NCIS: LA - Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Gen/Pre-slash
Title: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Rating: PG
Pairing: Callen/Hanna (preslash)
Length: 2203 words
Summary: "I'm not going to go ballistic every time we get a case that has something to do with a foster kid or adoption or whatever. I'm going to ballistic every time everyone else expects me to go ballistic over these cases."
Written for: SmallFandomFest 2010. Prompt: the only one who knows.
Sam glared at everyone in Eric’s little computerized domain. “Don’t tell me anyone’s surprised by that.”
Several eyebrows shot up, but no one argued with him.
Sam could feel Nate’s eyes on him and he knew that one of them would have to go deal with G. And Sam knew that it would be an infinitely more well-received discussion if Sam did it. But that didn’t mean he really wanted the job. He’d known when to shut the hell up. “Fine,” he finally agreed to the unspoken comment. He headed down the stairs, his eyes sweeping the lower level for any signs of his partner.
He finally found him pacing in the wardrobe corner. “Let’s go.”
G looked up at him and halted in his tracks. “Go where?”
“Somewhere Nate can’t follow up on that little explosion you just had.”
G blew out a breath and sucked in another, prepared to defend himself.
“In the car,” Sam cut him off before he could get started. For a minute he thought G was going to argue, but at the same time, they both noticed Nate heading down the stairs. Sam was about to remove G bodily, when G decided that Sam was the lesser of two evils and headed for the front door himself.
They were in the car and a good twenty miles down some back-woods mountain road when G finally started to unload. “You know, I’m not going to go ballistic every time we get a case that has something to do with a foster kid or adoption or whatever. I’m going to ballistic every time everyone else expects me to go ballistic over these cases.”
They were pretty far out in bumblefuck nowhere, so Sam just pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. “It seriously didn’t bother you? NCIS, local P.D. and a whole crew of petty officers out looking for a kid because the adoption went pear-shaped. You’re gonna sit there and tell me it didn’t bother you at all?”
“We had a missing eight-month old kid. Of course it bothered me. I just don’t think it’s fair for everyone to think that it’ll bother me so much more than everyone else.” G made it a point to maintain eye contact; he didn’t want to give Sam any reason not to believe him.
“And the fact that it was the kid’s crack-head mother, who skipped out on bail and kidnapped the kid from her foster parents who’d been granted a petition to adopt… That didn’t hit a little too close to home?” Sam didn’t want to press the point, but he wasn’t completely convinced that G’s anger was completely over the fact that everyone had him labeled and pigeon-holed.
“If I got bent out of shape over every case that had a kid who’d lost their parents at some point, I might as well resign now. Besides, this kid’s case was nothing like mine.”
There was a quiet resignation in the last statement that told Sam that they’d finally reached the part of the issue that wasn’t everyone else’s fault. And he’d have that discussion with them later. Right now he had to deal with his partner. “Can we talk about this? I mean, really talk about the stuff you don’t ever want to talk about? ‘Cause if you’re going to convince me that this wasn’t any worse than any other case about a kid, you’re going to have to explain how it isn’t like you.”
G sighed and slouched down in the seat, watching the trees in the distance. “Easy. No one ever came looking for me.”
Sam rolled his eyes, frustrated with himself. He shouldn’t be surprised that of all the fucked up details of the case, this would be the one G would latch on to. Then he realized there was another part. “And no one ever petitioned to adopt you?” He’d thought about it often enough. G had to have been in the system so early that he didn’t even know his own name. That, Sam figured, put him younger than three. Most three year olds at least knew their first name. And from what little he knew about adoptions in the U.S. it didn’t make any sense to him that a White, male, toddler with no disabilities was never adopted. There was something he was missing. And from the way Nate acted, he suspected that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t in G’s file.
“Once,” G mumbled rather unexpectedly.
Sam almost asked him what he meant, but he was pretty sure he was just setting G up to shut down if he played stupid. “Seriously? What happened?”
G turned to stare out the side window, deliberately keeping Sam from seeing his face. Sam could tell that G was seriously debating whether or not he should explain. Sam could see the set of his shoulders that said that G was seriously contemplating getting out of the car and literally walking away from the conversation even as far as they were from civilization. He called on all his SEAL training to be patient and let G either decide to talk or decide to say he wasn’t going to before trying to push him.
