AN: But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks—it is Sam and Callen finally talking about their feelings.


'My friend, you and I have come to an end.
With our hands held high and our hearts still weak,
This is where our faith and life will meet.'

"There Will Be a Day" ~ Strahan

~OL~

"S…s'nice, is all I'm…I'm…"

"Hey." An urgent poke to blistered skin. "Hey! G, you do not have permission to go. You got that? As acting team leader, I'm ordering you to stay with me."

"Not 'n charge."

"I am now," Sam huffs out. "You're unfit for duty and I'm making sure you don't tap out on me."

Funny, that Sam once complained Callen couldn't shut up on stakeouts and now here they are, Sam urgently prompting him to keep going with this inane story about a flower. To not give up. To not leave Sam alone on this dinghy with only Callen's corpse for comfort before his own time is up.

It's his greatest fear, and they both know it.

Not clowns, like Callen had joked, not drowning, not failing on a mission—no, Sam's nightmares revolve around his partner dying. A person so important, they stopped using the title best friends a long time ago.

They're something else now, something Callen has never permitted himself to name.

The orb of the sun is just free of the horizon when Callen takes his first rattling breath. Not that his breaths haven't been rattling so far, of course.

But then he can't draw another one.

Sam catches the lapse in the rhythm of Callen's chest in an instant. Yet he doesn't panic at this mirrored situation, not like Callen with his screaming and sobbing.

His lurch forward, however, is clumsy for the spry man. "G—"

Then he gets his turn to pump at Callen's chest, just a quick thump of knuckles on the bony ridges of his sternum. They feel like ballast weights, pure titanium pin balls trying to pummel his bones into soup.

Callen loses a few hazy moments. His lips and extremities go numb even in direct sunlight.

The logical, SERE trained part of his brain knows what this is, can list in alphabetical order his own symptoms and the myriad of injuries, from the bullet still cozy and snuggled up against his lungs to the ragged slices along his chest, to the head wound that never really stopped throbbing.

But none of it helps. None of it stops the lack of oxygen from weaving its enchantment, blood loss and the whispers of infection exacting their price.

After a second hit, Sam's rough trick works—the blood unsticks from Callen's lungs enough for him to stammer in a full breath, like a tiny car backfiring in pitiful little pants.

He coughs, nauseous from all the thick liquid he's swallowed. It sloshes in his stomach, blood and water together. And that's appropriate, somehow. On the miraculous chance someone finds his body before it's fish food, the coroner will open him up and see the two greatest metaphors of his life. They're better than any dog tags.

"Don't do that to me." Sam slumps. "You've given me enough scares at this point that I'm surprised I'm still alive."

So am I, Callen thinks.

"Sam?"

"I'm here, G."

But he's not, and this agitates Callen more than any physical pain. More than the tight embrace of broken ribs or heat stroke or the special lack of sensation he's been too stubborn to tell Sam about.

Like a mind reader, Sam quashes Callen's mood even further by shifting. "I'm getting another cramp in my side. Can you scoot your legs over a bit?"

Callen croaks it out—"No."

Sam stills. A hideous beat of silence slaps them both.

So far, they've taken turns: one curls their legs while the other stretches out for a while. A few hours in and they switch so that both have a chance to keep from getting full body Charlie horses or spasms in their exhausted muscles.

But with that one word, just one word, Sam finally stops moving.

"G?" is all he asks, with such velvety tenderness that Callen almost doesn't hear him. He's not sure he deserves it.

"Can't, uh." He stiffens his chin and cuts off any emotion to his face. "Can't feel my legs."

It's not a shock, not stacked up against the other horrors they've lived through in the last few days alone, but apparently it is the last in a long line for Sam.

He sets a broad palm on Callen's knee, as if that will help, and Callen wishes dearly that he could savour the touch. Could feel the warmth Sam's body is always radiating.

"When? When did you lose…?"

Callen looks up at puffs of clouds and longs to see his bird from yesterday. At Sam's whisper, he sighs. "Just before sunrise."

"Oh, G…"

Sam doesn't say it or spew facts that they both know, and Callen is grateful. He's seen bullet holes like his own before and this development was only a matter of time. The wound bubbles, boiling, under his back. It's so feverish he's surprised the dinghy doesn't catch fire.

"Please." His eyes wander, unfocused, over canyons of shattered honour on Sam's face. "Sam, come here."

He's been repeating it all night and all morning, over and over and over and over again—hoping against hope, against Sam's very nature, that he'll acquiesce. To fail so spectacularly is beyond what he's ever had to deal with.

Callen knows it, but still he asks.

"I can't."

"Yes, you can."

"G…it's not right."

"Course it's not." Callen's voice is firm despite his spinning vision. "Is that what's been eatin' you all this time? That we aren't supposed to be in this hell?"

