All The Small Things About You

Words: 776

Couple: Special Agent G Callen and Nell Jones

TV Show: NCIS: Los Angeles

Disclaimer: All characters you recognise belong to Shane Brennan and CBS.

Slightly AU.

Note: I don’t live in America, so I don’t know what the college/university system is like, so I have no idea what course Nell would have to have taken. You’d think that taking AVID would teach you that, yeah? Aha.

…

He didn’t know what it was, maybe it was her personality, maybe it was the way she tried her hardest to keep the attention off her and failed, but there was something about Nell Jones that had him hopng to know more about her than what her personal file told him.

Her personal file tells him that she grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, she was one of three with two older brothers, but had so many cousins that he hadn’t even read the entire list. She went through a public school education her entire childhood, and was the top of her class all throughout high school.

It tells him that she attended NYU, completing her Masters in Intelligence Analysing, and had minored in Foreign Affairs, and that the moment she graduated; she was on Henrietta Lange’s radar and became the Office of Special Project’s head intelligence analyst.

It told her that she didn’t come directly to the OSP office, and she completed a classified mission in Venezuela, with none other than Nate Getz – he could only guess that was where they met and formed this unknown friendship that they had.

Her file described her as a ‘Type A with borderline ADD’, and he could have sworn she said something like that to him shortly after her arrival, saying that it was along with her ‘control issues over people that she admired’, and being the NCIS federal agent that he was, he picked up on that part of what she said almost immediately.

It also told him that she was fulling quallified in handling a weapon, and it did not just mean the SIG that he’d seen her stuff into the back of her pants on those one-off cases where she went into the field, it said that she was fully qualified to slit his throat with a number of knives, and could possibly give him a run for his money in the gym.

What the personal file did not tell him, however, that she was the next Henrietta Lange, that she drank tea by the gallon, that she was sneakier than a ninja, and that she knew how to scare three grown men into handing in an expence report before the expences were even made.

The personal file did not tell him that she was one of the clumsiest people you could ever meet, despite her usual grace around the Office of Special Projects, and that she would constantly trip over the side of her coffee table in her lounge room, saying that she would move it one day, but she couldn’t bring herself to rearranging the room.

It couldn’t tell him, that she knew how to hold her liquor, having given him a run for his money during a team outing, leaving him gripping onto his partners right arm, and the side of the table to stand properly, while Nell Jones sat smiling, only the slightest but drunk and slurring her words, watching him as he stumbled to walk.

The file wouldn’t say, she she had these small things that she did, and it could tell you what she felt right away. When she happy, she had this large bounce in her step, she would constantly be on her feet, it was as though if she sat down, the world may end. When she was embarressed, she always tried to hand the attention to someone else, trying her best to stand behind the closest person or object, to obscure the view that anybody could have on her.

It can’t tell him or anybody else that she was attracted to the vibrant oranges and reds. How everyday she wore a different sun-dress and cardigan, and either one of those items of clothing had to have something floral on them. That she only ever wore cargo pants or shorts on the days that she had a massive pile of laundry waiting for her, and everything else she owned was in that pile.

The file would never be able to tell him about how confident she was. How she was not afraid to stand up for herself to a marine that was more than double her height and age. How she refused to leave the job alone until it was completed. How she wouldn’t let anybody stand in her way when she set her mind to something.

G Callen wondered to himself, as he leant against his partner’s desk, watching the intelligence analyst as she stayed deep in conversation with Kensi Blye about one thing or another, what was it really that drew him towards her?

Because he knew that it sure as hell wasn’t her clumsiness…