AN: Thanks for the feedback!
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Someone snaps their fingers in front of his face and Callen realizes he's been lost in thought.
"Look alive, Callen," Eric says, "or someone's going to take you out. And newsflash, it's gonna be Nell."
"Well, I wouldn't expect it to be you," Callen informs him.
Nell's the one who snapped her fingers; she often worries when he disappears like that, because it usually means he's remembering something awful.
She has no way of knowing that lately he's been thinking more of the good, and less of the bad. "I'm fine," he says, before she can ask.
She doesn't believe him, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. "You kind of stood there. Blankly. You'd tell me if…" she doesn't know how to end that, doesn't know what right she has to it.
He won't let her spend the rest of the morning thinking he's lying to her. "Just…" He tips his head and sort of smiles. "Georgia."
He doesn't have to elaborate; she knows from the way he says it that's he talking about that one night and nothing else. It should be one of her worst memories, and yet it's not, because he'd been there.
He'd kept a horrible memory from forming and left her with a good one, instead. It's not a secret – they've talked about it and he knows how she feels about that night.
"What happened in Georgia?" Eric asks, curious about a story he's never heard from either of them. "Did you leave something out of the reports? Did that conspiracy guy try to attack you? I knew you shouldn't have gone."
Nell flashes her gaze to Callen's, an unnecessary confirmation passing between them. That night belongs to them alone.
"I taught her how to fight," Callen says easily, "in the woods."
He says it as if that's some kind of skill necessary for life, and the kicker is that he's telling the truth. Or at least, The Truth According to Callen. It was session 65, the morning after that night, and they'd had hours to kill before their flight. He'd decided to take the opportunity to drag her into the woods of Georgia for an impromptu lesson.
Eric figures he should have guessed that already. "Of course you did."
"If you're running around a forest with someone after you," Nell speaks as if she's repeating something from rote memory, "tree branches are great to use as a weapon."
"To 'gouge people's eyes out'," Callen corrects, as those had been his actual instructions.
"Because that's what I'm going to use when I have a gun. A tree branch." The way she says it tells Eric she's probably said it before.
"It's a tip for when you're unarmed," Callen sounds equally exasperated. Yeah, they're definitely repeating an old argument.
Eric shakes his head, and maybe before he would have thought they were putting him on, but not anymore. He's getting more and more used to it; he thinks everyone is.
It surprised him at first that Nell would want to train with Callen, and later, that she enjoyed it as much as she did. As time went on, she increasingly regaled Eric with stories of what they did, where they went. She'd invited him along a few times, but no part of what they practiced sounded appealing to him in the slightest.
Besides, it was…theirs. When he sees them train together, in their own world and oblivious to anything else, he feels like he shouldn't intrude. No matter how many times they offer.
He finds their unexpected camaraderie the most fascinating part of their arrangement. When Nell first told him of her plans to train with Callen, he'd never expected it to unfold the way it did. He'd been sure one (or both) of them would quit in frustration and complain about the other for a few weeks until they reluctantly returned to the team dynamic they'd had before. Instead, they'd created an entirely new dynamic all their own.
It took Eric some time to admit that Callen and Nell's friendship has made things better. The entire team seems to get along easier, and Eric no longer feels as if he and Nell are a separate entity from everyone else, always isolated back at headquarters while the rest go into the field. Yeah, that's still mostly the way their cases work, but it's like Callen and Nell becoming closer has made everyone closer. They all see each other more, spend more time together outside of work, and Eric doesn't feel quite like the outsider he always did before.
Another bonus is that he gets to hear stories like the time Callen had taken Nell out on a boat to practice training in a situation where her 'balance was compromised'. She'd gotten seasick and pushed him overboard out of spite, and Callen had told her she won because she'd used the best weapon at her disposal: the ocean (picturing it had made Eric regret turning down their offer to join them that day). He hasn't admitted to Nell that he finds listening to their stories as entertaining as she finds living them.
Others around work have noticed the changes, too. In the beginning, people wondered why they practiced together so much. Then it became normal enough that people wondered about the times they weren't practicing together. The whispered questions have gone beyond that, too, and Eric's tried to hint to Nell that she can talk to him about anything. She's never taken him up on it, though. At this point, he's certain they're not secretly in a relationship, and he's equally as certain that they should be.
"Like I'm going to be able to blind someone with a stick!" Nell's saying. "You are delusional. No one's going to stay still enough for that. And if they do, they're probably dead already, in which case why am I trying to remove their eyes?"