Sam doesn't reply and now the cold is in Callen's chest cavity. He hiccups. "Sam. Sam, I'm asking my friend, not the SEAL—please. Please come here. Don't make me do this alone."

"Not sure you need me anyway."

Callen blinks. Sam's confession is a hypodermic needle of fire syringed straight into Callen's arteries. He stops breathing again, this time from emotion, from the prize match behind his eyeballs.

Callen has exactly one primary memory from being six years old—his eldest foster sister dragging him from his bed at five in the morning so they could climb a 'mountain' (the local treehouse) and watch the sun rise while eating peanut butter crackers. The crackers tasted stale, probably where she stole them from the school kitchen.

They always felt hungry those days.

Birds were barely up. It was cold, with slugs crawling across Callen's patchy rubber boots, and the world smelled like the armpit of a root cellar.

He remembers her bruised knuckles offering him a cracker, teeth as crooked as her smile. He remembers feeling like this might be the last vestige of calm before the future rose up to meet him, both of them.

Here, in the open ocean of nowhere with Sam…it's exactly the same. Callen is just a little boy waiting for the sun to rise, watching the world happen around him and trying to sustain himself on stale things.

It strikes him in one abrupt smack that Sam has been named too—and lost them.

He used to be husband.

Now he is widower.

Sam is friend and protector and brother-in-arms.

Sam is…Sam is other half of a whole. But people can get rid of their names, and Callen has begun to wonder if Sam doesn't want this one.

With these words, however, the illusion shatters before he can even process the sudden honesty after hours of lying. It's like stepping from an industrial freezer into the desert.

"Sam." His voice breaks on the word and he has to try again. "Sam, I never wanted—"

"That was the point, right?" Sam's body sits poised and balanced, as always, even in copious buckets of pain, but his eyes are restless. "Helping you grow, even if it means you don't need me anymore, is the best thing I could do for you."

Callen can't shake his head anymore, but he pokes at Sam's clenched fist. There are a million words streaming on his tongue, a Rebecca's Room profusion of counter arguments for that.

But Callen doesn't voice any. He just pats the fist through more breadcrumbs, where the prize fighter's blood comes streaming from his eyes, the battle long lost.

"Is that what this has all been about? Pushing me away?" Callen's mouth works now too. "These past few months you've been distant…won't talk to me."

"G, come on." Sam's torso pulls away to match the emotional distance between them and forget panic. Callen is hysterical. This isn't how any of it should have gone, least of all the one thing that used to be so dependable. "You're reading too much into—"

"Don't sell me that."

Sam stills again, though he doesn't fully let go of Callen's hand. It's clammy and cool. Callen grips it just in case he tries to, fingernails digging into the back of Sam's veins, thumb hooked around his knuckles. His partner barely reacts, other than to look sadly back at Callen.

"Do you remember that case when we had to stake out by a drug dealer's yacht, in the boat? We took turns…took turns being submerged and sneaking underwater photos of Ryson's operation."

"Yeah, I remember. You were nearly hypothermic by the end, after all the swims back and forth."

Callen taps at Sam's chest, where he's bent close. "Y…You made me cinnamon coffee."

Sam's brows knit. Then he seems to understand why Callen is bringing this story up now, of all times. The memory of sitting together under the blanket, on a boat, joking about how they slept better to the rocking of waves than at their respective houses. "G—"

"I will…"

Sam's lips twist, even though Callen hasn't finished his thought.

"I will always need you."

"No. You won't, G. And that's the way it should be."

Then Sam does the last thing Callen expects for the situation—he smiles.

It is the most horrifying thing Callen has ever seen. He almost wants to vomit. The smile is a tad sorrowful, of course, but more than that it is resigned.

"Shut up."

"G?"

"I said shut up," Callen growls, though his tears are a river now. "That's why you agreed to go on this suicide run of a mission, isn't it?"

Sam closes his eyes for a minute and that's even worse, so Callen shoves him by the arm.

"Isn't it?" he pushes, furious all of a sudden.

"You started dating Anna, just like I'd been steering you towards."

"It's not one or the other." Callen doesn't know why his body feels the need to shiver in such oppressive sunlight, but he can't stop the reaction. "Gaining her doesn't mean you have to go away."

"It was selfish." Sam's chiseled whisper winds Callen. "I needed to see, needed to feel that you still…"

He doesn't finish, but Callen has his own prescience for words. They're past the apologizing phase, though Sam might as well put up a banner for the mutual guilt happening here.

The petals of Sam's hand have opened at some point, relaxed enough for the two men to hold onto each other with a strength that belies their injuries. Callen relinquishes his death grip and each nail leaves a crescent indent, like mini scope bites.

Sweat mingles in the shaded hollow of their palms.