It was almost fifteen minutes before G spoke again. “It’s not in my records. In fact there are no records of me until I was five and I went into my first foster home. No one’s sure what happened to the first set of records, but I’ve looked… I’m nowhere.” G shifted suddenly and met Sam’s eyes with an intensity Sam had never seen. “Sam, no one knows about this. Mostly because I still wonder sometimes if it’s … something I made up, but I’ve… I’ve done enough research to be pretty sure it’s not. I need you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone. Not Hetty, not Nate… not anyone. No one knows about this and I do not want them to.”
Sam reached over and squeezed the back of G’s neck reassuringly. “I hear you.”
“I was adopted when I was three. I don’t remember a time before I lived with Eloise. I knew all the other kids called their parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ and I knew that it was odd that everyone assumed she was my grandmother. But she was my mom for all intents and purposes. And when you’re three, you don’t get the whole biological aspect and you sure as hell don’t get the legal ones.” G crossed his arms over his chest and let the side of his head thunk against the window glass. “She was my mom as far as I knew, even if I didn’t call her that for whatever reason. It didn’t matter to me. I was three.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said, not sure how else to keep him talking.
“I remember being three, I think it was right after my birthday, and she took to me to the courthouse - I mean, I didn’t know what that meant at three, but looking back, that’s what it had to have been - and she explained that I was going to talk to someone and then after that we’d get McDonald’s for lunch to celebrate because it meant I got to stay with her for as long as I wanted to. I was three, I didn’t know what it meant to be adopted, but…”
“But you get it now,” Sam put in.
“So we went and everything was fine.”
“Until?” Sam asked, dreading the answer. He knew going in that this story was not going to have a happy ending, but he still wasn’t sure he wanted to know what set G on the hellacious path he’d have to follow.
“The first time I saw someone die I was five years old,” G whispered.
“Eloise died?” Sam clarified.
G blew out a long breath. He’d never talked to anyone about this, even with all the shrinks he had to deal with as a kid, most of them hadn’t known about Eloise and he’d never given them reasons to start asking questions about the holes in his record. Another breath in and out before he could start explaining. Decades of distance wasn’t making this any easier. “I got the chicken pox when I was in kindergarten. My teacher sent home a bunch of papers to keep me busy while I was out of school for two weeks. Eloise was helping me with some of them at the kitchen table one day when she said her head hurt and that she was going to lay down for a little while. She made it half way up the stairs before she passed out and fell back down them. I was five and I thought I could catch her the way she caught me when I fell or when I jumped off the swing set. She landed on me and I ended up with a broken arm.”
“The fall killed her?”
G shook his head. When I was with the FBI I got into her records… her autopsy records… She’d had a stroke. The coroner thought that when the paralysis set in, her legs came out from under which caused her to fall… which… you know, it’s all bad from there when you’re sixty-eight years old.” G shrugged not sure what else to say.
“Jesus, G…” Sam wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Eventually our neighbor heard me screaming and called an ambulance for us both. That afternoon, I met my very first case worker.”
Sam was completely speechless. He reached over and grabbed G’s hand and squeezed, but he knew that was mostly because it made him feel better.
He felt G tense under his hand. “And this is why I don’t tell anyone about this. I get enough pity as it is and I’m pretty sick of it. It’s what leads to disasters like in the operations center earlier.”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy; everyone thinks that cases like these are going to get under your skin, but what ends up getting under your skin is everyone thinking that the case - “
“Yeah,” G cut him off. “That’s pretty much it.”
Sam squeezed his hand again.
“Seriously, man, don’t tell -“
“I won’t tell anyone,” Sam cut him off. He really didn’t need to be told twice. He knew how rare it was that G took someone into his confidence about his personal history. He’d never jeopardize that. “Nate’s probably gonna -“
“I know,” G cut him off this time. For some reason he took comfort in the fact that they rarely ever needed to actually finish a sentence with each other. “For a shrink, Nate’s pretty easy to manipulate. I’ll tell him I told you and I don’t want to go into it again and at some point he’ll corner you to make sure I really did tell you and then he’ll drop it.”
Sam chuckled under his breath. Nate might be the company shrink, but he was pretty sure G had them all figured out far more than Nate ever would. He stretched his arms up as high as he could before hitting the roof of the car and let them drop, his right going around G’s shoulder. He squeezed G’s arm and shook him a little. “If we head back to the office, can you go in there without taking anyone’s head off?”
“I’ll drop it if they do,” G answered.