"It's about strategies, Nell. And countermeasures."
"Stop throwing out words that you think sound good. Those are not answers to any of my questions."
"I don't think my response is the problem." He sends her a significant look. "The problem seems to be the person interpreting my response."
She scowls, only to prevent herself from accidentally smiling instead. In truth, he'd actually taught her some helpful things about covering her trail in the woods and misdirecting anyone who might be chasing her, as long as she had a decent head start. She highly doubts she'll ever need those kinds of skills, just as she doesn't think she'll use much of the obscure stuff he teaches her. It was kind of the point – learn as much as possible so that the few things you might need one day were readily available.
Nell's learned that Callen is a master at improvisation. He's always assessing the environment, analyzing ways to get out of a situation, making note of what he can use as a weapon if the need arises. It impresses her as much as it saddens her that he'd needed to start learning those skills at a young age, and that he'd needed to keep practicing them because of his career. She pointed it out one day and he'd reminded her that her career was the same. They both did it because they loved it, no further explanation needed.
She's learning other things, too. Like the fact that he'll take anything she says seriously if he thinks it will be fun to screw with her – or if he can turn her joke into a life lesson.
The best example had been a few months earlier. They'd been working out in the gym, and he'd mentioned trying to think up new ideas.
"What about zero gravity?" She'd joked. "I have some contacts at NASA." She did have the contacts, though she had no intention of using them.
Callen was supposedly 'supervising', which that day meant walking in circles around her while she used the punching bag. "I'll keep it in mind if we're assigned a case where we have to go into orbit."
"How about the mountains? I bet it's good to train in thin air." She tried to think of anything ridiculous. "Or a farm?"
He stopped walking, recalling a memory. "Throw a chicken at someone. Guaranteed shock. And not just for the chicken."
She steadied the bag. "You've done that?"
He shook his head, looking slightly traumatized. "It was done to me. Did you know many of them can fly or glide short distances? As in right at your face when someone lets go of them. It's…disconcerting."
She wisely didn't tell him she thought it sounded more hilarious than anything else (he'd probably make her practice it for real). "Why were you on a farm?"
"Terrorists, Nell," he stated, as if it should have been obvious. "It was a hideout for their drug operation, they were funneling the money back overseas. It was pretty funny, you should have seen Sam when they tried to get away on horseback and he ended up in the pond. I was busy disabling the tractor, or else things might have turned out differently."
She replayed his words a few times before giving up. "What?"
"You had to be there."
The pond gave her an idea, though. "What about underwater?" She laughed while she said it.
She wasn't laughing the next day when they stood in back of headquarters, late afternoon sun beating down on them pleasantly. "No. No, I did not agree to this."
"Lesson 51," he grinned broadly, waving her toward the water. "I would have brought you to a public beach, except this is more convenient with the showers right inside, and the others can easily find us if they need to. Plus, I won't get arrested when bystanders think I'm trying to drown you."
"Since it's completely plausible that I'm going to be fighting someone in the ocean."
"What if I'm an attacker and chase you in? Or I'm a suspect trying to get away from you by running into the ocean, thinking you won't follow?"
She glanced between him and the water. "First case? I hope I'd have more sense than to try and escape someone by running into the ocean. Second case? You're right. I'd wave goodbye and let you go."
"You'll thank me when I teach you how not to drown."
"My whole life I haven't breathed while underwater. Are you saying there's another way to go about not drowning?"
He ignored that. "Consider yourself lucky that I let you change into gym clothes," he said, as if that were particularly magnanimous of him.
"Yeah, I'm feeling so lucky right now." She splashed some water in the vicinity of his face. "That's definitely the word."
"You should feel lucky that I devote this much time to you. No one else gets the honor."
She was grateful to him, and he knew it, but she still had to give him a hard time, lest he get too full of himself. "I think the honor here is me spending time with you. Who else would you teach? Eric? Don't forget that we've asked other people along, and they usually refuse."
"We scare them," Callen said, which was true – he'd heard from Sam that was the general opinion around NCIS. "I don't know why, though. I suppose they don't get us, Nell," he sighed, as if being misunderstood was one of the great tragedies of his life.
"We're in the ocean," she countered. "Do you think this is why? It's not that they don't get us, I think it's that they 'get us' too well."
Callen's main goal that day was to teach her how to get away from someone attempting to drown her. It wasn't that different from how she'd normally escape, except she had to be aware of how deadly the water could be if an assailant was able to hold her under.
