A/N: So I was minding my own business, working on my other fic Strength in My Weakness, when rabid plot bunnies attacked. This is the result, but it's also kind of unlike anything I've ever wrote before so I'd love to know what you think and if it's worth continuing! I also have to thank JaniceS who planted the seed of wanting to know more about Callen's past and his alias Yuri (used in my other fics). It's kind of a companion piece to my other stories, especially Strength in My Weakness, but I think you should be able to read and understand it without having followed them.
P.S. The information on Callen's foster brother Jason is from Season 1 ep. 6 "Keepin' It Real" and the McPhersons come from Season 5 ep. 4 "Resnikov, N.". His DEA partner Matt is my own OC and comes from my fics Catching Fire and Guardian Angel.
Moments
"Look into my eyes, it's where my demons hide. Don't get too close, its dark inside." – Demons by Imagine Dragons.
March, 1976
He's spent two months with the Stevens and Rachel is the closest thing to a best friend he's ever had. She tells the best knock-knock jokes and she's the only one who can find him when they play hide and seek. She's smart and funny and tells him stories of when she used to live with her mom and sister, and he thinks it'd be the coolest if they could be real siblings. He's never had a sister, or at least he's pretty sure he didn't, but she'd be the awesomest.
Except when he gets back to the Stevens' today, there are police cars in the street and Rachel's crying on the step in the arms of their neighbour, Ms. Davies. She's an elderly lady who always smiles when they play in the yard and she didn't even yell that time his ball went into her flowers, but when G waves to her, today she doesn't smile back.
He's somewhere else by that night, with a lady who smells like mint and bubble gum and works at the candy store. He lies in bed that night and wishes that Rachel could be his sister for reals.
(Years later, he'll look into the murder of Maria Stevens. He'll be CIA at the time and when he finds the man responsible he'll repay him eye for an eye in all the ways the government taught him.)
June, 1979
Jason's dead.
It hurts in a way that feels like shards of glass in his chest because Jason had been his friend. He was dead because he'd tried to protect G, and he knows it's all his fault.
Because Jason was nice to him. He stopped the other boys from taking his lunch, and he stopped Mr. Marcos when he tried to hurt him, and they'd sit up at night and think of G names for him. G-force G-money G-power And he thinks he'd give all that back if only he didn't have to feel this way, because what happened to Jason is all his fault.
He sits on the floor at the end of his bed in a group home in Santa Clarita and thinks that if he'd never let Jason be his friend, he wouldn't have to feel this way, because he'd still be alive and none of this would be his fault.
He's Callen the next day, not G, and he doesn't let anyone call him that for a very long time. (Not until 2008 and a former Navy SEAL who won't take no for an answer.) And he never forgets Jason Tedrow.
September, 1980
He's stronger now. He can protect himself. He has to because he won't let anyone else die for him like Jason did. So the next time Mr. McPherson goes for the broom handle, something inside of him snaps.
It's the first time he's raised a hand in his own defence, the first time he's thrown a punch to protect someone else, because he can't let him hurt them. Matty with the big blue eyes who still has a family out there and sweet little Karen who still remembers her dad and braids a tattered red ribbon into her hair every day.
So he takes the broom handle out of their foster dad's hands and he beats him with it the same way he'd have hurt Matty and Karen. He attacks him with a ferocity that no ten year old should have, beats him until the broom handle snaps the same way this thing inside of him did, and when it's done he stares at the blood on his hands and feels sick.
But Matty launches himself at him with a desperation that speaks of the innocence he still has, Karen too, and he thinks that he'll take this feeling that turns his stomach as long as they're safe.
He gets sent to juvie for this, never mind the fact that Mr. McPherson would have killed Matty and Karen if he hadn't done what he did, and three weeks later he calls it hell and never speaks of it again. It doesn't matter anyway, he has a family out there somewhere, and they'll come for him eventually. He just has to survive until then.
(Later he'll redefine hell as a Turkish black site and a terrorist's ingenuity, but he'll survive that too because he has no other choice.
And he'll learn how to use that thing inside of him that comes out when the people he cares about are threatened. It'll still make him sick every single time, but it's necessary, and one day he'll even have a name for it.)
April, 1984
He goes to "hell" twice more, even though neither one of which are really his fault. Gets three weeks for shoplifting in May, 'cause Ms. Peters was too drunk to realize there was no food in the house, and a month the next November for possession. It wasn't even really his because he'd taken it off of a foster brother who was getting in too deep with the wrong kind of crowd, but the cops and the judge aren't listening and his attitude doesn't help.
He spends Christmas in this hellhole and tacks on extra time for bad behaviour when he attacks a guard who was trying to bash a ten year olds' head in. And when he gets out in mid-January with ice in his eyes and an edge in his grin, he tells himself he doesn't care because somewhere along the way that belief that his family would come for him has curled up and died.
It leaves a hole in his chest that aches like Jason's death all over again, but he smiles and tells himself it doesn't matter. He has himself to count on, the only one he's ever had, and sometimes he even believes his own lies.
(He doesn't let himself care about anyone for a very long time after that. Not until Matt and the DEA and a traitor that gets his partner killed on his watch, and that leads him through a whole other type of hell.
It takes Hetty Lange and every alphabet agency in the book hunting him half way around the globe to get through that.)
July, 1986
He's sixteen and the foster system hasn't heard from him in at least seven months. It's not the first time he's ran to the streets, he knows parts of LA better than the back of his hand, but it will be the last because he refuses to be CPS's puppet any longer.
He's found a family of sorts, in a messed up kind of way, on these streets but he doesn't know any other kind. They're a ragtag group with more in common with the lost boys than a gang, but they each have no one else in the world but each other.
Together they rule these streets, from Arleta Ave south to Van Nuys and east into Sun Valley. They crash in empty houses and abandoned warehouses, steal what they need, and answer to no one but each other. It's freedom, and a dead end future, and friends that he's just starting to think he can count on.
And for three months it's all good, until it all falls apart on a Friday night in October.
He's ducking through back alleys and side streets on his way back to their temporary haunt of an empty office on Sherman when it happens. He's got two of the younger kids with him, Jace and Michael, and he's pretty sure they've ditched store security from the Walmart four blocks down that they've just raided. It's a pretty good haul, (two jars of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a thing of pop tarts, and a couple handfuls of snickers bars), and the younger brothers with him are laughing and joking and mock wrestling on their way back.
It's then of course that it all goes to hell and Callen thinks sometimes in the minutes that follow that he should have seen this coming, because nothing ever stays good around him. It's the screech of car tires and gunshots and Jace screaming, and the next thing he knows he's tackled them both to the ground, but he's not fast enough, because Jace is crying and Michael's blue shirt is turning red.
It's sometime that night, after everything else, when he finds himself at the South Los Angeles Community Centre. There's blood on his hands and staining the knees of his jeans and this empty, ragged hole in his chest that aches because Michael is dead, and Constance's fingers warm against his arm. He thinks, in some distant corner of his heart, that she might be the only thing holding him together.
Jason's dead, and his family is never coming for him, and Michael's blood is under his fingernails and staining his hands in a way he can't get out, and he can't live this life anymore.
The next day he creates the first real legend of his life, the first of far more than he knows. G. Callen, upstanding citizen, with a fake ID that says he's eighteen and lives in Pasadena and a stolen credit card that gets him half way across the city.
He buries his past and never looks back, and sometimes he even forgets about the hole in his chest and the ghosts of Michael and Jason that haunt the dark corners of his shiny new life.