Hello all! Here's another chapter! This one changes things up a little, and is told from both Kensi and Deeks's points of view. Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS: LA.
Chapter Twelve
Darkness. Pain. Throbbing, throbbing pain. Kensi could neither see nor hear...there was only the feeling of pain and damp concrete beneath her, the binding sensation of ropes around her wrists and ankles. She was lying on her side, the taste of blood in her mouth, robbed of her vision. There was only blackness.
Oh, God. No. No. Please no.
She tried to breath deeply, but panic had closed up her throat. Kensi's chest was tight, her stomach clenched into knots. Breath in. Breath out. In a vain attempt to calm herself down, Kensi prayed. She remembered going to Mass at the local Catholic church as a kid, listening to a robed priest talk at length about God and His work. She hadn't understood any of it, but she liked the songs. Some of the Psalms she liked as well, and had remembered throughout her life.
Oh, God, where's Deeks? Dizzy sickness swooped into her stomach. Kensi felt guilty for not worrying about him sooner: what if Deeks had befallen the same fate? Tied up, left for dead? What if he was—
No. Stop. Freaking out will only make things worse. Kensi thought about what Hetty would say if she were in this situation. Probably nothing good. Probably nothing G-rated, either. Kensi lay in the darkness, her eyes closed, and fought off encroaching panic.
She could smell, very faintly, the scent of snow and cigarette smoke.
"Kensi?" Deeks strode across the motel's parking lot, cupping his hands around his mouth. A light, dusty snow had begun to fall; darkness was closing in quickly. There were few cars in the parking lot. The motel was small, and dumpy: a series of small connected rooms, like bungalows, painted white and bordered by black forest. There was a small lobby, and Deeks hurried towards it.
Inside, a bored-looking teenage girl dozed behind the front desk. An elderly man was fast asleep in one of two crappy armchairs. Frost blurred the windows.
Deeks looked around for Kensi; she was nowhere to be found. There was a door marked 'rest-room' and he rapped sharply on it, calling out. The girl behind the desk gave him an apathetic sort of glare.
Two young men came in, dressed in jackets and stomping snow off of their boots, and paid for a room for the night.
"Double bed?" The girl asked with a slightly knowing smirk.
"No," The taller of them rolled his eyes. "We're not...we're brothers, okay?"
"Uh-huh." The girl, still smirking, accepted their cash. When the young men had shouldered their way through the door, out into the gathering darkness, Deeks approached the desk.
"Did a woman come through here a few minutes ago? Maybe a half-hour?"
"What does she look like?"
"Pretty. Dark hair, about my height." He began to feel desperate. "She has really unique eyes. One blue, one brown."
"No." The girl flipped through a teen magazine. "Do you have any cigarettes?"
"I don't smoke," Deeks said, and went out again. Night had fallen over the tiny town. He paced in the parking lot, jittery with fright. Kensi was gone. She was not in the room, not in the lobby. Deeks traversed the edge of the forest, his heartbeat growing unhealthily quick. He was about the give up and go check the Grayhound bus terminal when his boot collided with something half-buried in the snow.
Deeks knelt, picked it up.
His heart stopped for a second.
It was a cross necklace, silver. Small, strung around a thin chain. Deeks had seen the same necklace around his partner's neck earlier, had seen her touch it sometimes, almost absentmindedly, when they were stuck on a case or had run out of leads. He felt sick.
"Shit." Deeks pocketed the necklace, scanned the ground for footprints—Damn it, why couldn't Kensi be here? She knew everything about tracking, about hunting and survival and...
No. This wasn't time to get weepy. Deeks stood up and raced towards the woods, into the darkness.
In the wane light and the pressing cold, Kensi arched her back from the floor. It hurt—everything hurt, every small motion and every breath. There was a cold weight in her bra: a small knife, a black-and-silver hunting model kept there for occasions like this. What criminal, caught up in the heat of the moment, would think to check a woman's bra for weaponry?
Your mistake, suckers. Kensi felt the ropes binding her wrists stretch taught as she shimmied awkwardly. The knife was nearly dislodged. She hopped up and down, wincing as pain radiated through her neck and back. There was blood shining darkly on the concrete. Almost...almost...
There. The knife fell, sliding from her shirtfront across her chest and neck; Kensi caught it deftly between her teeth. At times like this, alone in the rank darkness, she was glad that she had received top-notch training from the Office of Special Projects.
Kensi dropped the knife, fumbling it into her hands, and flipped it open with numb fingers. A cut stung hotly on her palm. She cut the ropes in half a minute, moved on to her ankles. Kensi glanced around the room: coldly empty, save for a heap of plastic bags in the corner. It didn't take a genius to figure out what they were intended for. There was another length of rope coiled in the corner. Kensi contemplated taking it with her, in case she needed to strangle someone in a hurry, but decided that it would only weigh her down. She needed to be light and fast and free.
Kensi moved to the door, treading lightly, placing her feet carefully. She heard distant voices. One sounded familiar. Footsteps, moving away from her, and then a door opening and slamming shut.
The smell of snow grew stronger.
Deeks jogged after a while, and then he ran again. Heat burned in his chest, a combination of cold and panic—he had been trained for this, had encountered similar situations on the streets of LA, but this was Kensi here...this was Kensi gone, vanished in the snow.
Breath. Stay calm. Breath, dammit.
He hugged the treeline best he could, keeping away from the denser forest. The pine trees were giant needles now, dusted with snow. A road bisected the woods to his right, but to his left there was only thick, pine-scented darkness.
Deeks tried not to think about Kensi, or the way that her hair looked in the sunlight, or her laugh. He knew that these were all chick-flick clichés, little things that he would do best to steer clear of, but he could not avoid them.
The road wound into the trees, and after a while Deeks saw footprints at the edge, and then tire tracks.
Someone had driven up to the edge of the road and climbed out of a car or truck. Car, judging by the size and width of the tracks. There was a deeper furrow than ran beside the footprints. When Deeks saw it, his heart leapt into his throat.
Someone had dragged a body here.
He broke into a run, plunging through the trees in pursuit of the footprints. They were deep enough to follow. He did.
Kensi was somewhere in this darkness: Deeks knew it. He held his gun before him, heavy-hearted with the knowledge that he couldn't really see well enough to fire it safely.
A shape slowly emerged from the darkness. Deeks squinted, unable to tell if it was a shed or house or just a big, snow rock.
It was a house.
A small house, with a sagging roof and crappy tin-roofed garage, the bulky shape of a covered car beneath it.
Deeks approached slowly, keeping to the shadows. As he did, the front door creaked open, then slammed shut. A tall, slope-shouldered man came out and lit a cigarette. Deeks ducked behind a tree, breathing quickly. He stayed there for several minutes, hoping that the smoking man would move away or at least go back in inside. He peered out, into a hazy darkness.
The man was gone. Deeks began to creep forwards, hands wrapped around his gun. He did not hear nor see the man behind him until something came down across his head, cracking sharply, and he realized that it was the butt of a gun before he crumpled to the ground.
"Gotcha." Someone said. Against his will, Deeks let out a high-pitched groan.
Squinting through the warm blood that clouded his eyes, Deeks looked up and saw the warm red glow of a cigarette tip.
Hope you liked it! Apologies for not getting it out and online sooner!