CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
For the third time in as many days, Sam was early to arrive at Ops on Thursday. Once again, he had tried to persuade his partner to come back to the boat with him for the night. After what had happened the previous evening, he felt even more strongly that Callen needed company, but to his frustration Callen had vehemently disagreed. Once Callen's mind was made up nothing would change it, and aware of the delicate state of their newly-repaired relationship, Sam reluctantly conceded and left: but no one had said anything about not turning up early the next morning.
Dumping his bag on his desk Sam made his way immediately towards the couch in the bullpen and felt a jolt of concern when he saw Callen was not there. Tamping down hard on the panic that automatically started to rise within him, Sam forced himself to think logically. There was no indication that Ops had been breached. No sign of a struggle. No reason at all to believe that Janvier had somehow taken Callen again. Far more likely that Callen had simply gone to the bathroom or to stretch his legs. Loosening his shoulders, Sam crossed to the little kitchen area and set about making drinks for them both.
Several long minutes later, Sam hardly tasted the hot coffee he finished in three unsettled swallows. Callen still hadn't reappeared. Frustrated, though with himself or Callen, Sam wasn't sure, the big man got up and strode in the direction of the gym. Maybe his damn fool partner had taken it upon himself to have an early morning workout, or slipped in the shower and knocked himself out… Sam could feel himself slipping back into that irrationally worried, over-protective 'mothering' mode that Callen hated so much, but he couldn't help it. Old habits died hard, and ridiculous though it might be, Sam felt as though he had two years of neglect to make up for.
Alternating between worried (for Callen) and cross (at himself), Sam pushed open the door to the gym. No Callen. As he made his way to the showers, Sam saw signs that his partner had however been in here: his sling was discarded on the floor, a towel over the handles of one of the static bikes. Sam shook his head with tolerant despair. Would Callen ever learn to just rest up patiently when he was injured? He pushed his head round the door to the locker room.
"G?" he called out, but he was met with deafening silence. Unable to help it, though chiding himself as he did so, Sam took a quick look in all the shower stalls. Just in case.
As he had rationally expected, Callen was not lying unconscious in any of them. Sam shook his head and pondered where else Callen might be. The firing range was silent. He peered into the armoury just in case Callen was there quietly cleaning a weapon, but as Kensi had confided in him of his one-handed struggle to manage the sniper rifle yesterday, Sam didn't really expect to see him engaged in that particular activity.
He began to get concerned that Callen had left the building, had maybe gone out in search of a bite to eat, or for a run. Though his partner rarely had breakfast, especially not this early, he could understand why Callen might want to run to clear his head. However, surely he would see the folly in leaving by himself? Sam didn't think Callen was incapable, far from it. Even more severely injured than he was now, he was well able to look after himself. But he wasn't in a good headspace, and Janvier was no ordinary enemy. Sam had no faith at all that the man wouldn't be doing everything he could to get his hands on Callen again. Or hand, Sam thought morosely, remembering angrily what the psychopath had done to Callen's own hand by way of revenge so far.
Just as Sam was considering calling in the troops in the form of Kensi and Deeks to go out and hunt for his lone wolf partner, he heard a noise above him, and he made his way quickly towards the stairs up to Ops. He sprinted up them two at a time and came face to face with a startled Callen at the top.
"Whoa big guy!" Callen exclaimed, his left hand firmly on the handrail almost as if he were bracing for impact. Sam's muscular frame, moving at speed like that, would knock him clean off his feet in his current state. "Where's the fire?"
"I was looking for you," Sam said sheepishly.
"Guess you found me… is there a crisis I don't know about?" Callen baited. He could tell from Sam's embarrassed expression exactly what had been running through his partner's mind.
"No crisis," Sam smiled disarmingly. He hated how Callen could read him sometimes. Pulling the sling from his back pocket, he held it out. "I noticed you mislaid this again." Callen glowered at him, not taking it.
"I was having a scout around the area of the auction site… on MapQuest of course," he explained when Sam raised an eyebrow. "It seems an odd choice of location..."
"How so?" Sam wasn't concerned. Not about the location anyway. They'd undertaken countless ops with much less planning than this, and Callen was of all of them the best at adapting to situations as they arose, flying by the seat of his pants if necessary. Their reconnoitre had enabled them to plan where they'd all position themselves, and Sam felt particularly reassured that the area leant itself well to holding a low-key perimeter on the surrounding roads. They'd be able to contain Janvier no problem.
