washes over Kensi and she mouths 'thank god'. She hopes Deeks is right and the bullets only caught G in the vest. He's given them enough scares with bullet holes, thank you very much.

"G, were you hit anywhere other than your vest?" The urgency in Sam's voice has hardly dimmed with the knowledge that G is still alive and – if still breathless and coughing – capable of speech.

"No," comes the hoarse reply moments later. "Three shots. All caught the vest."

"How's your breathing?" It's a relief to know the vest has served its purpose, but Sam isn't fully satisfied.

"How do you think?" The answer spat in G's irritated voice has the impact taken out of it by the coughing fit that comes over the comms link seconds later.

Deeks's snickering filters through his mic, though there's a bit of distortion that makes Kensi wonder if the elevator shaft is interfering with the signal, or if maybe the fall and impact has damaged his earwig.

With a clearing of her throat, Hetty takes over the conversation.

"What's the situation?" she asks, clearly addressing G and Deeks.

"Well, G is up on the tenth floor," comes Deeks's input, sounding like he's talking through gritted teeth. "He took three to the vest. I'm honestly not sure which floors I'm... hanging outbetween, but I banged up my hip, shoulder, and head pretty bad. That said, I don't think it's necessarily concussion bad and I didn't break anything."

"The shooter?" Hetty asks, moving along brusquely.

"I only got a brief look at his face when he shot me," says G, still sounding a little out of breath, but way better than the last time he tried to talk. "Just one guy, though. White. Tall. Didn't seem to really know what he was doing with a gun. That's all I've got. He showed up right when Deeks yelled something about the flash drive so I'm thinking this was our guy."

"Do you think we can maybe get me out of here." Deeks's voice is more than a little peeved, and Kensi feels a laugh bubble up on her chest at the thought that Deeks has been hanging suspended in midair this entire time.

Getting Deeks out of the elevator shaft is a slow, difficult process. However difficult it is for Sam and Kensi to stand there and listen to them struggle and not be able to help, it is even more difficult for the two injured parties currently attempting the extraction to actually carry out.

When the man had started shooting, the building was swiftly evacuated, leaving nobody but G around to help Deeks out of the hole. With G's damaged chest courtesy of three close range gunshots and Deeks's general banged up state, it's not easy going. By the time G reaches down to grab Deeks's hand and pull him completely upright, Deeks is pretty sure he might have been wrong about that concussion thing.

It takes even longer to finally retrieve the flash drive. If Sam and Kensi'd had their way, they wouldn't have gone after it at all, not injured as they are, but a sharp look and an order from Hetty overrides any objection hardly before it can even be made.

It's also Hetty's urging that sees a reluctant Nell attempting to talk G through decrypting the flash drive. It's been thoroughly pointed out by Nell, Eric, G himself, and everybody else within earshot, that G really doesn't possess the technological know-how to crack this level of coded encryption, but Hetty is having none of it.

No, instead of doing what has been suggested and heading to the nearest emergency room, G is sitting at one of the tenth floor computer stations and listening to Nell's incredibly patient voice in his ear, while Deeks headed downstairs to talk to the security team probably about to storm the building. Splitting them up even further is yet another move against popular advisement, Hetty overriding Kensi and Sam's safety related objections.

"Now enter Ops Analyst Gallagher's code and see if that works," Nell says in a slightly muffled voice.

Looking over at her, Eric sees that she has dropped her face onto her folded arms in defeat. They've tried several of the less complex cracking methods and everything is coming up blank. Eric is glad he isn't the one Hetty asked to talk G through this because while he is helping from the periphery, the brunt of Hetty's impatient frustration isn't falling on his shoulders.

Not too much later, as Hetty's fuse burns shorter and shorter, Eric feels bad for thinking that.

Everyone has been stretched thin on this case, tempers running hot and patience wearing out, but it's Nell that Eric is now worried about. It's hard enough to try and crack a code under pressure, but talking another, far more inexperienced person through it from a couple hundred miles away, while Hetty Lange breathes down your neck... It's nigh on impossible, even without factoring in the level of encryption on the drive itself.

Sam and Kensi's consistent presence in the room throws a who other factor into play, on top of all that. From his place sort of on the periphery of everything that's happening, Eric can practically see the tension ratcheting up the longer they all crowd around Nell. He is just on the border of suggesting maybe they should all back off and give her some space when Hetty gets the jump on his idea.

"Mr Hanna," she snaps, after turning sharply and running into Sam. The room gets uncomfortably quiet, Eric and Nell watching the stiff postured trio of Sam, Kensi, and Hetty standing in the center of the room.

"Your job is not to stand around here and watch them do theirs. I trust you have other things you could be doing, Sam?"

It looks as if Sam is about to answer, going so far as to open his mouth, but Hetty cuts him off abruptly before he even gets the chance to speak.

"Then please, go work on them. You as well, Kensi. Neither of you are doing Nell or Mr Callen any good standing around here hovering."

Sam and Hetty stare at each other for a long, harsh moment while Kensi watches, then Sam turns away, concentrating on his ear piece.

"You're doing great, G," he says, shooting a quick, pointed look at Hetty when he says his partner's name. Then he walks brusquely out of the room, Kensi following close behind him.