They hadn't been out there for long when a voice called to them from the dock a few feet away. "I didn't quite believe it when Deeks told me I'd find you out here." Granger was shading his eyes from the sun, trying to convince himself those were indeed his two agents splashing around in the water.
"Essential skills, Granger. Today we're teaching Callen's Ocean Survival Guide 101." He grasped Nell's shoulders and dunked her under the water.
"Neither of you better die. I don't have time for the paperwork this week."
Callen put his feet down to the bottom and stood, revealing how shallow the water was where they were. It only came to his chest in their current spot. "It's not deep." He cast a glance at Nell; the water was almost at her neck. "Well, if you're not vertically-challenged."
She kneed him in the side for that one and he collapsed, falling under the water and resurfacing in an instant.
"Mr. Callen," another person called, and they turned to the dock on the other side to see Hetty standing on it, watching with disapproval. Callen spared a thought to wondering where she'd come from and how she'd gotten there without him or Nell noticing. "I know you are not using height as a way to disparage your co-worker."
Nell had never seen Callen's face drain of color that quickly and she stored the memory away to relish forever.
"No. Never. Uh, never." He looked to Nell for help that wasn't coming.
"He makes fun of me all the time, Hetty," Nell claimed, exaggerating greatly. In retaliation, Callen pushed her backwards and she lost her balance, going under again.
"She's a liar, Hetty. I would never."
Nell took advantage of being underwater to pinch Callen's arm as hard as she could. When he yelled and jumped away, Hetty smiled in satisfaction, happy the younger woman could give as good as she got. She made sure to appear stern again by the time they turned back to her. "As admirable as your dedication is to…whatever you call this, I'm afraid you'll have to cut it short. New case, be upstairs in 15 minutes."
"News to me, must have just happened," Granger told them, as Hetty went back inside. "I came to ask for your reports on the last case, Callen. Lucky you – now you have a reprieve."
"Until the end of this one when you have to fill out twice the reports," Nell added, patting Callen's arm in fake sympathy.
Callen would have gone after her again if Granger hadn't stopped him by ordering them to cease and desist (Nell noticed that he sounded amused, though).
Too bad he's definitely not amused right now.
Nell watches the assistant director explain something to Kensi and Deeks while shaking the manual for emphasis. He then orders everyone to practice from page 47 and (for perhaps the first time that morning) everyone makes a genuine attempt at following his order.
Eric announces he's feeling more confident, even as he keeps shying away from Nell when she goes for him. He insists that avoiding her is an 'instinctual reaction' to someone coming at him. Nell's at a loss for what to do other than chain him down or something.
Callen knows he should be concentrating on sparring with Sam, yet he can't help watching Eric and Nell. He's starting to feel genuinely bad for her, even as he's thoroughly entertained by her attempts to teach a completely unwilling Eric anything remotely new.
"Head's not in the game, G," Sam states the obvious when he catches Callen off-guard and takes him down to the mat for the third time in a row. "You're making it way too easy for me. At this point you may as well lie on the mat and I'll start walking around you claiming victory every three minutes."
"I'm paying attention," Callen lies, shaking off the hits he's taken. "Are you seeing this?" He motions for his partner to watch Eric and Nell.
She's switched strategies and is trying to get Eric to come at her. Eric's making a valiant attempt, though he keeps coming up short of touching her and going back to the edge of the mat to start over.
Sam has to admit they're at least as entertaining as beating Callen, especially since Callen isn't putting much effort into it. "You guys okay over there?" He asks cautiously. "How are things going?"
Nell doesn't have an encouraging answer. "They're…going."
"Where?" Eric asks. "To the hospital? That's what it seems like."
She tries to remain calm (as if she hasn't repeated this a dozen times already). "I've become pretty well versed in not hurting people while doing this."
Callen smiles inwardly when she says it, thinking of their first session.
It had felt different meeting in the gym at night. Their only company had been two agents at the climbing wall, paying them no attention. They'd had the rest of the gym to themselves. Callen had thought about backing out for the previous two days. He wasn't sure if he was the right person to teach her, if he was what she needed.
They'd sparred together a few times, always in team trainings and the like, and he knew she was good. She could hold her own in a fight with a run-of-the-mill suspect, but he knew she'd have trouble taking the likes of him or Sam. Or Kensi and Deeks, for that matter.
The more he'd thought about it, the more he'd worried about what might happen if she faced off against an opponent who was well-trained. Most people they came across weren't, but the dangerous ones, the terrorists or assassins or anyone trained at a higher level than her could take her and she wouldn't have a chance.
