Season 2, Episode 1: Human Traffic
G was awake at dawn, staring up at a familiar ceiling from his sleeping bag as if he were fourteen years old again. Except this time, he wasn't in a temporary bedroom listening to the sounds of a temporary family. This was his house now.
His house.
He never could tell if he wanted to hug Hetty or chuck things at her head – maybe both at the same time. There was no other person in the world who would go so far as to take his money out of his accounts and buy him a house. Let alone do so without consulting him.
And no other person he would have accepted it from, either.
In the morning light, the colors of the house were different from what they had been the night before. The dawn-gold sunlight was much brighter than the evening sunset orange. It was more like the morning in the bullpen, where the evening sunset light was the same warm shade as the lamps in Hetty's office.
G started walking the empty floors of the house again, stepping on every floorboard, running his fingertips along the walls and doors and windows. He tried all the sinks, listening to their sounds, timing how long each one took to go from stone cold to scalding.
He was circling back to the front when he heard the slightest scraping sound from the porch. Curious, he peeked out a window.
Hetty was just straightening up. She looked at him through the window and gave a little smile, then turned to walk down the front path back to the street.
For a moment, G considered calling out to her. Maybe even chasing her.
She had given him a home, and now she had given him a house.
But he held still. If she had wanted to share this moment, this first morning, with him, she would have knocked. Hetty always did what she intended, and she clearly intended on leaving him to settle into his place on his own terms.
However, she had left him something.
He watched her long enough to see her get safely in her car – there weren't generally a lot of muggings in this neighborhood, but anybody who raised a finger to her was going to lose it and the hand attached to it – and then pulled open his front door.
Two boxes sat side by side, with a basket in the middle.
The basket was, of all things, a fruit basket. There was no card, just the fruit, but G didn't miss that it was all the fruit he tended to like and not the generic mixes that always included stuff he wouldn't eat unless he'd been starving in a Moroccan prison for more than a week.
The label on the left-hand box showed that it contained a set of cameras and a full, hardwired security system. G recognized the brand; it was the same Hetty used for one of her smaller houses.
The right-hand box held a wall safe.
G laughed.
Leave it to Hetty to not only buy him a house, but help him stock it with the essentials. Not furniture, or art, or knick-knacks, or linens. She didn't try to make his home look like other homes, not even like her own. She didn't try to fill up the empty quiet space which made him feel like he could breathe.
Instead, she fed him, and she protected him, and she helped him keep his secrets.
Because of course she did.
G carried in the boxes and the basket, and set about figuring out which wall or floor he was going to cut apart. He'd have to get Sam to lend him some tools so he could hide the safe correctly.
And it might hurt, he realized after a moment, to break an unbroken wall or rip up a smooth, steady floor.
But as much as this house represented his past, it could also represent his future.
Callen decided he was going to be all right with a little renovation after all.