A/N: Thanks so much to everyone to reviewed and put this story on follows and favorites! I hope this last chapter doesn't disappoint. I'll apologize in advance for any mistakes in medical terminology in this chapter. My first aide knowledge only goes as far as Band-Aids and Polysporin. Thanks again, Riptide
Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS: Los Angeles or any affiliated media and do not profit in any way from this. Except of course for reviews that are food for the plot bunnies… ;)
Recovery
"The home is to him his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose." – Edward Coke.
Callen lapses in and out of consciousness for the next twelve hours, and Sam stays by his side for the rest of the day and into the night. He's drugged to the gills and restrained to his hospital bed at the wrists and ankles. It's a fact that Sam hates, but it's for his own good. Sam's painfully aware of the chances of Callen hurting himself or one of them in another fever induced hallucination.
Callen's on wide spectrum antibiotics, enough morphine to drop a horse for the tearing in his lungs thanks to the Spiral virus, and of course the vaccine itself, and the CDC's cautious of introducing tranquilizers on top of all the other untested pharmaceuticals in Callen's system so that option's out for the time being. That leaves Sam with nothing to do, but sit at his partner's bedside and worry.
Even with all that crap floating through his bloodstream though, Callen's sleep is far from peaceful. He fights the restraints almost constantly drifting between every language in his extended repertoire, only some of which Sam understands. Most of which he wishes he didn't because Callen's nightmares are exactly that.
Sam watches as Callen relives old operations in his sleep, watches as his partner pleads with injured colleagues and old friends to just hold on, man, don't do this to me now. He listens as Callen's cover gets compromised – sold out by someone he thought he could trust, listens as Callen gets taken by the same guys he was sent to take down, and he listens as his partner gets interrogated – tortured – for information.
Sam sits by his partner's side until he can't bear to listen anymore and then he retreats into the hallway and drops his head into his hands, and prays that this is the drugs talking. That Callen's hallucinating, not remembering.
34 Hours, 14 minutes.
It is 9 o'clock that night – just after six p.m. on the west coast – when Sam hangs up from his video call with the team back in L.A. He's given them an abridged version of the details of Callen's condition because he's certain that his partner wouldn't appreciate them knowing about any of the things he's revealed in his sleep. At this point, Sam would give just about anything to forget some of the things he's learned about Callen's past in the last thirty-six hours.
An old CO once called Sam the bravest of his SEALs, but it takes every ounce of Sam's courage to walk back into that quarantine room.
23 Hours, 57 minutes.
It's a long night and not one Sam ever wants to repeat. He's gritty eyed and hasn't slept a wink in nearly forty-eight hours by the time morning rolls around. There's a rage rolling in his gut and Sam has the overriding desire to hit the next person that walks through the door. Callen's been shifting between hallucinations all through the night, his consciousness flowing as easily as quicksilver from one extreme to the next which is, of course, the reason that Sam's blood is boiling.
He's heard more of the horrors of his partner's childhood than he ever wanted to and now he doesn't know what exactly he's supposed to do with this information. He knows what he wants to do, and that's to find every abusive foster parent and sucky Child Services worker and beat them to a pulp. There are only two things stopping him. The first is obvious and that's the thought of his partner waking up in Druid Hills, Georgia alone.
The second is a little more complicated and it stems around Callen's 3 a.m. confession to a fever induced spectre that he never meant for Jason to die. Sam remembers listening nearly five years earlier as Callen told the story of watching a foster brother being beaten to death while trying to protect G from their alcoholic supposed guardian in the hopes of getting a smuggling, knucklehead of a Marine to talk. He remembers brushing the story off as nothing more than a made up ploy because the alternative was something he didn't want to think about. Now he's got nothing but time to think.
00 Hours, 03 minutes.
Seventy-two hours passes in the early morning stillness of day three of Sam's vigil. He's dosing, slumped in the reclining chair that he's plagiarized from the nurses' lounge. Sam's got his feet up on the edge of G's hospital bed and one hand wrapped carefully around his partner's wrist, counting heartbeats and the minutes that have passed even in his sleep.
Sam's always been a light sleeper, trained by years in the military when you slept wherever and whenever you could, and he jerks awake when his phone buzzes in the semi-dark, banging his knee against the side rail of the hospital bed. He reaches for his phone and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees the timer that's now sitting at zero and the two texts that have come in within seconds of each other. One's from Kensi, and by proxy Deeks, and the other is from Eric's personal number. He reaches over to lay a hand on Callen's shoulder - careful of the IV and heart monitor leads – feeling the shaky rise and fall of his partner's breaths and smiles to realize that he wasn't the only one watching the clock.
Two days after the seventy-two hour deadline passes Sam watches as the doctors put his partner in a drug induced coma. He'll stay that way for another twelve days and seven hours.
Two weeks after collapsing in the research laboratory of Gamma Grade Pharmaceuticals, Callen opens his eyes again in a private room of the CDC's headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia. Sam smiles, excuses himself from the nurse, and regains his place at his partner's side. Somewhere between getting Callen up to speed, and following through on his threat to fill the halls with the sound of music, Sam sits back and just enjoys the feeling of having his partner back.
Two weeks is half a month, and one twenty-sixth of a year. Its fourteen days, three hundred and thirty-six hours, and twenty thousand one hundred and sixty minutes. It's one million two hundred and nine thousand six hundred seconds. Sam knows all this because two weeks is also the amount of time it takes for Callen to come back to them.
The End
If you're interested, please take a look at my other NCIS: Los Angeles fics.
Catching Fire: "Love is like a friendship caught on fire..." Deeks has been out of contact with his partner for over a month, when Callen breaks into his house with information that Kensi's classified mission is about to go sideways. Set after 5:14 'War Cries'.
First Impressions: Callen, Sam, and Renko already make up NCIS: OSP's flagship team, but when Hetty decides that Renko needs a new partner Kensi Blye joins the team. She's tough, opinionated, and desperate to prove herself, but her new teammates aren't going to make that an easy task. Especially when a dangerous Mexican cartel and a Navy officer turned traitor are keeping OSP's finest on their toes…