Callen thinks of the maps Sam studied before coming here and realizes, suddenly, that no experts have charted the most important thing of all. They have not studied or traversed the cartouches and peaks of Sam's hand like Callen has. It is its own country, and it has housed the refugee of Callen's trust longer than anyone else in his life.

There are highs and valleys, the rough crevasse of bullet scars, callouses, outcroppings of wrinkles that attest to years holding a weapon and picking victims up after being harmed by one.

And underneath it all is the volcanic thrum, a riverbed sustaining life in each heartbeat.

"You wanted to live vicariously through me."

Sam looses a sigh of his own. "No, G. I needed you to be okay. To be taken care of just in case I…"

He doesn't say it, because it's almost comical coming from the situation they're in now. The 'd' word is still off limits.

"Even if I was…gone," Sam amends, "I wanted to make sure you'll always be taken care of."

"Be loved," Callen finishes, lacking his usual distaste for raw sentiments. Probably thanks to the fact that he's in the double digits of how many breaths he has left. They have to count.

"Yeah." The word is grey, fabric left out in the sun and weathered to the point of desaturation. "Yeah, G. You deserve better than an old badger like me."

The shivers run up into Callen's teeth so they chatter. "It doesn't get any better than you. Without you, I'd retire, you know that?"

Sam swipes a thumb under his nose. "No, you wouldn't."

"Can't replace the best, not even with a new partner."

Callen pretends not to see the way Sam's face falls even further, how emotionally strung out they both are. They are silent for a time, floating in the windless doldrums of a cloudless morning.

G's lips curve up. "Did you just call yourself a badger?"

"I'll hurl you off this dinghy myself. See if I won't."

They laugh, even though the pain of it nearly causes him to black out, and it manages to last longer than thirty seconds in a way Callen didn't think was possible. He realizes it might be the last time he even gets to laugh, so being the one to give Sam his last moment of amusement feels like being handed a trophy.

Then Sam says the last thing Callen expects—

"There's so much I wanted to do."

And at last, at last, Sam lays down on his side facing Callen.

It takes some shimmying and swearing on both their parts from the discomfort, but it's still the most beautiful thing—Sam stops fussing over signal flares and homemade compasses to just look at Callen, to be one hundred percent present when he goes.

He looks, his eyes a lighthouse fixed in one direction, and a peace beyond quantifying sweeps in fizzy particles through Callen's body.

Their bodies jam together inside the pillbox of the dinghy, knees curled up so they both fit twined around each other.

If every single piece of gold in the world was shaved down into flakes and set out in a carpet of blinding splendor, Callen thinks it might, might, capture something of the way Sam's eyes look right now. They are heavy, a bullion of faith that broke Callen's scales within a year of meeting him, and so breathtaking that his throat stings.

"Me too." Callen works up a smile of his own and it must be equally terrible for the way it makes Sam's hand tighten. "But we still can."

"Oh yeah?"

"Why not?"

Sam wipes some blood away from Callen's face, where it runs between his dry lips. Those dulcet callouses rub at sensitive skin around the blisters. "We'll go see my son's graduation."

Callen closes his eyes, trying to picture it, before Sam pats his cheek to keep them open. Not yet, the gesture says. "He looks great. He's got your military tank shoulders."

"He sure does."

"There are flower petals from the DC cherry blossoms."

Sam looks off in the distance. His glistening skin isn't so flushed anymore, pasty to the point of looking like a corpse and shivering with infection and blood loss. "Yeah, I see that."

"And we've got a seat by the front, so that he can't miss us when he walks across the stage."

"We'll embarrass him by taking too many photos."

"You mean you'll take too many photos—I'm the cool, hip uncle. Remember?"

"My diving watch could be his gift."

"That's a lousy graduation gift."

Sam ignores this with the ease of long practice. "And I'll walk my daughter down the aisle if she gets married."

"I can see it. I can see it, Sam. She looks gorgeous, all sparkly and smiling…"

"She does, just like Michelle." Sam's eyes are bright.

"…But only if I get to help reception party plan."

"Of course. You and Deeks go overboard on the budget and ridiculous decorations despite my protests, as usual."

Callen doesn't miss Sam's use of present tense but he plays along, the scene unfolding like a cinematic vision inside his head. "And their kids are running around playing with balloons."

"I'm not sure Kensi and Deeks wanted kids."

"Indulge me for a second." Callen grins, and this time it feels blindingly real. It's as if someone reached down and lit his soul on fire, back to the way they were in the beginning, almost two decades ago when he met Sam. "Say a boy and a girl."

Sam gets into these not-memories too, his voice stronger. "We'll do Saturday cook outs on the boat."

"Eric can make some of his famous sushi! I'll give him hell for bringing something raw to a barbecue but eat most of it before you can."

Sam snorts. "Leaving me to rummage through leftovers in the fridge the next day when you aren't looking."

