Disclaimer: CBS owns everything.
Reviews are appreciated! Thank you to everyone who already has.
xxx
"Jason, get in here!"
Her skin tingles under the heat of the burning room. Cool fingers that lift her roughly from the floor nearly startle her out of her reverie, but not quite.
"Jason! Dammit."
Through the haze that has become familiar, she blinks up into a face that is filled with fear. The man cannot be any more than twenty five. Covered in ashes with a swollen lip, he uses his free hand to speak into a radio as he carries her out of the flames. When silence greets his urgent requests for help, he curses once again.
"Não tenha medo," she can feel her lips moving, the words taste like acid on her tongue. The man glances down at her trembling body and winces.
"I'll get you out of here kid, don't worry." He ducks around another corner, and she wishes that the hallway would stop spinning so much. Soft words continue to float from her rescuer's mouth as she drifts away, unfazed by his jostling arms.
She sleeps soundly, and dreams of a place far from the burning bricks of her childhood prison.
xxx
Callen shakes his head angrily.
"It'll take us weeks to figure out what could be missing."
Eric's sigh from the other end of the line offers him little help. Sam continues sifting through the mess that lay before them both.
"They don't appear to be leaving with anything either," Eric admits. "Whatever they were after, they don't appear to have found it."
Callen snaps his phone shut and crosses the room to join his partner. "They're awfully interested in her father, G. They went through an entire album of his pictures, and then overturned a bookshelf." He shakes his head. "And I'm betting that Kensi didn't destroy one of her father's pictures either."
Sam picks up the photograph in question from where it lay.
The man that smiles back up at him is long dead, from what he can gather from an outdated personnel file and the look in Kensi's eyes that they all pretend not to notice.
She has only spoken of him once.
xxx
It had been a rough day, to say the very least.
And if either of them had been in the mood to elaborate, they might have said that it was more of a trying day, filled with vicious suspects and parents of Marines whose tears fell through the phone lines. Sam found her leaning over the railing that overlooked the bullpen. He approaches her almost tentatively.
The look in her eye is less of a warning to keep his distance than it is an apology for all that she might say.
"What does it mean to be lonely?" The question is soft, and he almost misses the uncertain words. Her fingers drum a crooked rhythm against the metal.
"I'm not sure you know what you're asking." And he is nothing if not honest. She smiles at the response, because she knows that this was not the direction he expected the conversation to take. Loneliness is something that has found a home in the hearts, but they have always kept it to themselves. They all live behind the lie that everything is fine and it always has been.
When Kensi asks him what it means to be lonely, she is asking him to share a part of himself.
She presses on anyways.
"No, I mean it. What does it mean to be lonely?"
He hesitates.
They do not often delve into each other's personal lives. Because then he might mention things like his daughter, and all her warmth, or his wife, and all her secrets. The more you share, the less you have left to hide behind when things go wrong. He shifts once more before answering.
"It's not really a question, if you already know the answer, Kensi."
He swears that her eyes are shining.
"What do you mean?"
Silence. She sighs.
"When my father died, he left me a letter." She has stopped tapping her fingers now, rubbing them together nervously instead.
"A letter full of these apologies and regrets, and he told me that no matter what I found out about him later on, he loved me."
Sam doesn't move.
"I didn't understand it," she laughs, "I still don't. All I knew was that I was completely lost to a family that wanted nothing to do with me, and every time I turned around, there was another dead end."
"Loneliness," she breathed, "tingled like kind of lost excitement that I couldn't contain because I didn't understand it. Like there was this whole other person just resting beneath everything I'd come to accept as real, just aching to come out and show me everything that could have been, if only I'd let it." There is a pause "And sometimes, even now, I wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and clammy, because someone was telling me something important, but it was just too loud inside my own head for me to understand what they meant."
The bullpen has cleared out now, and while Hetty is undoubtedly lurking somewhere behind the walls, she has made herself scarce.
"That doesn't make you any less real, you know." He does not meet her eyes.
"Real?"
He nods, although he doubts that she is looking.
"Just because you feel like someone else sometimes doesn't mean that you are someone else. It just means that you're stuck in the middle of everything that's black and white and not quite gray either."
She is looking at him now, and he reaches out to untangle her hands from one another and squeezes them reassuringly.
"We've come to define this world in absolutes and consistencies, and we get mad when we realize that we can't box people into corners and leave them there. You are more than your own expectations and you are more than everything you dreamt that you could be. More than your father and more than your family."
Kensi looks away now, chewing her bottom lip.
