before and after and in between

by Aurylie

KensiHettyNateEricCallen. They have always always always lived up to your expectations. Sam POV, because it's interesting.

Disclaimer: Shane Brennan owns it all, along with CBS. I promise.

Reviews are appreciated (Thank you to all who supported my last story, 'an almost goodbye!).

xxxx

"I didn't do anything." Kensi is fierce and hurt, and you sigh because you believe her. And you follow your other angry friend if only because this is about him and his past and he needs you both now.

You understand the struggle to find who you really are, underneath the armor, underneath the weapons and case files. You understand the shock and the anger, and you understand the fear. The uncertainty is not new and it does not surprise you. But you had forgotten what it meant to hurt like this.

A little bit empty, a little bit sad, a little bit lost, and a whole lot unfair.

"If you can turn it off with a cell phone, you can turn it on," and this is your attempt to nudge him along, to bridge the gap that has been forming ever since men in a black van shot five bullets through his chest and left him to die.

He doesn't reply. You don't really expect him to.

Somewhere behind you, Kensi is speaking quietly to an officer who shifts and wonders, glancing at the building as if it will erupt again. Young and empty and oh so consistent, you do not envy him.

"Cell phone or no cell phone G, it wasn't her. You know as well as I do that she knows better than to go messing around with locked computers." Callen glances over his shoulder, and you see a twinge of recognition and maybe regret, but it goes and it goes and you want to shake him but don't. Coming to terms is easier said than done and it is easier thought of than reached, and he has been starting that journey for a very long time.

The glass from the windows that disappeared in the flames crunches under the weight of your shifting shoes, Callen remains still and brooding. Firemen move around you both without question, and you not at the ones you recognize.

"Lets get back to base, Eric should have something by now. We have nothing left for us here."

Oh, how your friend could argue that. How there was something, and how there could still be something, and how there is always someone just out of reach with all the answers and how he aches to find them.

Kensi is already in the backseat of the car when you turn around, phone strewn on the seat next to her, rubbing her eyes in frustration. The three of you are a unit, a team, and it is not often that something like this falls between you. But it does and it hurts, and you would comfort her but you know she doesn't want it, and it wouldn't help.

The drive back is silent, and you wonder if you all can recover from this loss again.

Callen almost left in an explosion of gunfire.

You do not doubt he will leave in the false hope of a confirmed identity either.

xxxx

Dog days of August and the sweltering July heat.

Broken traffic lights, and you were sitting on a metal fence somewhere in the middle of Delaware. Your father was a retired Army general, and your mother taught high school math. Your young cousin hid under the dining room table during the month of June, and your grandmother blinked slowly from her favorite rocker when the snow hit and Christmas came. You were sixteen, ready to become a SEAL and ready to save lives and to make them all proud. War stories and old movies, and you grew up too fast.

Losing yourself to silent nights and the warming sun that rose and rose and never moved.

How you always felt safe in the questions you never found the courage to ask. You used to sit in the back of a yellow school bus with big bold letters and press your palm against the glass. When your best friend was a little boy named Damon, before he moved across the country and out of reach. And you learned of boundaries and how to not say goodbye.

A twelfth birthday party, a driver's license with a picture you hated, a small dog that curled up next to you every evening and loved you beyond recognition.

For you, it was fleeting and full, and so very out of your control.

You packed up your room a month before graduation, before deployment, and pretended like you did not see your father's sad eyes.

Because you were not running. You were simply finding, and that was okay.

But you tossed and turned more often than not. Edgy for the desert heat and longing for a sense of justice you did not yet deserve. Sometimes, your mother would hover in the doorway when she thought you were long since asleep and you would listen to her trembling breath and miss her already. Because she was loving and kind and strong and you needed to take a plane to somewhere that was not here to prove that you were too.

Back in a town with overgrown yards and thick factory smoke that settled in your lungs and did not leave. Back when you hung out in the convenience store parking lot and played solitaire in the back of a truck until your fingers were numb and slow. When college meant late night parties and early morning classes and you were just getting started. You had a girlfriend named Jessica who left for New York at the start of summer and never bothered to call and might have broken your heart.

Before the drug cartels and before the days when the sun never seemed to set over the hot African sands. Before your mother died and before your father withered and left you in all but presence. Before Hetty and before Kensi and long before Callen. Before the body counts that never really added up or made sense or made it any better, any more right or fair or true. And how they would never really dull the pain.

