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Grigori ‘Grisha’ Aleksandrovich Nikolaev had arrived at St. Joseph's Orphan Home in downtown Los Angeles just a couple of hours prior. The large building felt unfamiliar and cold. The nuns and caregivers moved swiftly around Grisha, completely absorbed in their daily tasks, seemingly oblivious to the newcomer. As a four-and-a-half-year-old, Grisha felt utterly bewildered in this new environment, like a small boat adrift in a stormy sea, especially after everything that had transpired in the past week.
Grisha couldn't understand what anyone around him was saying; his world was solely Romanian, Kalderash Romani when alone with his mother, and Russian. The massive language barrier left him feeling lost and alone. He yearned for the warmth of his papa, mamă, and big sister, but the memories were fading now as the reality of the orphanage that he was residing in took over.
Sister Agatha, stern and mean-spirited, was in charge of the orphanage and ruled with an iron fist, scaring Grisha. Sister Mary Margaret, on the other hand, worked there and tried to show a little bit more compassion, but her efforts were often overshadowed by Sister Agatha's harsh demeanour and she was simply too busy.
As he watched all the other children calmly play and chat, Grisha felt like an outsider. They communicated in English, a language he couldn't comprehend, and the loneliness gnawed at his heart. He missed his family. He wanted his mami back.
Amidst the sea of unfamiliar faces, one boy named Jesse approached him. He couldn't speak Romanian, Kalderash Romani or Russian, but he sensed the sadness in Grisha's eyes. With gestures and drawings, Jesse tried to bridge the language gap, offering friendship to the newest arrival despite the boy being a couple of years older.
Though Grisha struggled to communicate, Jesse's efforts brought a small glimmer of hope. They found a way to play together, laughing without the need for words. Jesse became his companion in a world where words held no meaning.
Sister Agatha's harsh treatment added to Grisha's already overwhelming struggles. She would berate and physically punish him for his difficulties with the English language, making him feel even more isolated and alone as he tried to get a grasp on the new language, not receiving much help.
In those quiet moments, the memories of his family haunted him. He remembered the day they were at the beach, and a man had given him a toy soldier. It was the last time he saw his mother, Clara Georgescu, before tragedy struck, and she was shot right before his young eyes.
Grisha cried himself to sleep most nights, longing for the love and warmth of the close family he had tragically lost. He missed his papa, his mamă, and his big sister Amaliya more than anything and part of him couldn't wrap his head around why his father, Aleksandr Nikolaev, had sent him away, why Papa no longer wanted him. Jesse remained by his side, offering solace and understanding without the need for words.
Over the next two years, Grisha stayed at the orphanage, slowly forgetting his birth name, Grigori, and becoming G. Callen. Most often going by his assumed last name. He no longer recalled a word of Romanian, Kalderash Romani, or Russian either. The memories of Romania and his family were all long gone now, replaced by the life he had known at St. Joseph's, buried beneath the daily struggles of orphan life and the trauma of the separation from his family in the first place.
Finally, after that two years of resilience, Callen's life was about to change again. A social worker for the California foster care system came to St. Joseph's Orphan Home. She introduced herself as Mrs. Johnson, and a rare spark of hope ignited within young G. Callen's heart for the first time in memory.
Mrs. Johnson seemed nice and gave him something called a lollipop to eat which he really liked. She then explained that she had found a potential foster family for him, the Johnsons, who were willing to welcome him into their home.
Anxiety and hope swirled within Callen as he prepared to meet that foster family for the first time. He'd become fluent in English, thanks to Jesse's guidance and no small amount of determination on his part, so that wasn't a concern. He was worried about how he would be received though by this new family.
As he stood there at the threshold of the Spanish-style bungalow, his heart pounded. The Andersons awaited him with warm smiles, and Mrs. Anderson held out her hand, inviting him to join them. Mrs. Johnson stood by Callen's side, offering silent support as he stepped forward and into this new chapter of his young life, leaving behind the harshness of the orphanage as well as Sister Agatha's berating words with a childish optimism.
