'The burden you choose to bear
Keeping yourself from those who care,
All of the things you keep concealed,
One day are bound to be revealed—
We paint a picture of ourselves that isn't real.'
"Known and Loved" ~ Joel Ansett
~OL~
Other men might have grieved at that point or screamed in anger and pain, but for half an hour after the gunshots—thirty excruciating minutes that delay the second hand's ticking like it's tethered to the earth—all Sam does is sit.
The bluster leaks out of him in one giant exodus and he blinks, as if entering a deep trance. He sits under the window, he stares, and he presses his foot into Callen's where they sit across from each other. Callen tilts sideways next to the door.
"I'm sorry," Callen whispers.
"We've been over this already, G."
"I shouldn't have provoked him, tried to buy time."
Sam's eyes glare a warning. "Not your fault."
Neither man cries. Perhaps that's abnormal, perhaps it's not healthy, but other than some knot-in-his-throat swallowing, all Callen wants to do is the same thing Sam is actually doing—
He wants to listen.
They sit completely still, exchanging not a single word more while they strain their ears. Atop the lash of rain, building to an even greater tropical storm, the amiable murmurs of guards on their shift change and the compound's bustling close up shop for the night.
No sign of Kensi and Deeks. Of their corpses being moved.
In this way, nerve endings reached far, both Callen and Sam can't fight an undignified jump when loose pebbles around the room rattle.
Callen shoots upright, hand on the cold floor to stabilize his dizziness. Blotchy ink spots, lined with technicolour, float at the rim of his vision. Sam is already on his feet, squinting through the bars on the door.
At first that seems like the end of the strange noise, one they've never heard in the twenty four hours since they were caught. It's a boom more than a sound, felt rather than heard.
Maybe the compound doors are being closed or it's from something being loaded into the weapons bay downstairs…?
These are Callen's best guesses—but then urgent voices begin to shout down the stairwell. He knows his theories are not correct anyway, that no doors could make such a sonorous vibration, too low to be heard. But such alarm in the guards' voices sends an eerie ache through his chest.
BOOM.
This time, the low whomp ends in a crackle, like electrical whips twirled in the air. A bulb over the guard's desk in the hall winks out, throwing the room into even greater darkness than before.
Sam gasps, above Callen's head, and only then does he realize his partner has scaled the window again.
"What? Rescue?"
"G…I don't know what's going on—but the lower walls are on fire." He sounds calmer than he should, though the whites of his eyes flash in the gloom.
"Fire?" Callen struggles to stand, nearly blacking out at the pain this causes his spine. "The fortress is made of stone."
Sam hops down in a dexterous, panther-like move, as if he doesn't have the mother of all concussions too. "Yeah, but the upper levels aren't."
His strong paw appears under Callen's bicep and deftly levers him onto his own two feet, his other arm wrapped around Callen from the front instead of the back. Callen leans more heavily on Sam than he's comfortable with, forced to brace a hand on Sam's shoulder. They both wheeze from even that minor exertion, their chests bumping into each other.
"We should get out of here," says Sam, voice thin.
"After you."
And it strikes Callen as they start for the door what a clownish move this is. Where are they going to go? How are they going to escape before they're burned alive? Sam's dog tag, that would take weeks to wear down into a metal shiv?
The next wh-BOOM shakes the structural walls. Dusts rains on them like pixie dust. Callen twists a hand in the shoulder of Sam's shirt to keep from toppling and stiffens with realization. "That's not just a gas fire. Those are explosives."
"You might be right, but I hope for our sakes you're not."
Again and again a sound like distant fireworks knocks the compound. The fifth one buckles the floor of their cell, and smoke wafts in from the stairwell. Flag stones shuffle places by mere inches in their cobbles pattern, still enough to force Sam and Callen to grab at the wall for support. The floor feels like a carpet, in wave-like ripples that resettle the mortar in a macabre Jenga game.
Clang!
That's a new sound. Both Callen and Sam snap away from it on instinct, muscles tight.