Their game continues over the next few hours, Sam and Callen living a whole life on this dinghy, describing in detail their best case scenarios. Callen can almost taste it, the joy of a life lived out with these people.

It is only once the sun is almost at its noon zenith that Callen picks up on a running theme. Sam hasn't yet, still waxing on about a 'memory' of how he'll teach Kensi and Marty's kids to fish, watch them be raised by Uncle Sam and Uncle Callen too, this four-parent family.

"It's beautiful," Callen whispers. "All of it."

Their faces are mere heartbeats apart, but Callen can feel the distance yawning, something inside of his body growing icy…shutting down…

"I wanted to grow old." Sam's first few tears fall only now, only once he sees the foggy light in Callen's eyes. "I wanted us to grow old."

"On the boat."

Sam's forehead creases, at the same time that he reaches out to smooth Callen's with his thumb. "What? We are growing old on a boat."

A small popping sound breaks through the gunk in Callen's larynx. He fists his other hand in the torn chest of Sam's shirt, and the riverbed heartbeat is under his knuckles too.

Sam kneads his fingers into the back of Callen's neck like dough.

In, out. In, out…

"Sam."

"I know. Hey, I know."

"Sorry 'm…I'm leavin' you."

Sam's lips are a mess now. "You might not be. And I'm sorry I can't tell Anna you love her."

"She probably knows. Haven't…haven't said it to her." Callen reaches up to clasp the wrist by his ear, pleased to go with two fistfuls of his partner. "It's you 'm not so sure about."

Sam gets that look, the one right before he lectures some unsuspecting drug runner kid or mouths off at a government official. "You listen here. I wouldn't change one jot of how this went down. Do you understand me?"

Callen stares at him, too spent for a comeback.

Sam breathes out, slow. "I'd do it all over again in the sense of backing you up. I should never have pushed you away—I know you only agreed to this Rhea case because of me."

"I should never have doubted that you still…wanted…wanted this…"

Callen's breaths are a whistle now, like Deeks' on the cell floor.

Then a curious thing begins to happen: Callen looks up at the horizon and suddenly can see through it. Someone has cut away several petticoats of stratosphere tulle to make it sheer and glittering.

The blue of the sky mingles with refracted starlight through Earth's atmosphere, as if he and his vision are floating between universe and planet to images he can't place.

The long-lost memory of a high school English class and the novel they studied that year comes floating back…the sound of his teacher reading it on hot September afternoons…sweet dreams, ah…

"G." Sam's voice goes sharp. "Hey! Don't you dare, G!"

"How w'ld it end?" Callen's voice comes out like individual grains of sand, small and coarse. He's choking on those stars, lungs filled up with cosmic dust from a world and colours he's never seen.

"What?"

"How would…we…?"

There are figure eights whirling in the cosmos now, around the sunlight like playful quarks and rings. Callen wonders how he ever thought the universe is static.

He can hear pulsing underneath the planet's crust, in harmony with the whales and the atoms in Sam's eyes and dichroic symphonies of light. They're perfectly layered. They've all rehearsed this song since the beginning of time.

"We're old and fat." Sam's tears water the chapped places on Callen's face. "With no more dying people to worry about."

"I c'n…see it…"

"And…" Sam lets out one very long breath that sounds like he's gone over a shallow set of speed bumps, uneven. "And you'll irritate me to no end with your stupid Tootsie pops."

"Yeah?" Callen hears the permanence in that and some of the ice thaws.

"Yeah, G. We'll travel the oceans together, take naps along the coast and fish for our supper."

Now a close, fluttered trill ads to the mix, a piccolo of approaching hope. The low thud thud thud of a kettle drum.

"And watch the fireworks."

G Callen smiles, for he can hear it now, how his own body has been part of the score all along. His molecules vibrate in sync with every dog and oak tree and volcano.

Sam's voice begins to fade, Callen hearing him through the giant metal tube of fading black. "And…we'll host the Blye-Deeks kids on weekends, when they grow up and protect the world instead of us…"

"S'm?"

"I'm here."

But Callen himself is not, he knows now.

This time, he's the one leaving. That's new. He always gets left behind, abandoned, shoved away 'for his own good,' whether it's his father or Anna or even Sam this last year.

Callen closes his eyes and when they open, Kensi kneels over him instead.

The blood is gone from her teeth, smile radiant enough to compete with the sun at her back. She's even haloed, smooth white wrapped around her auburn tresses, flying free in the wind.

The beat of wings brush cool on Callen's face, as does a strange flurry of motion behind her, her hand soft and whole where it strokes his cheek. She waters him too, brown eyes lit up nearly chestnut.

"H'me?"

"Yes, Grisha." She laughs, a wild sound. "We're going home."

Callen's last memory is Sam's bitter weeping…begging him to stay.