Before it became your war, before it really became your life.

So you walked across a stage to get a diploma that meant everything to you until you realized it was just paper and ink and would not save your soul or keep you safe at night. And you checked your flight time and kissed your mother's cheek, shook your father's hand. Tray tables up and you were already prepared for takeoff.

You were gone with the breaking of dawn.

And it was not until much later that you wondered if you could lose yourself in the process of leaving.

Or exactly where you'd thought you'd end up anyways.

xxxx

You were in Somalia for a time. And you had the uniform and you had the heart, but the muffled gunshots that rang through the camp in the early morning caught you off guard sometimes, and the blood trails that followed you all never quite faded.

Sticky gray dust and swollen black bandages.

Skin becomes weathered and red and it wrinkles and burns and you find yourself missing home more than you thought possible. Your gun is glued to your hand and you edge around corners and sink into shadows and this is life and this is death all rolled into one.

You blend into the apologies no one ever gave you, and the remnants of a well-lived life. (They used to sit around the dying embers and speak in lazy whispers about childhoods that could have been yours, and it made you shiver at the distance you have traveled).

Where you realized that there was nowhere to hide, and that the lines between good and bad; black and white; you and them, were smudged and often crossed and it made you sick to hear it and angry to see it. Your hands are littered with sharp scars, and you almost lose the feeling in your left wrist after a stakeout gone wrong. And oh, how some nights you wished you wished you wished you had.

Because you lose a teammate instead, and you punch the wall of his dimly lit hospital room and will not cry. It is the first time you have lost a friend, a brother, and you hear his laugh ringing in every warehouse you can't avoid and you want to kill every masked man to avenge him. You never quite get over it, and you never quite draw even.

Toss and turn, wake and sleep. What it is and what it was and it's not made for you after all.

A long and winding journey of sorts, and the memories are blurred and spoken and you miss everyone equally eventually. Because your friend's smile fades, and your mother's smell fades, and you forget so much and feel so much and that does not make it any easier to bear. His body is shipped back to the States, and the funeral will be lovely and they will cry and cry. The sun and the sand and the boy that was and then wasn't all swept away and so very dead. He will be replaced with another man just as capable and just as ready to serve

But it will not be him, and it will not feel right for a very long time. But one day it will, because you eventually discover that everyone is replaceable.

And you cannot find all the things you have lost in any of the beds you've slept in or any of the shoes you've worn because they are not hiding. Maybe they are not real and maybe they are exactly where you've left them and you ache. For a life that was once yours and a life that once was something else that you cannot place.

So you are and you believe and you try try try.

Rewarded by an identity that wears off slowly and you are empty. Because you are Sam Hanna. Because you are a SEAL. Because you are a son, a friend, a solider, and a teammate. Because it all means nothing when the sand on your tongue burns and the ringing in your ears will not stop. Because you lose yourself in the battle, because you lose yourself to the uniform and to the men who fear you as much as you fear them.

So you save a young boy named Moe, by killing his father, and you change his life. Lead him to the ocean and bundle him up on a plane and try not to show him the guilt in your eyes or the heavy heavy heart that is yours and will one day be his too.

'I am your brother, and you are my brother.'

Those acid words that became a truth that echoed and haunted. You watched him grow and mold and conform and then believe in other truths that spoke louder and with harsher tones. And one day you would miss him, but not today, because you watched him sleep the whole flight back to Los Angeles because your mind was guilty and sad.

He did not wave when his foster mother led him gently out of the airport, but stared back at you with large, frightened eyes that you could not turn away from.

Lost in translation, contents have shifted. You find yourself fading slowly, and it is so very nice to finally know your place. Shaking of bones and breaking of wills. Best friends and brothers who wake up sometimes, and the ones that sleep forever and do not heed warnings or believe in you any longer. To know where you're going, to getting there and all the space in between that pulls at your heart and oh how you bleed.

The mistakes that are yours and the ones that might as well be.

And everything around you screamed of Somalia and Morocco and Zimbabwe and Cairo, and you spent your days avoiding loopholes and compromises. Looking for a peace that might not exist, a family that couldn't possibly understand, and a way to forget the shaking boy who gripped your hand tightly as you glided over the Atlantic Ocean.

You were never really surprised when it did not come.

xxxx

The man named G. Callen comes as a sudden transition in the midst of an undercover Russian operation that you could not control. New and fumbling in the world of computer searches and undercover roles that masked the lack of organization, you learned his ropes and created your own.

