#fireman on the oriental carpet

[buckhead1111]

buckhead1111

[ejzah]

Deeks saying "I've always wanted to be a fireman" and I'm now imagining AUs with Deeks as a fireman :p

A/N: Hi anon! I took your ask as a suggestion!

***

The Agent and the Fireman

“Alright, Kensi we’re going in with the captain, you find his second in command, Lieutenant Deeks,” Callen told Kensi. She eyed the blackened and fire-decayed building ahead of them and decided not to complain.

“Ok, any idea where he is?”

“Parker said he’s overseeing the clean up,” Sam told her.

Kensi headed for two figures in heavy yellow jackets and hardhats, hauling a hose back to one of the trucks. As she got closer, she flashed her badge, calling out,

“Agent Kensi Blye, NCIS. I’m looking for Lieutenant Deeks!”

The firefighter to the far left, pointed across to the building where several people were helping with clearing with debris and talking with LAPD. He singled out a man who was helping cart a four by six towards a dumpster.

“Right there, ma’am. Good luck pinning him down.”

Kensi sighed internally; of course she’d get saddled with someone difficult. Squaring her chin, she forced an expression of pleasant professionalism, and approached the Lieutenant.

He’d stripped off his protective jacket, so he only wore the standard black t-shirt, his red suspenders hanging loose around his hips, which gave and unobstructed view of his well-defined arms in action. As he came back from the dumpster, she stepped into his path, holding up her badge like a talisman.

“Lieutenant Deeks, I’m Special Agent Kensi Blye with NCIS. Your captain said you’d be able to answer some of my questions,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Agent Blye,” he said, and oddly enough it sounded like he meant it. He tugged off one glove and offered her his hand, shaking her hand firmly. He hooked a hand over his shoulder. “You mind if I finish up here? Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, then I’ll answer all the questions you want.”

Then he smiled.

“Sure,” Kensi heard herself saying, gaze traveling between his crooked smile and stunningly blue eyes.

She stood back, watching the Lieutenant cart more debris away, give orders to his men, and intercept a persistent reporter. It was impressive to watch. Especially when he grabbed an ax and broke down a thick door, the muscles of his back flexing and bunching beneath his t-shirt.

When he finished, he walked back over, stopping in front of Kensi with one hip canter to the side.

“Alright, what can I do for you, Agent Blye?” he asked, taking his helmet off, revealing a head full of thick, curly blonde hair. He let out a groan of relief and swiped his arm over his forehead. “Gah. I always feel like my head’s going to explode in those things.”

“Right, um, what can you tell me about the fire?”

“It started in one of the offices and was definitely arson,” Deeks replied without hesitation.

“You sound pretty certain about that,” Kensi said.

He shrugged, smiling in a way that was ever so slightly forced. “I’ve been doing this for a while, Agent Blye. I know the signs, and I was all through that building. The arsonist used a liquid accelerant. They tried to hide it, but I found a slight doughnut pattern in the carpet.”

There wasn’t any arrogance in his voice, but enough confidence that Kensi instantly believed him.

“That’s good to know. I’ll be sure to mention that to my superiors. As you might know, this building contained confidential information. In your expert opinion, do you think this was a random act of arson, or goal-oriented.”

“Given the proximity to the building’s servers, the fire was likely started with the intent to destroy as much data and technology as possible,” Deeks answered. He nodded, adding, “Of course, Captain Bates will have to officially confirm my assessment.”

“Oh, so you do have limitations,” Kensi teased, eliciting a wide grin from him that made crinkled the skin around his eyes. Looking slightly skyward, he shook his head, still smiling.

“Touché. Yes, not having the authority to sign off on reports is my biggest downfall, Agent Blye,” he drawled.

“Kensi,” she offered impulsively.

“Kensi,” he repeated, drawing out her name in a way that made her want to shiver despite the full son beaming down on them. “Alright, Kensi, is there anything else I can help you with. As much as I’d like to talk to you all day, I can practically feel Riley getting antsy over there.

Kensi searched around for some other question she could ask to prolong the discussion, but came up empty. “No, that’s it. Thank you for your time, Deeks.”

“No problem.” There was that smile again. Acting on another impulse, Kensi reached into her pocket and removed one of the seldom used business cards she always kept on hand.

“That’s my number. You know, in case you think of any other details. Later on.”

Deeks took it, eyes dancing with amusement. “Right. I might even need to schedule a special meeting with you.”

“Anything for the job,” Kensi added mischievously. Deeks winked, tucking her card in his pocket, and offered her a two-fingered salute before heading towards his crew.

***

A/N: I hope this was suitable. Kensi would totally be all over Deeks in fireman gear.

Thanks for the prompt!