"G," Sam says, at the same time Callen breathes, "the door!"
It hasn't magically sprung open, but upon closer inspection the hinges warped where the wall's buckling cracked around their bolts. Sam tries pushing the door open and its rusty scraping sound is both loud and dissonant enough to make them wince.
"I can kick it open." Sam has one hand on Callen's chest, the other in the small of his back, to shuffle him into a gentle prop against the wall. Callen scowls. He's less effective than a potted plant, picked up and relocated on a whim. "Hang tight."
"And once we get it open?" Callen lowers his head, brows up. "Then what?"
"Would you stop being such a Dolly Downer? What's gotten into you today?"
"What's gotten into me?" Something riles in Callen's chest, something he hasn't allowed himself to dwell on. Hurt. Fear. Abandonment. "What about your Rambo impersonation back there?"
"What are you going on about—"
"I'm just saying, they'll shoot us. We don't have a weapon."
Sam's face hardens. "I am a weapon."
Despite the kitschy words, a chill shoots down Callen's inflamed spine at the tone he rarely hears from his partner. It's usually used before someone dies. Violently.
He swallows down his emotions to deal with for another time, preferably when they're not about to die. "Be careful."
"Are you kidding me, G?"
"Job safety is important."
"Everybody's a comedian around here. You ready?"
Callen nods and braces himself, on the off chance one of the guards choking on smoke and running panicked around the hallway cares enough to accost them.
Sam backs up to the far wall, under the window, before oxygenating with a few deep breaths. Then he pushes off at a dead run.
At the last second, he lifts both feet and donkey kicks the hinges, slamming onto his back.
"You dolt!" Callen stands guard over him, as if that will help, to maintain the usual protocol. His heart hammers. "I didn't expect you to do it like that!"
Sam clambers to his feet, hopping once like a prizefighter. "Might have broken something."
"You think?" Callen snaps. He runs a bloody hand through his hair. "At least it worked."
It worked a little too well, Callen sees once they haul themselves out.
Callen refuses the offer of a 'piggy back' carry, though he appreciates that Sam, ever the optimist, can find some humour in all this. "I'm walking and that's final."
"You're hobbling, is what you're doing," Sam fires back.
The return of their usual banter is short lived, mainly because they get a good look at the iron door and realize it landed on their head guard when Sam bull rammed it free of the frame. The mercenary's crumpled body lies pinned by the door's massive bars.
"Do you think he's dead?" Sam asks, sounding a little stunned with himself.
"I don't care." Callen pokes Sam in the side to get them moving, which he can't do under his own power at the moment. "We've got to be gone by the time this place goes up in smoke."
"Too late." Sam's voice has switched to something jittery and alert, laced with adrenaline.
And if Callen had any doubts that stone would impede the burning of what wood and cloth line the inside of the fortress—he's proven wrong by flames licking at the stairwell.
Sam stutters to a stop at the orange blaze, the screams of dying men far below. Callen's stomach riots at the smell of burning flesh. He manages to swallow again and decides that if this is a rescue, it's going even worse than theirs did for Rhea.
"Now what?"
The prompt gets Sam walking again, in the other direction. He swivels on his heel and this time Callen does vomit a bit, spitting it into their cell on the way by. Good riddance. Sam doesn't spare the puking fit a second glance, just hitches Callen higher on his shoulder. His arm pinches Callen's ribs.
"There's a second staircase I saw in the blueprint file Hetty gave us." Sam pants it out, coughing. "Around the head guard's sleeping quarters…"
But that one is even worse than the first. They know that even before it comes into view, two long minutes later, because of the oven heat that bakes the sweat to their skin.
Sam instinctively retreats. This stairwell is silent, and somehow that's much worse than screaming.
They're trapped and they confirm it to themselves in one moment of eye contact.
"Guards' locker room?" Callen offers.
"Yep."
They head that way by unspoken distress, mute panic they're both too well trained to voice. Callen feels the first hack rise in his chest, at the foggy haze that has immersed the entire corridor. He coughs without opening his lips.