With a further scrutinising gaze at his partner when he didn't respond, Sam realised Callen still looked strained and exhausted. It began to worry him that Callen was clearly so preoccupied with the location, and he wondered if something else was going on that he wasn't sharing. Maybe the drama of the previous evening had rattled him more than Sam realised.
"It'll be fine, G," Sam added reassuringly, and Callen nodded, but when they got back down to the bullpen he opened his laptop and once again opened up the maps and satellite view of the area, clicking through all the approach roads almost obsessively.
Something about the site gave him a feeling that he could best describe as an itch. An itch that he couldn't exactly pinpoint, like the healing wounds under the cast on his arm – there, inescapable, but indefinable in their exact location. Callen sighed, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep finally catching up with him, or embarrassment over the… incident… yesterday. He cursed himself again for what had happened. Sam and Kensi had made excuses for him, and hell, even he recognised that he had been tired beyond any normal limit. But still.
He heard the distant voices of Kensi and Deeks in the corridor and abruptly got up and left the bull pen. He was aware of Sam's concerned eyes watching him as he did so, and felt the need to escape all the more because of it.
The comparative darkness of the corridor was a relief for the dull ache behind his eyes. He walked blindly, not really sure where he was going, until he reached an alcove, and there he pressed himself into the small space as if he could disappear into the very structure of the ancient building itself.
He knew Kensi blamed herself for pushing him too far yesterday. They were all used to his normally inexhaustible stamina. Checking out the site of the auction was in the normal course of things a sound idea, an essential preparation for a mission that had a lot riding on it. Naturally he hadn't told them of his difficulties sleeping since his abduction by Janvier, nor did he think anyone, even Sam, truly grasped how close he had come to drowning in his moonlit swim to shore, how far beyond normal exhaustion he had gone to get Nick and Peter, along with himself, discreetly to safety.
He had been practically stumbling with tiredness when it had happened. When Kensi had approached him unawares from behind. In a shuddering and vividly clear flashback he had seen and felt the moment where, with his attention on Janvier pinned up against the bus, Joelle had sprung on him from behind, taking a rock to his head and hitting him hard enough that he had been knocked out instantly.
Though it didn't excuse what he had done, it had been instinct he had acted on, he knew. His exhausted brain had gone into survival mode as he spun defensively, attacking his attacker and causing the two of them to fall to the floor. That his 'attacker' in this moment had actually been Kensi had failed to register until after he had landed the first punch.
So now she too bore a split lip, twin to the one Janvier had given him on the boat. And he bore the guilt of knowing he had hit a member of his team, a woman he cared about, someone he would have laid his life down in a heartbeat for to protect from harm.
"Callen?"
Her voice in the corridor was gentle, merging bewilderingly with the shouting in the scene still playing out in his head: Sam and Kensi yelling 'Callen!' as he scuffled to pin his 'enemy' on the ground, Sam's hands grasping his upper arms, Kensi doing her best from underneath to push him off her… The moments of breathless confusion after Sam managed to pull him away, wrapping his strong arms around Callen's entire upper torso to restrain him while they waited for him to re-orientate himself in the present not the past.
"Callen?" The quiet insistence broke through the fuzz in his brain, and he took his head away from where he had pressed it against the cool stone, bringing himself unenthusiastically back to the here and now. The lighting in the corridor was dim, and he couldn't clearly see her face. Nonetheless, he couldn't bear to look at her and turned quickly away, flinching ever so slightly at the touch of her hand on his arm.
"I was worried about you," Kensi continued, ignoring his reaction to her hand as she kept it where it was, softly on his shoulder. She wanted to pull him into a hug, wanted to break down the walls he had built up around himself with the physical contact it would bring, but she could feel how on edge he was and so she didn't dare in case he baulked away completely. "You didn't reply to any of my messages overnight, and I'm pretty sure you weren't sleeping."
"Didn't see them," Callen lied.
"Sure you didn't," Kensi muttered. "Come on Callen, you're exhausted. Won't you please go somewhere and rest?" she pleaded. "There's plenty of time… Come back to ours, get a couple of hours sleep on a proper bed…"
"Kensi, I…" Callen began.
"Don't say it," she interrupted. "Don't say you're sorry again." She paused, and continued in a softer voice. "Goodness Callen, do you think any of us have never snapped? After Afghanistan…" Kensi swallowed, even now the memories unpleasant. "It took me a long time to get over that. Weeks. Maybe even months. And you know how I pushed Deeks away after the helo crash, and… and Fatima. You were there for me. I hit out at you then, remember?"
"It's hardly the same," Callen murmured.