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Soon Be the Dawning Days

@darknight-brightstar @zeitheist Every single one of my attempts to write pleasant holiday-oriented things ends up ass-deep in character dissection and plot exposition.  @squad51goals @its-skadi

In this installment, we talk about seasons, changes, and things to celebrate.

December darkens the days, and sharpens the nights.  There is frost every morning, and the sun is a pale consumptive, waking feebly and slipping weakly into evening.  The potbelly stove in the dorm is always burning, always someone up in the night to tend it, every hour.  The lads spend a productive few hours one off day re-arranging their beds, recaulking the windows, and hanging curtains.  When Josiah asks what they are up to, they explain the lads at the ends of the rows have been getting cold in the night, and they are trying to fix it up so that either everyone is warm, or everyone is cold.

"You mind, Captain?" Jules Menlo asks.  He and Bertram Cochrane have taken up the lead, since Antoine and Ellis left for the City.  They are raw to it, but they are learning yet. 

"Not at all, boys, carry on."

Josiah is pleased with them.  Neat and natty rows of beds can go to hell, the lads are making a fine hearth for themselves.  They make sure to vent it properly, and Lufty nods approvingly at their work - a house inside of a house, a canvas-flanked beast breathing and snoring in the wind-snipped nights.  Josiah only scolds them once, when he catches Davey at three in the morning carrying wood in for the stove.  Sure, he is wrapped up tight as a beetle in a sack of flour, but Josiah reminds them that he's just a boy, yet, and needs his rest.

Young Cleary had stumbled a while, the days after Antoine and Ellis were graduated.  Eddy had given him a scorcher of a talk for forgetting to include Davey in the proceedings, and he deserved it.  That responsibility is still so new and giddy to him - where now, he can remember his own graduation, and think well on it, and not always be so bitter - and he had left the boy bereft.  Fool that he is.  Even Silky would've cuffed him for it. 

My true friend Silky, he writes, one glassy morning when the sun had lost the strength to lift the frost from the grass, you would not believe me or maybe you would.  Do you remember the day the bell sounded for us, at breakfast?  In the good cheer of sending my lads to the city, I left out the boy who needs us most, our young Cleary.  Your god, my friend, would smote me off the earth.  It was a terrible mistake, for I frightened him so badly.  I had to set him down later in the day and explain all the proceedings and the ceremony.  I am not yet sure he forgives me.  I am not sure I deserve it.  Here he is, a boy who has already lost one family, and I am to take another from him.  You can be sure Eddy let me have it. 

yours irresponsibly, Birchy

In those following days, after Antoine and Ellis depart on the train from Troy, his heart aches, something like a tooth you want to forget, something a body can't escape from.  The long hallway is there in his dreams, in the boy's dreams, and now he hears the piano, and the distant laughter.  He smells the books in the study.  When he wakes, he feels the far-off gaze of a man much his senior, cool-eyed but in such a way as a lake when the summer days grow taut about the city streets.  An expectant look, a waiting.  Far off down that hallway, as far from the boy now as the Bronx for him, as the dorm he once sweat out his sear in.  He would want to look away, as the village folks and the oakbellies look at his scars and his brace.

He knows that hallway, and that's just the trouble, for young Cleary has walked it alone, trailing his fingers along the green wallpaper, and Josiah, trembling for the thought of the beam waiting in the ceiling, has not followed.  Coward, he thinks.  To let the child walk his hallway and stumble, smoke-wrecked, to his wide lawn, alone.  A one-legged and half-hearted coward.  Davey looks at him askance often in those following days - doesn't come to read with him or practice his Latin, doesn't follow the lads out on their drills no matter how they coax him.  He walks down the pathway past the brambles and into the woods, his too-large coat down past his knees and his collar up so high it leaves just his dark curls tumbling out in the sharp wind, and when he comes in for dinner, he is quiet and small among the lads. 

It is one of those long, weary twilights when the winter rattles like dry bones, and his leg aches.  He is fixing the ledger, making notes, and Silky's reply is on the edge of the desk.  Davey slips in so quietly he only hears it with his sear, so startlingly that Josiah leaves a blot on the end of a row. 

"Capper?"

He puts his pen down and smiles like he imagines Silky would at an Antoine or an Ellis.  Truth to say, he has missed the boy, even the sometimes frantic, fledgling winging of his sear.  He is far too young to grieve such an emptiness as that long, black hallway and the smoke-torn sky.

"May I ask a question?"

Times, the boy's genteel raising surfaces, softly like the wave on the shore.  Times, as now, he holds his cap in his hands as if he's in a holy place, and his eyes are the shyness of moss on a shadowed ledge. 

"Course.  Always."

"Eddy said firemen don't take holidays."