"G?"
"I'm fine. Keep moving."
The locker room is the only door that's not locked, chock full of ammo and spare uniforms and toiletries. Callen chose this room because it might have a secret, hidden staircase leading up to Torales' quarters or some such escape.
But Sam heads straight for a window at the back.
"Sam?" Callen flinches around a particularly mangled breath that erupts against the lodged bullet. "What are you doing?"
Sam just stands at the pane-less window and looks down. Waaayyyy down. Too far down for Callen's taste. There's no glass in this two-by-five monstrosity of an opening, so the storm whips rain at their faces, the first fresh air Callen has tasted all day, and chain lightning exposes their bloody faces in the night.
"There." Sam points, once a third set of lightning reveals what he wants.
Callen waits with narrowed eyes until the sky flashes enough for him to see. "A puny dock? Are you insane?"
"We can jump, G. And it's the yellow dinghy tethered to the dock that I want."
Bewildered to the point of jostling his partner, Callen ignores the dinghy idea for now in favour of the obvious problem. "Sam, that's a three-storey leap!"
"Into deep water," Sam argues, and Callen is delirious that he's trying to use logic right now. "This side of the fortress was built directly over the ocean, meaning we'll be jumping into twenty feet deep waves, at least. They'll buffer our fall."
"Are you positive of that?"
Sam's lips thin. "I studied sea charts of the area before we left LA. I'm as positive as I can be."
"Great."
Callen's grousing is all an act and he's aware Sam knows this. They're sardine pressed together, so there's no missing the trembles wracking Callen's body. Nor is there any missing the growing heat at their backs, stones crumbling into the water as Torales' house of cards falls down. The smoke is so thick that if Sam were standing an arm's length away, Callen wouldn't be able to see him.
He shakes his head. "We're going to die."
"Do you trust me, G?" Sam's eyes aren't intense, filled with that brotherhood-overcomes-all note Callen is used to like breathing air.
No—they're hurt.
Callen's mouth drops open, floored by something Sam seldom, if ever, lets him see like this. It's so agonized that he almost looks away.
When Callen takes a second too long to answer, Sam jostles him. As if this is the most urgent thing on the planet right now, even more than explosions and suicidal jumps and life threatening bullet wounds. "G? Do you trust me to get us home? Do you trust me with your life?"
"Always," Callen replies without hesitation this time. "You'll never let me down."
Well, Sam is about to throw him down a window, but that's splitting hairs.
And Sam's entire body deflates. He covers his eyes with his hand for a moment; they stream, just like Callen's, but for the first time Callen thinks maybe he's finally processing something else. The same something he himself hasn't dared voice, not once this past year of bitten-off words and lost time.
"I wish we could go back for their bodies."
Callen's whisper is nearly inaudible, but Sam hears him. He always hears him.
Sam's hand drops. "Kensi talked about wanting to be cremated anyway."
Maybe it's a morbid comment, but Callen takes immense comfort from it. They may never find Rhea's or the agents' bodies amid the ash, whatever Torales did with them, but here and now they can honour their family in this tiny way.
Neither is naïve enough to say 'goodbye' out loud, but both Callen and Sam pat the stones on either side of the window. Remembering. Memorializing what they can in place of a headstone.
"Ready?" Sam asks for the second time in under an hour.
"No." Callen goes limp to let Sam reverse their steps for the wind up. "But we're out of options."
~OL~
' We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.'
There is salt and there is white sand. It's beautiful, like lamb's wool and unspotted things. Ready for sacrifice, for the making of amends. Windy with the balm of a place he's never seen.
Souls forlorn, alabaster sails torn, and make-believe pirates who made you wish your children could be born without fathers to mourn…
"G? Can you hear me?"
Sweet dreams…ah, sweet—
~OL~
G Callen has fallen from a building exactly twice.