Life in the Johnsons' foster home was different from the cold orphanage. Callen finally felt a glimmer of warmth and belonging as the Johnsons treated him with love and care. Mrs. Johnson would often spend time gardening, and Callen found that he really liked helping her tend to her plants. However, the scars from his already tumultuous upbringing ran deep and the Johnsons, first-time foster carers, weren't prepared for it and felt like they were in over their heads.
Despite the Johnsons' caring, Callen's time with them was short-lived. The foster care system then proved to be a revolving door for him.
At eight years old, Callen's world was upended worse than usual when he was moved from a great foster home that had wanted to keep him in Pasadena to a new foster home in Los Angeles after being pulled from class and tested for something that he was later told was dyslexia. The move to Los Angeles was so that he could attend a special school there in Cypress Park. The head instructor, Mr. Pembrook, terrified him but Callen also wanted the strict man's approval and worked hard to learn tradecraft. Mr. Pembrook's methods were brutal though and it was hard for him not to crumble under the pressure and trauma. Even as he was excelling, getting good grades fairly easily in most things, and really enjoying certain aspects of tradecraft.
Over the years, Callen was moved from one foster placement to another, a total of thirty-six times, some of them group homes. Each new placement brought its own challenges. A few of the foster carers were kind, most were downright apathetic, and others were just outright abusive.
He had asked for help at first but no one seemed to care. When he was ten, living with the McPhersons, was a good example of that. Mr. McPherson had been beating Callen with a broom handle for weeks and Callen was only removed when he had enough one day and grabbed that broom handle from his foster father's hands and then broke it over the violent man's head, using a move he'd been taught by Mr. Pembrook in his Weapons & Self-Defence class at Drona..
As he grew older, Callen found himself influenced by Mr. Pembrook's relentless mantra at Drona: "Don't feel, feelings cause pain." This mantra became ingrained in his mind, leading him to construct a tough exterior, pushing people away before they had the chance to reject him. He embraced emotional detachment as a means of self-preservation, believing that vulnerability only led to heartache. Yet, behind that tough facade, he yearned for a place to call home and someone to truly belong to.
The good foster homes were the hardest for Callen. He would start to feel a little bit at home, make a friend, actually sleep through the night... and then something would happen, and they'd ship him off, usually not to someone as nice. It was a cycle he had grown all too familiar with – the fleeting taste of warmth and belonging, followed by the bitter sting of rejection. He would no longer let anyone in because it was too risky. The walls around Callen's heart grew higher, and he shielded himself from forming any attachments. He needed to protect his heart, keeping people at arm's length to avoid the pain of rejection again and again.
In one particularly harrowing home years later, Callen lived with a slightly older foster brother named Jason, who was then beaten to death by their drunk foster father. The trauma of witnessing such violence stayed with Callen, leaving him scarred and even more guarded. It also left him feeling guilty for not helping Jason when the older boy had done everything he could to look after him.
At fourteen, Callen's life took an unexpected turn when he was placed with the Rostoff family, a warm and welcoming Russian household. Their four-year-old daughter, Alina, was an absolute delight, and the little girl quickly became Callen's language teacher. Relearning Russian, although he didn't know it, from Alina became a source of joy for Callen, bringing him closer to the Rostoff family.
Despite the Rostoffs' caring nature, Callen's time with them was also cut short when the foster mom, Masha, got sick. The foster care system's unpredictability remained a constant, and he was once again uprooted from a place he had grown to appreciate.
At fifteen years old, in a moment of desperation, Callen ran away from yet another miserable foster placement, wanting to escape the cycle of misery that to Callen felt never-ending. He couldn't see a way out.
In a turn of fate, Callen's desperate actions led him to rob a storage locker, but he was almost instantly caught. Callen ended up in Southgate Juvenile Detention Centre as a result and went through three weeks of hell before he escaped, drawing on skills that Mr. Pembrook had taught him at Drona.