"Come sit.  What're you onto?"

"It's almost Dawning Days, that's all..."

"Oh, ghosts above, Davey - " Josiah has to laugh.  " - no, that's not how Eddy meant it.  He only meant that fires and accidents and all our work, it can happen any time."

Davey sits in one of the clutter of chairs in Josiah's office, kicking his legs, the gesture of a younger boy, an apologetic sort of gesture. 

"I don't mean to laugh, young Cleary, but we do know the Dawning Days."

From the sundown on solstice to daybreak on New Year's - the time of spirits, the time of the seasons shifting, the time to do good and remember that the sun is only resting for a grand debut.  The oakbellies throw a grand to-do at New Year's, all the officers invited to come at their most festive.  He has not gone - and the oakbellies are likely to be glad of it, he figures, for he would not cut such a charming figure in his full dress and a tin of polish on his leg.  They would, as they did at his promotion, shuffle and swallow hotly above their stiff collars.  He would probably stand the whole night out of pride and spend the week after in bed.  Perhaps it would be worth it.

"Do you have a party?"

"As many as we can."

"And lights?"

"As many as the sills will hold.  The lights and the cups left out for the ghosts.  Eddy has probably got another little tree to plant - you know, that stand of maple by the stables, that's his handiwork."

Davey is looking as delighted as Josiah has ever seen him.  His eyes are younger, now.  He is more the boy that he must have been in golden days, before his long dark hallway. 

"And you already know Bertram and his fiddle, and save us all, we've heard the lads sing."

"They taught me the fireman's song."  Davey grips the chair, and then pauses, as if lost of a sudden.  "Lyddie would've liked that song, I suppose.  Mother scolded her because she called the music our teacher brought her 'musty old tunes'."

From far away, in the marrow of his bones, Josiah feels the soft carpet of the parlor under his shoes.  Dark walnut bookshelves and rich, salmon-colored wallpaper embossed with an intricate pattern, the sort of thing a child would run their fingers over.  The books are less a rainbow than a late-summer forest, greens and smatterings of red and orange.  The girl playing the piano, with the bow in her hair, likes to spin cleverly from the plodding strains of an old mass to the bright chirps of ragtime and dance.  The brother laughs. 

The oak floors in their dormitory had what seemed to be a century of wax and polish creating glistening currents in the low lamplight.  They could have greased the bedsprings with a gallon of lard per man and the damned things would've screamed like witches every time a man so much as thought of rolling over.  A cold night outside, and a warm hearth within, each coat and helmet hung on its hook, each woolen blanket tucked neatly around each mattress corner.  The brothers are singing and the brothers are laughing. 

"Antoine wrote me a letter," Davey says, quietly.  "He says he got his sear."  Davey bites his lip.  "He says everybody looked after him, and his captain Jack Prince gave him a pocketwatch.  Does it hurt so much, always?"

"Every man is different.  It's a hard hand of days.  But we look after each other." "I don't remember, exactly.  I hurt so long, I was in bed and the lady wanted to call the doctor, I think.  I hurt so long, and then - then it just felt like - "  Davey leans forward, puts his arms on the desk and his head in his arms and sighs.  Muffled, he whispers, "I felt like - "

Like wandering, Josiah thinks.  That strange stillness when the fever breaks, before you come around to your mates watching over you, before you pull yourself out of your bed weak and stunned and brand-new on foal's legs.  A fresh and open field, the shaded place where the last dollop of snow lives nearly into June. 

"I know," Josiah murmurs, and lays his hand - his scarred hand - on young Cleary's shoulder.  "I do know, son, I do."

"I wished Antoine didn't have to hurt that way.  Or Ellis.  Or Jules or Betram." "I dunno what it was like - " Josiah sighs.  " - but for me, I had my mates around, and my pal, we got it together.  I never would've got through it, without him."

"Thomas."

Josiah starts.

"Sorry, Capper.  I read it on the letter.  Eddy talked about him once, too."

"Silky."

"Capper?"

"Silky.  That's what we called Thomas."

"Why?"

"I don't remember, really."

"What's he like?"

"Oh," Josiah says.  "I'll tell you.  You'd like him a sight better than me - for one thing, he's got two entire good legs and he could take you down to the fish pond.  Second - "

Davey is kicking his legs again, scuffing the toes of his boots on the wooden floor. 

"Well, I'll tell you.  The day I met him, here at Wynantskill, he very nearly ran me down with a horse, a big old dapple grey gelding we called Chubby..."

Davey leans on his hands. 

Silky's letter, half-unfolded, is by his elbow.  I never really got the brothers' whole forgiveness bit, it says, but I do reckon it's a little bit like when you turn over the ash of a building, and you find a little green thing growing underneath.