Once, during a case where he had to jump into a pool from a detached one-and-a-half storey balcony. The bruises and broken leg hurt like hell and for all the effort, they didn't even catch their suspect. He'd been lectured for a week straight by every single member of their team—Eric included.
The second time being right now. Twice as high as the first jump.
Contrary to how Sam badgers, Callen does remember his training course, to cross his ankles and fold his arms over his chest for when he hits the water. Being airborne feels like it takes a lifetime, certainly long enough for Callen to let go of his death grip on Sam and perform the exact same motions Sam is doing.
One last explosion propels them out of the building.
They are completely weightless, torn free from gravity and its endless demands. Callen flies into a storm of Shakespearean proportions.
He is weightless…he is free…he is engulfed in a downy soft silence.
What they don't teach you, though, about free diving into waves so turbulent they'd make Odysseus impressed—is how you'll feel like you just lost all your teeth. Callen didn't experience this the first time, other than the bone-jarring shock that always comes with hitting water, denser than air, at high velocity.
Now, however, the impact is so forceful that Callen instantly blacks out.
Pain wakes him. It's in his lungs, from the water and bullet, in his joints, in the cue ball ache of his skull, even his tongue where he bit down on the edge.
He hasn't been out long, but in barely three minutes something went wrong.
Not just his back, where the bullet definitely feels like it pierced something, but now he can't see Sam.
The visceral mania, heart snapping panic, this causes Callen catches him completely off guard. It's the first time since he woke up in a cell this morning that he hasn't been constantly within Sam's line of sight. Callen whirls in the water.
And there, face down in the water ten feet away, is his partner.
He's not moving.
"Sam!" Callen's scream is lost to the wind. "Sam!"
~OL~
' At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain…'
~OL~
The waves fight against Callen's weak front stroke, his swimming less coordinated than a child against the torrent. His injured arm shrills in protest. Still, he pushes, spurred by the sight of the yellow dinghy tow rope wrapped around Sam's wrist where he must have grabbed it.
"I'm coming!" Callen hacks up another mouthful of water. He just lost half of his team, his family, in one go—he cannot lose what he has left. "I'm coming, Sam!"
Suddenly, so fast he registers the warm squirt of his own blood before the pain, something swipes up the front of Callen's chest.
It's the worst immediate pain Callen has ever experienced in his life.
He screeches, with such power it's wrenched out of him before he can register the sensation. The storm wolf howls in reply.
~OL~
'…Nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed.'
~OL~
Being flayed and sautéed alive in real time would hurt less than the strips of skin currently hanging off Callen's chest, dozens and dozens of them. They punish him in cattle prod fritzes when the black spots in his vision fade and he can resist the dunking of the waves long enough to look down.
His shoe pushes off something course, bumping him over a long ridge of grainy, hardened sponge.
Callen realizes what it is just as he kicks free of it—coral. A coral reef barrier around the base of the inlet. And the waves dragged his torso roughly across it at incredible speed.
It must also be what Sam hit, dead on, when he landed. Once Callen swims up and rolls him on his back, then towards the dinghy, somehow miraculously afloat with rations still strapped to the bottom but spinning like a toy in the bathtub drain, he sees the unnatural angle of Sam's shin. It must have snapped upon impact.
I'm lucky I didn't hit it too or we'd both be dead.
The word, four letters long and Callen's entire life's theme in one syllable, incites his panic again. He never panics. It's not in his blood, not in his nature after one too many run ins with angry foster parents and people who never had the patience for a kid with so much baggage.
He is the calm one on the team. The ready for anything leader. The knows a way out of every situation member who never leaves his people behind.
Where is he now? Even Callen feels like insisting upon an answer for his absence.
"Hang on." Callen doesn't know if he's coaching Sam or himself at this point. "Just hang on."
~OL~
Cigarette in the rain, fighting through the pain, a futile lesson in disdain, never a song of love with more than one refrain—
"Grisha? Hey, you with me?"
"Not cool, brother. You've got to hang on a little longer. Okay? Callen?"
Sweet dreams…ah, sweet dreams.