There's something in that action, the way Sam says G's name, the way he seems to almost be pointing it at Hetty, that sticks in Nell's mind.

Nell has seen the way the muscles of Sam's jaw clenches every time has spoken these last few days, his hands shaking just the slightest bit as his fingers tighten into fists at his sides every time Hetty says those words, Mr Callen.

There's a near anger in the way Sam says G's name, when he and Hetty are standing toe to toe and Nell wonders if there's finally going to be a confrontation of sorts, if maybe all of this built up tension and pressure will finally explode. She wonders who, if any of them, will be left standing in the aftermath.

When she walks G through the next code strategy, Nell is still thinking about names and voices, and a question hovers at the edge of her tongue for minutes before she asks it. It is only when Hetty steps out of the room to take care of something or other, and Eric excuses himself from his work on the phone numbers, that the opportunity presents itself, and she jumps upon it before she can find it in herself to think better of what it is she is about to do.

"Hey, uh," she says in a hesitant voice. "I. You never said and I never asked but- What do you want me to call you?"

"Excuse me?" The response is shocked and confused.

"Your, uh. Your name. I never asked which you preferred and, I mean. Which do you want me to call you? Callen or... or G?" It comes out in stilted speech, halting and awkward, like it's a question Nell doesn't know if she is allowed to ask him.

His answer, when it comes, is similarly broken up, as if unsure if he's allowed to tell the truth.

"...G," he says finally, in a tight voice, like it's a plea, like it's a confession. "Call me G."

"Alright, G," Nell agrees, feeling something in her ribcage loosen.

The question and subsequent answer seems to lend a kind of peace to the further dialogue between Nell and G. Not so much as to relieve the burden of the circumstances entirely, but enough that, for a few minutes at least, those perhaps most effected by the turmoil with Hetty, those her unpredictable behavior has come down hardest on, can breathe easily. It doesn't last for long, Eric coming back from the bathroom and Hetty approaching up the stairs, but Nell things to herself that she has never in her life been so grateful for a break.

If anything, though, the scarce moments away from Hetty's harsh presence only serves to magnify it upon her return. As the minute hand inches around the face of the clock mounted on the wall, tracking just how long they've been at this, Hetty grows increasingly more impatient. It seems to Nell like Hetty has come somehow under the misguided notion that she and G have yet to crack the encryption on the drive because they've chosen not to, rather than the obvious and truthful conclusion that this is top level Navy encryption, and smart though G Callen may be, he's never possessed a great deal of finesse with computers, and his only help is hundreds of miles away, blindly coaching him through an earpiece.

The situation gets almost to the point of Nell snapping and yelling at her boss to, in blunt terms, screw off and let her do her god forsaken job, sure to be an unforgivable mistake that would at the very least cost her that job, when Eric takes matters into his own faintly trembling hands. His solution comes in the form of a text message sent downstairs, opting to call in the big guns rather than try and diffuse this situation on his own.

"What do you mean there's nothing on the flash drive?" Hetty is in the process of asking in a frighteningly icy calm voice when Kensi and Sam reach the room. They remain in the doorway for a moment to take in what's going on before deciding if and how to intervene.

"I mean there's nothing on the flash drive!" Nell, on the other hand, is anything but any kind of calm. Her voice has hiked up a couple notches from its average pitch, and Eric is honestly not sure how close to the breaking point she is – indeed how close he himself is, just being in the same room as this mess. He's fairly sure neither Hetty nor Nell have noticed yet the presence of Kensi and Sam.

"Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me the two of you haven't just deleted what very well could be our motive, and at the least is a now-breached piece of highly guarded military data," Hetty says, voice climbing up in volume with every word.

"There's nothing there! There isn't anything there and there never was anything there!" There's an edge to Nell's insistence, and Hetty is about to continue, advancing towards the near-frantic young woman, when Kensi decides that this is it, enough is enough.

"Hetty," she shouts, side-stepping around a chair to plant herself firmly, protectively, in-between Hetty and Nell. "Back. The hell. Off. Right now."

It looks for a bout half a second like Hetty is gearing up to yell something in response, maybe remind Kensi just who exactly is in charge here, when Kensi jumps the gun and cuts her off.

"If you try and justify this or keep driving Nell into some kind of break down, I swear I will march downtown and bring Director Vance to this office myself to court marshal you for abuse of power, so help me God."

The fact that Hetty can't technically be court-martialed, and legal action against her would probably take some other term, is the farthest thing from Kensi's mind at that point, having gone with the first suitably strong-worded phrase that came to her. The immediate situation is far more demanding of her attention than a misuse of military phrasing.

Kensi is acutely, painfully aware that she has just crossed a line in the sand, and everybody knows it. She has done something there is no coming back from, exposed their hand to Hetty. She can sense Nell behind her, however, and she knows it was worth it. That's why they're doing this, after all, isn't it? To protect people from Hetty.

Seconds tick past as Kensi and Hetty stare each other down hard, neither willing to back down first. Luckily it doesn't come to that, because it's exactly that moment that Eric's computer pings, and he turns to it, thanking every deity he can think of and reading the message on the screen.

All attention is on him when he reads off the message, relief rolling through him.

"Those numbers on Admiral Gallagher's phone – we finally got who they belong to."