That was ultimately what kept him from canceling and finding a proper class or instructor to train her. Once he started thinking about the things he could teach her, the more he realized he couldn't allow anyone else to do it.
He wasn't sure how long she'd stay – a few sessions? A few weeks? For whatever time she willingly gave him, he'd do what he could.
She stood in the center of the mat, shifting her weight from foot to foot and he knew she'd showed up early to stretch. He'd watched her from the doorway for a moment before entering.
"You're early."
She shot to attention when he walked over. "I wanted to be ready."
"Relax, Nell. This isn't boot camp or anything."
They went over the basics, introductory stuff that she knew, as he tried to set her at ease and get a better sense of her skill level, starting from the ground up. He already knew he wanted to train her more unconventionally than she'd expect, and they were going to have to work their way up to it.
Once they reached her current level, he nodded, impressed. Then he insisted she go past it, and informed her not to hold back. It took several tries for her to actually come at him with intent, and he saw her relief every time he successfully blocked her. It warmed him even as he knew they were going to have to work on that.
The bigger problem came when he went after her. It was the little things, like the way she shied away from him, or the look in her eyes right before he touched her. He didn't remember seeing it in her before, and wondered what was causing her apprehension.
Most of the time she trained with people less experienced. He knew she had a fair chance of taking them, and some she could always beat if she wanted. He thought she would become more comfortable after a little while, that the uneasiness in her eyes would go away, but it didn't. He easily got her into a hold and didn't miss her sigh of relief that he hadn't…what, broken her neck?
He let her go and she stepped away like nothing was amiss.
It was almost as if…since he'd asked her to not hold back with him, she expected he wouldn't hold back with her, either. Even though she had to realize by that point that he wasn't putting much force into anything he was doing. It occurred to him a moment later that despite her reservations, she kept letting him come after her, maybe wondering every time if she'd be hurt.
"Nell," he said, as she turned to him, "I've been doing this for years. I'm pretty much an expert at it."
"Yeah, I know," she said, confusion clouding her eyes.
He decided to spell it out. "I know how to do this without hurting people."
She deflated a little, glancing down at the mat. "I don't think –"
"Yeah," he interrupted, "you do." He ran over the possibilities in his mind. "Who have you sparred with before now?"
"No one regularly." She rattled off a list of names. People from their team, a few agents who he knew were around Nell's skill level, and several others from back when she'd been training as an agent. He was ready to dismiss his suspicions until the last name she said made him swear.
"You had a session with Carlyle? Sara Carlyle."
The woman was tough, a good agent by all accounts, but she definitely had a chip on her shoulder. She was notorious to spar with and it always seemed like she had something to prove. Callen never liked to go against her because she didn't know when to stop, and she never held back even when she should. He hadn't been aware Nell knew her, had never seen them interact.
"A session? No, we were assigned to each other for two months during training," Nell explained.
"Two months?"
"I kept asking for someone else, anyone else, but no one would partner with her."
Yeah, Callen knew why. He also knew two months was an odd length of time to be partnered with someone.
"What happened at the end of two months?"
"She almost broke my arm," Nell explained. "I tapped out but Sara was pissed I'd beaten her in a session before, so she wouldn't let up. Luckily, our instructor saw what was going on and screamed at her, and Sara let me go. She didn't face any disciplinary action, she claimed she hadn't noticed me tapping out and that the situation was misconstrued. After that, I refused to work with her, and we permanently changed partners. Sara had a mean streak, for sure."
"She nearly broke your arm and you call it a 'mean streak'?" Callen could hardly believe the way she described it. He wished he'd known, before then.
Nell absently rubbed her arm, and he knew she was remembering how it happened. "I hated working with her at the time, though I can admit one thing: she made me stronger. She's the only reason I'm as good as I am today. I had to be tough to have a chance in hell against her. Or rather, to have a chance of not getting seriously hurt while fighting her."
He tried very hard to control his anger, and had a feeling he wasn't succeeding. "That's not how it's supposed to work."
"A lot of things don't work the way they're supposed to work." She shrugged, and he could tell she wasn't pretending – she'd moved on and harbored no bitterness against the other woman. "I think it's called…life?"
He admired her ability to not hold a grudge. It seemed that some leftover wariness while sparring was all that remained of her time with Carlyle. Nell was tough – more so than he'd realized before that night. "Don't get philosophical on me," he warned.
"Or what?" She challenged. "You gonna break my arm?"
