A/N: Wow! That was an incredible episode tonight! I don't want to ruin it for anyone though, so I won't say any more. This chapter took longer than I thought it would and I'm still not really sure of how it turned out, but the retail craziness is setting in again with Black Friday approaching and I figured I'd post it before I lost the chance. Unfortunately I don't know how long it'll be before I get the chance to update again, but I'll try my best not to be too long. Happy Thanksgiving to anyone reading from the US, Riptide.

Chapter 2

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." – Friedrich Nietzsche.

May, 1987

He's seventeen, even though every piece of ID to his name says otherwise, and he's got a crappy little apartment in Venice and a job at the grocer's on the corner and he takes night classes at the community college for psychology and criminal law because he's seen enough of the dark corners of this world to know how it really works. And he's never felt more out of place.

He can watch the drive bys from his bedroom window and see the ocean from the front counter at work and at night he sits in the sand off Santa Monica pier and stares up at the stars. He's never felt so small and he's painfully aware of the fact that his normal sort of life means nothing in the grand scene of things.

He sits in class listening to Prof. Risso for Criminology 102 talk about abuse rates in foster homes and it takes everything in him not to be sick because Jason and Michael and Matty and Karen. They're all just numbers here, in this shiny new life he's scrapped together.

He goes through the motions though and for a couple of months he even starts to believe it. And then the anniversary of Jason's death rolls around.

It's been eight years but he still hasn't gone a day without thinking of the boy that was his friend, the one who had made up G names for him, the kid who had died trying to protect him. He owes him everything, and he owes him more than this because he can't let them be just a number.

Jason. Matty. Karen. Michael. Jace. Rachel. They're the only friends he's ever known, the only family, and he owes them more than just being a statistic.

The next day he walks in to a Navy recruiting office in Pasadena and imagines that somewhere Jason and Michael will understand.

(Hetty Lange watches from the shadows, smiling bittersweet and guilty because he's his mother's son but she has no doubt that Clara never would have wanted this for her boy.)

August, 1989

He's nineteen, even though the military thinks otherwise, (according to his ID he's 21 and was born June of 1968) because he's already been Petty Officer Callen, 3rd Class for over a year now. Naval Base San Diego has become something like a home in a weird sort of way, because it's duty and it's necessary and he can do some kind of good here. And somewhere deep down that need to protect people like no one did for him resonates in a way he can't explain.

He's never questioned himself more though, because he's not really changing anything here, and there are still the Jason's and the Karen's of the world with no one to count on. And he's remade his life twice now for the memory of his former foster brother, but nothing feels like enough.

It's Jessica Moire that turns his life on its ear again though. She's beautiful and dangerous and she has all the answers. He's wrapped around her finger, in a web that he won't see until much later, because Jess is as cold as she is enthralling and she's one of the best. She offers him a chance to make a real difference, save lives in a way that few people can, in a way that even the military can't touch.

Two days later Petty Officer Callen disappears into the ether, red tape and redacted security clearance making his military record a thing of the past. Special Agent Callen, CIA takes his place and it settles down in his gut with a belonging he can't deny because it resonates in a way that feels meant to be.

(He'll regret this eventually, in the pit of his CIA days, when the Ghost and the things he's done in the name of freedom and country make him question just what he's become. It chips away at your soul, this kind of darkness, but even then, in the worst corner of this thing they've turned him into, he can't deny that Agent fits like nothing else.)

April, 1990

The first time he kills a man it's a warm day in Southern Italy and they've been hunting down a terrorist for the past two weeks. They've split up to search the lower town, and he's just about ready to call it quits when he gets ambushed by the terrorist they're looking for's muscle.

They fight, and this guy's good he thinks the third time he sees stars, because Callen knows precisely how good he is, but he's still getting his ass kicked. He hits the ground hard, tries to roll away only to get a boot to the ribs for his troubles, and something inside of him snaps the same way it did with his foster dad all those years ago.

Its desperation, and a survival instinct he didn't know he had, and a frightening kind of rage that steals his breath away, and somehow he gets his hands on his gun.

It happens so very quickly that the next thing he knows there's a dead man bleeding out in front of him and then he's down beside him, losing his meagre lunch across the cobblestones because he has blood on his hands all over again and it's piling up in a way he doesn't know how to fix.

It's Jess that finds him, holstering her own gun to pick up his from where it's clattered out of his hands. They've got no time for this and he knows that on some level, but it takes her hand squeezing painfully tight on his shoulder, and a sharp toned Agent Callen to get him moving again.

In the end, it's necessary and he'd had no choice, he'd be dead right now if he hadn't reacted the way he did, but that doesn't fill the hole in his chest or fix the emptiness in his eyes. Somewhere in the darkest corners of his heart, he wonders just what it is that he's becoming here.

There's blood on his hands, undeniable and unforgiving because he'd already had Jason and Michael on his conscience, and this chance to change the world that Jess had promised him has no redemption in the works.

(It's another little piece of his soul, another hole in his chest, and he'll look back years later and think that this is where it all starts. Yuri and the Ghost and this killer the Agency is turning him into. He won't see that until much later though, not until a setup in Syria that he was never supposed to survive and a government hit team burning his life down around him.)

September, 1990

He's been CIA for over a year now, thirteen months, not that anyone's been counting, because it's the Cold War heating up again and terrorists a dime a dozen and a threat around every corner. A year and more aliases than he can count and he's become one of their best assets. There's already a rumour going around, and sometimes they call him the Ghost, a call sign that's starting to stick.

He supposes that of all the things it could have been at least the Ghost has a certain ring to it. It fits better than anything else these days, too, because he looks in the mirror and wonders at whoever this is that's staring back at him. It's funny, he thinks, in a way that he should probably be worried about, but he recognizes his aliases far more than himself.

He's coming back from a drop point on a Wednesday night in mid-September the day his world shifts again. By the time he makes it back to the crappy apartment he's crashing in with Jess and their tech operator, he's got a bundle of nerves lodged in his chest and dread curled sharp and hard in his gut. Something's wrong, he can feel it in his bones, but it makes no sense, because they're on the equivalent of a milk run right now.

He's got his gun in hand when he makes it to the door, and Jess meets him three steps in with a smile that's at odds with the man secured to a chair in the middle of their one room apartment. She's all sharp edges in a way he's failed to see before and an icy kind of detachment in her eyes that makes shivers creep up his spine.

She's as dangerous as she is beautiful, always has been, and she's both tonight, and he doesn't know how to reconcile it with the madness he's just walked in on, because there's a man tied to a chair and Jess's fingers wrapped tight around the wrist of the hand his gun's in, and there's a razor edge in her smile.

He looks down the sights of his gun at this man that Jess has targeted and feels sick all over again, just like an alley in Southern Italy, because he's killed since then, and learned it gets easier with practice, but this is an entirely different monster.

The first time he executes a man he's got Jess curled up against his side, whispering poison in his ear, and her gun snug against his ribs, and this broken, jagged thing clawing its way up in his heart.

Its survival, because he doesn't doubt that whatever he is to her, she'll end him here, in a dingy apartment on the wrong side of Chicago, but he'll never forgive her (or himself) for this, because she's broken him in ways he didn't think possible.

It aches like shards of glass in his chest, because that stupid, gullible kid that joined the CIA to save the world has curled up and died, and he stares in the mirror and sees something far less than human looking back.

(It's the real beginning of the Ghost, of the government sanctioned assassin that'll be unmatched and untouchable. He'll be the CIA's best, the bogeyman of half the world, and he'll do things that will break every moral of the society he set out to protect. He'll sell his soul for the sake of the world he set out to protect.

And he'll hate himself for every single minute of it.)