Chapter 11: Alias
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." – Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
There's sunlight in her eyes bright and unyielding and dragging her back to a consciousness that's far more painful than she thinks it has any right to be, and Kensi drags heavy eyelids open with what feels like massive effort. It takes three far too long blinks before the world comes into anything like focus and then she squints against the light, feeling it pulse and jab in her brain like a thousand little fireworks.
"Deeks," she thinks then oddly urgent and with an insistence that prickles worry along her nerves. They were in danger, she remembers, ISIS and a shoot out in a warehouse, and she darts her eyes around the room finding his prone form before the rest of the pieces click into place. She breathes a sigh of relief that rushes all the way up from her toes because he's sitting in the ratty old chair opposite her, head propped on his closed fist, and fast asleep by the even rise and fall of his chest.
She drops her head back against the ratty couch cushions and closes her eyes, breathing deep in relief. They're together and they're alright and for now that's all she can ask for. She pries her eyes open against the bright sunlight and has to bite her lip to hold back a cry of surprise because Callen's peering over the back of the nasty old couch at her, a wry grin tugging at the corners of his lips, "Morning, Kens."
"Callen," she murmurs grinning back up at him. There's something crinkling the corners of his eyes, happiness she thinks at first that they survived, relief that they're all in one piece more or less. That's not it she realizes though, or at least not fully, there's something else there hiding in the shadows in his eyes, something dark that shimmers like betrayal and fear.
"How's the leg, Kens?" She drops her eyes down to the gauze wrapped around her thigh, dried blood from earlier crusting on the material. Underneath the sutures she'd talked her parter through making the night before, sting like a collection of snakes bites across her thigh.
She looks away then as the wound starts to throb as though her attention on it has reawakened the nerves in the area. Callen's eyes are still on her, his attention bright and sharp and almost overwhelming. There's worry in his cyan blue eyes, clouding the normally bright colour and she wonders about how long he's been sitting there.
"Better," she lies if only to make some of that worry fade. Kensi plants her hands at her sides and pushes, shoving herself upright in a move that hurts less than she was expecting. Deeks' hand topples off her knee, banging into the edge of the chair he's sitting on, and she cringes, hating to wake him when she has no doubt he's spent the entire night and most of the morning in that chair. He stays asleep though, breathing so deeply that it doesn't even change with the jar, and Kensi frowns because he's not even that deep a sleeper at the best of times.
Callen clears his throat then, the sound harsh and very close and she turns to watch him over the back of the couch as he produces two bottles of water and passes her one. "Drink. You've been out for almost fourteen hours."
Kensi startles then, chokes, and has to cough several times to clear the water that's lodged the wrong way in her throat. She'd figured that she'd been asleep for a while, but hadn't realized just how late it was. She squints at the light slipping in through the cracks in the windows and above the door, contemplating the angle against the concrete and decides it must be much closer to noon than she'd thought. They shouldn't have let her sleep so long, they're on a clock as it is, but as she studies the circles under Callen's eyes, she can't help but be glad that they did. "What happened to the group at the warehouse? Any leads?"
"Gone." Callen snaps, hands clenching on the back of the nasty sofa she's laying on, before he steps away. He paces across the warehouse space, a dozen steps away and then turns on his heel to stalk back towards her. He's too calm, too focused, each step too smooth and precise. "Bodies were gone. Weapons. Everything. Not even a shell casing in the whole place."
"What?!" She pushes herself upright, or tries anyway because all of sudden her arms are too weak and her muscles shake.
"Callen?" She asks, confusion at the way her voice rings in her ears colouring the sound. He grimaces at her, apologies shining in his bright blue eyes as he reaches out to push her back down on the cushions. There's a blurry kind of grace in the way he moves that she's always admired. Or maybe that's her. Kensi reaches out to catch his arm, movements slurred, as she grazes his skin and misses by a mile. He presses the water bottle back into her hand and smiles, bittersweet and jaded. There's an ocean of pain in his eyes, so so deep, and she's taking longer between every blink to figure out how to lift her eyelids again. She can't remember why she's so tired. Wasn't she just asleep?
"It's okay," Callen murmurs, revenge glittering in his eyes like stars and she doesn't recognize any of the patterns they lay out. It's Callen's ghost again come back for an encore and she thinks she might understand now why Deeks was so afraid of this monster that lives under their friend's skin. It's the eyes of a predator, like making faces at a Great White and she can't see anything of the Callen she knows in the darkness staring back at her. "I know who betrayed us, Kens. And I know how to find ISIS."
"Yuri," she murmurs because this is the Ghost through and through. The scourge of half the world, he's been twisted she thinks; bent, broken, shaped into something savage and heartless, and even all this time with them have barely blunted those edges.
Callen smiles then, bitter and jaded, and Kensi watches him walk away in the space between blinks. She's so very tired and the water bottle slips between her fingers as she watches him reach for the door. It's goodbye, she thinks because there's nothing of Callen left behind those shark eyes and the rage in his smile is something inhuman.
She needs to stop him, needs to get Deeks. She needs to open her eyes. But she's so very very tired. And that's not Callen, not really, not anymore, and the thud of the warehouse door reverberates in her skull like the weight of her eyelids.