Shortly after his escape, Callen crashed through two L.A.P.D cruisers and into a street light pole. The officers on scene wanted him locked up and it felt as though his life was over, an experience that intensified his feelings of hopelessness.
The hand of God intervened though as a short, dark-haired woman named Hetty drove up onto the scene, handling the police officers with ease. In Hetty, Callen sensed a mixture of authority and compassion. She saw potential in him, even in the depths of his mistakes, and offered Callen something that he'd longed for his entire life – a real home and a chance at a better life.
Hetty recognized the deep emotional scars that Callen carried, and with unwavering determination, she pulled him from the cycle of foster homes. The woman had already arranged for Callen to leave Drona, having learned of the methods being used at the school, a large reason for Callen acting out. Instead, she enrolled him in a public high school and provided the hurt teenager with a stable environment to grow and thrive.
After Hetty took custody of him, Callen's memories of Drona and the trauma quickly faded. Though the walls around his heart remained, Callen started to let her in, bit by bit. The journey to healing and finding a place to call home would be arduous, but with Hetty by his side, Callen managed to break down that wall ever so slightly.
He also found a new sense of purpose and direction in his life. He began to distance himself from the wrong crowd and focused on building a better future for himself. He became a lifeguard at Lakes for a time and did a summer of volunteer wildfire prevention, channelling his past experiences into a desire to protect others rather than completely hating the world the way he had.
Following in Hetty's footsteps, Callen decided to join the C.I.A shortly after he turned eighteen. His resilience, determination, and skills learned from Drona made him an exceptional operative for the agency, even if he didn't remember how he'd learned his tradecraft. With Hetty as his guiding light, Callen embarked on a new chapter, using his past to shape a promising future.
As an adult, Callen's life remained turbulent, lacking a stable living arrangement and constantly hopping between jobs. He even spent significant time in Eastern Europe, where he improved his Russian and rekindled his fluency in Romanian during various deep cover operations. Eventually, Callen found himself at NCIS's Office of Special Projects, where Hetty was heavily involved. She paired him with Sam Hanna and although he didn't want to work with a partner at first, the former Navy SEAL had sneakily managed to get through Callen's walls before he even realized it happened and became a good friend. One of the very few people he trusted.
At the age of forty-one, Callen's life took a rather unexpected turn. While working on a case, Hetty vanished. He followed the woman who'd saved him from himself as a teen to Romania and uncovered some information about his past. He then discovered that he was, in fact, born in a small town off the Black Sea in Romania. The realization that he'd lost any connection to his own culture, that he wasn't born in the United States, and that Hetty had seemingly known things and kept them from him left Callen with rather mixed emotions. A part of him longed to explore his roots, but another part feared the pain that might come with reopening old wounds. He desperately wanted Hetty to tell him what she knew about his past, however.
Sitting down with Hetty a couple months later, Callen learned about his mother Clara Callen, his maternal grandfather George Callen, and the reason behind the tragic circumstances that had led to his family being brutally torn apart back in August of 1974. The weight of his past seemed to feel even heavier, but he found some comfort in finally knowing some of the truth, after allowing himself to cry for the first time in years and taking his grief out on a punching bag in the gym. He wished she’d been able to tell him his name though, but she didn’t know it. She also hadn’t given him any information on who his father was.
He'd seen the way Hetty smiled when she said his mother's name and, for the first time, he wondered if the truth about his lost past might actually make him lose something precious in his present – and his future.
Hetty eyed him, almost pleading. "Forgive me.”
The words had driven Callen out of the chair, and she had let him go. He'd talk to her again, maybe even forgive her, but tonight, Callen needed to go hard at the punching bag. With every strike, every sound that was between a shout and a sob, he grieved everything that was taken all those years ago. Grieving and wondering how he got to America, if he’d ever learn what the letter G in his name stood for, and if he’d ever get to meet his father… wondering if the man was still out somewhere. Had he abandoned his children? Or had his father also been a casualty of the blood feud?
Either way, he felt like he was drowning in grief. His life should’ve been so different.