And G Callen is alone.
~OL~
"G? You with me?"
"Hmm?" Callen's eyes snap off the rising sun to Sam's worried face.
"I said, are you with me now?"
Callen looks up at him, grateful that his partner's large body shades him from another day of merciless sun. He might almost take the storm yesterday night to this…this kiln of cheery sunlight. Both have blisters on their faces already. Salt aggravates their injuries, stinging the minor ones and cleansing the big spots, like Callen's chest.
"I was thinking about your terrible plan."
"Oh yeah?" Sam leans back, visibly relieved. "The one that kept you from barbecuing?"
"We nearly died, Sam. We should have found a way to scale to a lower window before jumping."
"Uh-huh." Sam sounds faux-unimpressed. But Callen can read the affection in his eyes. "I'll remember that the next time I'm trying not to burn to death."
Not that there would be a next time.
Sam reads this thought in his eyes, his own darkening. "We'll find a way to get home. Just you wait." But Sam's voice hiccups over the word home and Callen finally, finally sees his opening.
He tries again to take Sam's hand and this time his partner lets him. "You're my brother, you know that?"
"I do." Sam curls their arms, snakes twined around a staff that can't heal them this time. "I really do."
"Brothers don't let each other face things alone, right? That's what you're always telling me."
"G, please—"
"And this should be…" Callen gargles up more blood. "And this should be no different."
Sam hangs his head, though they're compressed tight enough that personal space is a laughable concept and Callen can still see his face. It's wretched now, as if Sam has aged ten years in the span of one night, all rigid clay statue lines damp with age and too much rain.
"You promised," Callen whispered. "You promised me that's what family does."
"Don't ask me something I can't give, G."
~OL~
Callen's world again comes down to colours and sensations:
Salt spouts attacking his eyes. A fortress-sized bonfire. Orange, black, sickly green lightning, pink coral…
The white of Sam's bone.
"Come on." Callen tries again to lift Sam onto the dinghy.
Success!
Or at least his torso is now sunk, limp, onto the makeshift boat. It's heavier than it looks to maneuver, both Sam's body and the dinghy. The inflatable rations container cushions his partner's chest.
A wave tears Callen down, his fingers bloody on the oar ports to keep from drowning. "Come on, Sam!"
~OL~
' They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.'
Where is Sam? Why is he alone?
Blood of my comrade...
~OL~
"Come on, Sam…come on…"
Blood loss makes the world lurch even more than the storm. He pushes at Sam's injured leg, the last part of him not on the dinghy, and hears a crunch of bone on bone in places they should never touch.
Callen hisses through his teeth, like he felt the pain instead, but Sam doesn't wake.
Hauling himself up feels intractable. Callen tries anyway, arms shaking, injured bicep giving out after a moment so that his torso just hangs inside the boat, legs flailed like a ragdoll in the waves. He hovers next to Sam's face, in awe that they're both still alive.
Then it clicks—
Sam isn't breathing.
~OL~
Part of a once in a lifetime dyad…
~OL~
"You bastard," Callen growls, because he's so scared his vision is blurry. He kneels on the floor of the dinghy and pumps at Sam's chest with his good hand. Their bodies hurtle from side to side, play things for the boiling cauldron of open sea.
"You can't just make up this plan and then…" He ceases the rant long enough to pinch Sam's nose and breathe into his lips again. "…Leave me here!"
~OL~
Found my heart when it was sad…
~OL~
The storm actually has the audacity to dissipate by the time Callen gets a face full of warm water. Despite the fact he's just been royally spit on, Callen laughs like he's never done it before. His hand clutches at Sam's.
The laughing spirals into crying, of course, far quicker than he expects. Not really tearful, messy weeping, but the dry sobs of a soul at its dead end.
"Sam…"
"G." Sam's whisper is raspy and he's already passing back out, but he pulls G close so he can wrap one arm around his neck in a desperate clutch. "I've got you. Always, remember?"
~OL~
…And taught love to the soul of a nomad.