"You asked me what it means to be lonely because it's easy to feel like you're the only one-"
"That isn't real."
They stand together in silence. And Sam aches for this girl, who is his friend, who has lost herself to the darkness that surrounds them all. For the letters that don't bring back your family, and the family who is really anything but that at all.
He doesn't tell her what loneliness is to him, because while for her he believes it is the fear of certainty, for him it is a void.
And if he was being totally honest (and he usually is not, when it comes to this sort of thing), he feels that loneliness is when you're sitting in that corner of black and white and suddenly coming to terms with the idea that you are meant for more than that.
Because you've just made this life-changing discovery that no one else in the world is able to understand, because they're the ones who filed you away in the first place.
Loneliness is the gap that exists between that lunging realization, and finding a world that is not lost to a lack of color.
It is the space between emptiness, and life.
Neither of them moved for such a very long time. She bleeds for a father that carried his secrets to the grave, and he cries for daughter and a wife that cannot save him from the emptiness inside his heart.
It is as close as either one of them get to honesty.
And it will never really be enough.
xxx
The two agents burst back into the OPS room, the memory of Kensi and her secrets still burning at the forefront of Sam's mind.
"Eric, see what you can pull up on Kensi's father," Callen speaks for his partner, who explained bits and pieces on the drive back. They watch Eric shift through document after document, digging through the past of a man they do not know.
"Stop," Sam commands softly.
"A falsified birth certificate?" Eric voices his concern for the obvious error.
"Why would Lieutenant Blye need a false report to prove he's her father?" Callen mulls softly, not looking away from the screen.
"Because he's not," Sam asserts. "Maybe that's why he apologized to her in that letter. Maybe he's been keeping more secrets than she suspected."
"Keep looking into it Eric," Callen spins on his heel, Sam close behind.
"We need to find the rest of Kensi's family."
xxx
The man in the corner says nothing, and she is grateful for the silence. Her mind is spinning from the bombardment of almost-memories that have begun to pound against the inside of her skull. This dirty floor and this damp, dark room are things that she feels she should know by touch.
As if from a life she once lived.
They have drugged her, of that she is sure. Chemicals creep through her veins and make her sluggish and sad. The whole world seems to be speaking in riddles, dreaming in rhymes of fonder moments, when she was not chained to a wall. And it's easy, she breathes, it's easy to live in the shadows because then you are not bound by expectations. But it is a wrenching memory, the time she spoke to Sam about loneliness, and she shivers.
It feels like June, in this cell, although she knows that it's not. And she thinks of all the years she has been alive and knows she is getting older, but wonders restlessly if she is really any wiser. She never asked to be special and she never asked to be ordinary, but she supposes that you get to be something, someday, all the same.
And while she is certain about many things, she only believes in a few.
The door slams open.
Emilio strides in, lips pulled into a thin line, his gate stiff. He does not acknowledge the man in the corner any more than she does, and she wonders if the man is simply something she has created to not be so alone.
"Do you know why you are here?" Emilio's rough voice pulls her back to the present, and she tears her gaze away from the shadowed figure to her right. His tone is amused, if not slightly frustrated, and he leans against the doorway restlessly.
He seems to interpret her silence, although she is not sure what he decides.
"I watched your father burn," is what he eventually says, and laughs deeply at the way her eyes light up in anguish. "Burn until you couldn't even see the damage we'd caused."
This gives her pause. There had never been any mention of torture (although from these men, she'd believe it), and her heart twists at the thought.
"Needless to say," Emilio's eyes are fixed on a point somewhere over her left shoulder, but his mind seems to be so very far away. "He did not have the answers we were looking for."
And she doubts that her lack of understanding is totally due to the drugs. And she doubts that this will every truly make sense. Emilio is now crossing the floor towards her shackled form.
He bends down until they are eye to eye.
"Tell me," his breath smells of cigar smoke and liquor, "What do you know about a man named Amaro Solis?"
And although the name gives her pause, it cannot bring back the ghost of a man she does not know. Her questioning eyes hold no secrets, and Emilio shakes his head sadly.
He rises off the cold floor.
"You will talk."
As he exits, the man in the corner stands. The movement does not startle her, but the pitying look in his eyes does, and she turns away as best she can.
She is alone for only a moment.
And when two new men enter, one with dozens of syringes that make her stomach clench, and another with only an angry smile, she cannot help but tremble.
The memory of her father's crumbling car.
The pulsing feeling of familiarity that the darkness holds.
The idea that loneliness is something she can overcome.
She hopes, with everything she has, that Callen and Sam are on their way.
xxx