Your mother passes away in the quiet hum of a September morning, and you called home for the first time in years with salty cheeks and too-late words. Fingertips reciting a prayer, two steps behind the rest of the world, it was heartbreaking and oh so expected that you might have crumbled once.

When the uncertainty of tomorrow became your life and the people who walked away never came back. When the not knowing was more important than the understanding, and nobody knows their first name because they had so many different ones that it was easy to hide. And you are not in Africa and this is not the war you first walked into, but it is easy to pretend and it is easy to dream. You do not pity Callen and you do not envy his loneliness. Trapped in a cycle of tombstones and almost-but-not-quite, he is looking for a name that will not fit when he finds it.

And you have one that slides off and on and has come to belong to a sixteen-year-old boy who left it behind accidentally so many years ago. Somewhere in the house with the overgrown yard and old metal fence, buried in a flower garden that faded with the passing months and you will never find it now because you have stopped looking.

Identity is fickle and fragile, always breaking and bored. It belongs and it sighs and wilts with the years.

Because Hetty was young and wild. And is now older, with hundreds of favors and old friends and secrets. Better at moving on than you, than them, but caught in the deceiving cycle of one-more chance. One-more chance and one-more phone call before the game is over, before two and two equal six and ten and twenty-one.

Because Nate and Eric and Dom are (were) small and curious and a little bit out of the loop. Part of the extended family, but never all there; because this is your world and that is theirs and you will never completely understand. Fight the fight and get a little closer and try a little harder, and they all end up in broken basements eventually.

Because Kensi is angry at people who have no explanation, because she is frustrated and scared and always trying too hard to make it work when it won't. Because she will always be fifteen and she will always be the third wheel because it's what she's best at. And you worry about the girl who has become your friend, and maybe even your sister, because you will not let her lose herself when you see so much of yourself inside her beating beating heart.

Because you and Callen are oh so much alike. But you focus on his childhood and his fear of being empty and nothing all at once because he needs someone to understand even when he thinks they don't, that they can't. Because it's your life, because it's his life, and because the amount of control that you really have over either is limited and disappointing.

Because this is something that needs to be done, but probably won't be.

Because it all comes down to circles and the color red eventually.

Because the sawdust in your shoes and the phone on your bedside table are the only honest things you have known in such a long time.

(So you marry a woman named Megan. You meet her at the grocery store and she is lovely and teaches kindergarten and does not ask you things even when she probably should. So much like your mother, and you so much like your father that you shake your head in wonder. You find suddenly that you are not sorry all the time, for waiting too long or speaking to quickly. You ask questions and she makes observations, and it never ever ends and you know you love her. If only because it's impossible not to.)

The only promise you'd ever make and the only lie you ever meant.

That this is not over, and it is there and gone and yours and then not. Years of training mean nothing when it comes to matters of the heart.

(Memories stuffed away in a cardboard box that leads to a bank shooting and an old friend named Renko. The jelly bracelets and bulletproof vests that make you worry and the doors that almost don't open. You know her story and you know her regrets, but you will never know either completely because they are sealed inside jewelry boxes and wrinkled paper.)

You learn that people do not always get what they need. And they even more seldom get what they want.

And you know a man who builds boats to chase away ghosts. You know a woman who buried the evidence and died for it too. You know what it feels like to be wrapped in pretty words and to still not be happy.

Because it's your third year of movement and it's your fifth of last-ditch efforts. Not for lack of trying, and you are no closer to figuring yourself out. Books on self-improvement, everything tastes like copper, draw the blinds and you are safe.

So this one-more time becomes your one-last time. If this name and this past and this book of addresses are worth dying for, then you just might. For a friend who deserves it, for a wife that does not.

KensiHettyNateEricCallen, Dom who has already left, Deeks who is never where he should be, Renko who comes and goes, but goes more than he comes. The Director and all his regrets, Gibbs and his team and everything they do not understand and all that they do. And they do not get what they want or what they need or what they expect. But they have always always always lived up to your expectations.

Your words tumbling around this room for flashes of would-be conversation. It fills the silence.

And you write your letters in scarlet ink and spill your secrets to ease your broken mind.
It's all black and white until you make your own shade of gray and you are Sam Hanna and you are okay sometimes.

And this is about the lengths you are willing to go.
And the people you are willing to meet, risks you are willing to take.

Whatever makes this worth it in the end.