"Of course it is! You're not immune to normal human responses, Callen. What happened with Joelle, what Janvier did to you…" She spoke with compassion, the horrors unimaginable, and yet imagined by them all, for they had seen his hand, and they all knew what kind of a person Janvier was.
"I hurt you." Callen was still stubbornly stuck in the same groove.
"What, this tiny cut?" Moving her fingers to Callen's cheek, forcing him to look at her, she grinned. "With that cast, you couldn't land a punch even as hard as Eric!" Callen raised the faintest of smiles in response to her playful teasing. "So, we're good?"
He nodded, and then when his mute response didn't seem to satisfy her, he added hoarsely, "Yeah, all good. Thanks, Kens."
With one final squeeze of his shoulder as she turned to head back to the bullpen, Kensi whispered, "Acting on instinct keeps you alive. Don't ever apologise for that."
She'd be lying if she said the incident hadn't rattled her. Callen had turned on her with a violence and speed that had been startlingly unexpected. If Sam hadn't been there to help her fend him off, she didn't know what damage he might have done. Not that Kensi blamed him at all, for it had been clear to both of them that he had not known what he was doing. But that in itself had been terrifying to witness. She was used to her leader retaining absolute self-control always. They were all familiar with how easily he could adopt different personas, but they were always an act, his actions carefully deliberate and regulated, even in situations where others might break. His uninhibited wildness and intensity had scared her. It had been total primeval instinct acting, adrenaline fuelling him on an attack he couldn't possibly have managed with his injuries otherwise.
She worried about what Callen's subconscious actions would have done to his already stressed mental state. She knew him well enough to know he wouldn't forgive himself no matter what she had said to him. Additionally, she worried that the punch he had landed with his broken hand, and the efforts of Sam and herself to prise him off her while he tried to fight them, might have added to his physical injuries. He had been through so much at the hands of Janvier, that was clear. The image of his grotesquely mangled hand when she had first seen him again outside the boatshed still haunted her. Connor had been sweet, getting Deeks to ring her. Oh, she missed Deeks. How could it have come to this? She'd come to rely on him to ground her, and without him she had withdrawn into herself in a way that wasn't entirely healthy.
Other than to mutter that he was sorry, Callen hadn't spoken on the drive home. Sitting in the passenger seat while Callen hid away in the back, she and Sam had exchanged worried glances the entire way, to which Callen seemed oblivious. He had clearly been lost in an intense flashback. She could only hope he would open up later, tell someone what it had all been about, rather than locking all the trauma within.
Making light of the small cut on her lip when they had returned to the office, Kensi quickly packed up her things and headed home. Sam too had encouraged everyone to leave quickly, knowing that Callen needed space alone to decompress after what had happened – but she had seen the worry in Sam's eyes for his partner and she desperately hoped that Sam could get him to talk. Callen was on the edge, and nothing was going to bring him back until Janvier and the Incognito software were secure. She felt sick at the mere thought of Janvier, and seeing Callen acting so wildly out of character hadn't helped.
To Kensi's surprise, Deeks turned up at their house that evening. Though neither of them had discussed an official split, he had to all intents and purposes moved out after she had refused to give up being an agent. It had been odd to see him, standing there on the doorstep after ringing the bell to his own home. Without a word, she stepped back to let him in, and in he came, tentative but caring, reaching a gentle hand out to her damaged lip with sadness in his eyes.
"Just an accident," she whispered, trying to make things okay.
"What happened?" he asked softly.
"Callen… he…" She baulked. They all knew Deeks could be volatile when it came to seeing a woman hurt at the hands of a man. Kensi felt torn between the two men, both of whom she treasured dearly. She knew Callen's actions were absolutely without blame, but she wasn't sure if Deeks would see it that way.
Deeks was still looking at her, waiting for an answer.
"He tripped up. Caught me off guard." There. It wasn't a total lie. She buried her head in his shoulder as he took her into a gentle embrace. She had missed him so much, but it was like neither of them knew what to do to fix things. "Stay," she whispered into the cocooned safety of his neck, and in response she felt him hug her tightly as if with new resolve. It gave her hope.
A/N: The next chapter is a big one in every way. I've edited it so many times..! I just can't get myself quite happy with it.
Thank you for your reviews, they really do help encourage me to spare some time to get each new chapter uploaded. Getting this next one right really has been what has stalled me for so long, even though I wrote it almost two years ago, in the hiatus after Season 11 rollseyes Yeah, it's been that long to get happy with one chapter..!