He couldn't help laughing, and it eased the anger he felt. He liked her fire, he always had, and it startled him to find he liked it even more directed at him than at others.
It was the first instant, the first spark of awareness in him that they could make this work. They could make it something great.
"It wasn't a threat," he admitted, though she already knew that. He thought about why he might not have seen her hesitation before, and could only hazard it was because he'd asked her not to hold back, and she'd worried he'd do the same.
She reached up to fix her hair, some of it having fallen out of the ponytail she'd put it in for the night. She sensed his unspoken question. "I guess it's in the back of my mind, sometimes. Not usually, only when I face someone who's clearly much better than I am. I can't help worrying a little that I'm in over my head. I mean one wrong move from either of us and –"
"Not going to happen," he said, firmly. "You have nothing to worry about from me. Let's try again."
They went a few more rounds, and she was still cautious. He didn't blame her. He knew it wasn't something he could fix with a few words. He could talk to her for an hour trying to reassure her and he didn't think it would matter – she had to see it for herself.
"Still not going to hurt you," he said, taking a step back when he saw her hesitation. "Still not changing my mind on that, either."
She had started rolling her eyes every time he said it. "I believe you," she insisted, for probably the fifth time.
He disagreed. "Not yet, you don't."
It wasn't until the end of their session that he was able to take her down for the first time without the apprehension he'd come to expect. They sat on the mat together, both wanting to smile at each other and both looking anywhere else. It didn't seem right to either of them to feel that comfortable together after such a short time, so neither wanted to admit it to the other.
"You finally believe me," Callen said, after the silence had gone on for a few minutes. The agents at the climbing wall had left and it was getting too late for them to be there. (Back in the early days, they'd stubbornly felt obligated to keep to a kind of regular routine. Like straying outside of it would make them too clearly abnormal.)
It took her a few seconds to understand what he meant. "No."
His whipped his head around to face her. "No?"
She cleared her throat. It was about more than belief. "I trust you. I mean, I always have, like I trust our whole team. There's a difference, though, with trusting someone in that way, as opposed to…"
He knew what she meant; he'd had more trust issues in his life than he could count. "As opposed to letting go enough to physically trust them with your life?"
"Yes, exactly." She was relieved he understood.
"Now the trickier part," he told her, as they got up to collect their things. "To build on that trust by not trusting each other, so to speak."
"Huh?" She had no idea what he was talking about.
"Everything you've ever learned about the right way to fight? We're going to forget it. You're going to learn my way to fight, which means expecting the unexpected."
"I'm going to guess that's where the…not trusting each other comes in?"
"Right." He caught the skepticism on her face as they started toward the locker rooms. "We're going to work our way up to it once you're more comfortable. We'll stop following the basic rules of sparring, which by definition means that we'll have to stop trusting each other to follow those rules."
"Okay," she sounded more than a little anxious, and he wondered if she was thinking of 'not following the rules' the way Sara Carlyle hadn't liked to follow the rules.
He stopped walking and turned her to face him: he needed to make sure she paid attention to the next part. "I'm not talking about hurting each other. I'm talking about surprising each other. What you can trust is that I will never intentionally hurt you in anything we practice. In fact, I'll be going out of my way to avoid it, which means if it comes down to it, I'll let myself get hurt over you."
"You don't have to –"
"Yes. I do. It's the number one rule, and you need to know that. This isn't about showing off or teaching you to become some –" he waved his hand around "– martial arts master."
"I could become a ninja," she argued. "You don't know."
He tried not to smile. "It's not even about us trying to beat each other, or win. It's about teaching you to fight the best way I know how, so you can protect yourself whether you're chasing a suspect or God forbid, somebody tries to hurt you. Do you understand? And, more importantly, do you agree?"
She took in his words and slowly nodded. "Yes, I agree. And I'm in."
He had no idea why he felt so relieved at her answer. "Good."
"Hey, later on, when I'm better…then can it be about us beating each other?"
"Oh, you can count on it," he assured her.
Agent Sara Carlyle transferred to another location shortly thereafter. Nell had asked Callen about it, and he'd replied that he had no idea why Granger shuffled people around the way he did. She hadn't pushed it (truthfully, she'd known the answer before she asked the question).
Seven months had passed since their first session, disappearing in an instant. For Callen to hear her paraphrase what he'd said that night…it filled him with a unique sense of pride. He'd kept his word and taught her well enough for her to feel comfortable extending that same promise to others – he's made that difference in her.
In return, she's made a hundred differences in him: he can name quite a few, but he suspects most are things he's not even aware of yet.
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