At this point Kensi jumped in.
"Dominic Vail. Dom." Kensi smiled remembering her first partner. "He was… a complete nerd." She laughed. "Obsessed with Startrek and computers, he knew random facts to just about anything. And he had this dorky alien bobble head on his desk that Sam used to relentlessly tease him about." She said while looking at Dom's former desk, which her husband now occupied.
"Sam gets that way, you know." She said, returning her focus to the two newest members of their team. "He gets all involved in your life and pushes you and prys at you and can drive you nuts, but he does it to protect you." Kensi explained.
"Sam would spend hours every week trying to train Dom, help improve his field craft." Kensi laughed inwardly to herself recalling a memory. "One time, we were all sitting in the bullpen, and Sam had Dom facing the kitchenette over there. He stood by his desk with a stapler in his hand pretending it was a gun and made Dom try to knock the "gun" out of his hand before he could fire it. They must have been doing it for close to half an hour before Eric whistled us up to ops. Dom was still too new and didn't know the "drill when you hear the shrill", so he kept standing, facing the kitchenette waiting for Sam to make a move while the rest of us walked up to ops. Dom's soul must have momentarily leaped out of his body when Hetty suddenly appeared at his side and told him to head upstairs. He had no idea Sam wasn't standing behind him aiming his stapler at him anymore."
Then Kensi sighed. "But despite all our best efforts at training Dom, he still didn't vary his routine enough. And… he got unlucky. He was too new to NCIS to have any enemies of his own. But Callen, Sam, and I… we had more than a few. So… one night Dom got snatched on his way home from work." Kensi recalled whiling taking a deep breathing trying to recenter herself.
"We searched everywhere for him. We eventually found the guys who took him, but they had already handed him off to the guys that hired them. We had no leads. He was missing for months. Then one day, we got lucky. We found him. He managed to get free from his captors and make his way to the roof of the building he was being held in. Sam got to him first, but they were taking heavy fire. One of Dom's captors came up to the roof from another door behind where Sam and Dom were taking cover. Dom…" Kensi choked up. "Dom threw himself in front of Sam to cover him and got hit. Callen and I were eventually able to clear the building and get up to the roof, but… it was too late. He was gone." Kensi retold with tears in her eyes.
"That's why Sam would always ride Deeks so hard….. well… one of the reasons." She smiled towards Deeks who returned the smile.
"That's why he's riding you guys too. We've had a lot of tragedy in this office, and we've had a few really bad years. It's taken us a lot to get to a point where we're solid again. But even the most highly trained among us, taking all the precautions in the world, get hurt sometimes. We've all been kidnapped, Sam's been shot while working an op, Callen and Deeks have both been shot off duty. We've all been tortured. This isn't a normal job. The stakes are high even for the most trained agents out there. And we know that, and we can accept that, it's what we signed up for. What we didn't sign up for is getting hurt or compromised due to incompetence or lack of training. If we get killed on the job because we were bested by the enemy, that's one thing. But if any of us were to get hurt or killed because of inadequacy from OUR side, we just can't go through that again." Kensi said looking both Fatima and Devin sternly in the eye.
Fatima and Rountree both swallowed hard after hearing everything the three agents had to say.
"Let's go home." Kensi sighed to Deeks as they both picked up their belongings from their desk and walked out through the tunnel.