Sam noticed he only sounded about half as bitter as he expected him to. It was a start. “How about I drop you off at the police station so you can get copies of their records while I go back and knock some sense into those colleagues of ours?”
“I don’t need anyone fighting my battles for me, Sam. Been taking care of myself for a long, long time.”
Sam nodded. “I know. But there’s a difference between needing someone to run interference for you and someone volunteering. They need to be told to knock it the hell off. A conversation that will be twelve times more awkward for everyone if you’re standing there.”
G scowled but didn’t argue. Sam had a point. He’d rather not go through this every time there was a kid or something they assumed would set him off. And it would be a weird conversation to have. As much as he’d always dealt with his own crap himself, it was kind of nice knowing that he had a partner now who would step in and take some of it for him.
“Let’s find a place to get lunch first,” G suggested.
Sam smiled and pulled him in for a hug. “Your turn to pay. In fact, I think you owe me for the last two weeks.”
G was a little disconcerted by how much the familiar banter comforted him. “Oh, no. I paid on Tuesday and I paid for dinner last night during that damn stake out.”
Sam restarted the car and deliberately prolonged the argument as they headed back for the city. It was more than a small victory that G was letting him get his back. And he’d take all the victories they could get.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Callen/Hanna (preslash)
Length: 2203 words
Summary: "I'm not going to go ballistic every time we get a case that has something to do with a foster kid or adoption or whatever. I'm going to ballistic every time everyone else expects me to go ballistic over these cases."
Written for: SmallFandomFest 2010. Prompt: the only one who knows.
Sam glared at everyone in Eric’s little computerized domain. “Don’t tell me anyone’s surprised by that.”
Several eyebrows shot up, but no one argued with him.
Sam could feel Nate’s eyes on him and he knew that one of them would have to go deal with G. And Sam knew that it would be an infinitely more well-received discussion if Sam did it. But that didn’t mean he really wanted the job. He’d known when to shut the hell up. “Fine,” he finally agreed to the unspoken comment. He headed down the stairs, his eyes sweeping the lower level for any signs of his partner.
He finally found him pacing in the wardrobe corner. “Let’s go.”
G looked up at him and halted in his tracks. “Go where?”
“Somewhere Nate can’t follow up on that little explosion you just had.”
G blew out a breath and sucked in another, prepared to defend himself.
“In the car,” Sam cut him off before he could get started. For a minute he thought G was going to argue, but at the same time, they both noticed Nate heading down the stairs. Sam was about to remove G bodily, when G decided that Sam was the lesser of two evils and headed for the front door himself.
They were in the car and a good twenty miles down some back-woods mountain road when G finally started to unload. “You know, I’m not going to go ballistic every time we get a case that has something to do with a foster kid or adoption or whatever. I’m going to ballistic every time everyone else expects me to go ballistic over these cases.”
They were pretty far out in bumblefuck nowhere, so Sam just pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. “It seriously didn’t bother you? NCIS, local P.D. and a whole crew of petty officers out looking for a kid because the adoption went pear-shaped. You’re gonna sit there and tell me it didn’t bother you at all?”
“We had a missing eight-month old kid. Of course it bothered me. I just don’t think it’s fair for everyone to think that it’ll bother me so much more than everyone else.” G made it a point to maintain eye contact; he didn’t want to give Sam any reason not to believe him.
“And the fact that it was the kid’s crack-head mother, who skipped out on bail and kidnapped the kid from her foster parents who’d been granted a petition to adopt… That didn’t hit a little too close to home?” Sam didn’t want to press the point, but he wasn’t completely convinced that G’s anger was completely over the fact that everyone had him labeled and pigeon-holed.
“If I got bent out of shape over every case that had a kid who’d lost their parents at some point, I might as well resign now. Besides, this kid’s case was nothing like mine.”
There was a quiet resignation in the last statement that told Sam that they’d finally reached the part of the issue that wasn’t everyone else’s fault. And he’d have that discussion with them later. Right now he had to deal with his partner. “Can we talk about this? I mean, really talk about the stuff you don’t ever want to talk about? ‘Cause if you’re going to convince me that this wasn’t any worse than any other case about a kid, you’re going to have to explain how it isn’t like you.”
G sighed and slouched down in the seat, watching the trees in the distance. “Easy. No one ever came looking for me.”
Sam rolled his eyes, frustrated with himself. He shouldn’t be surprised that of all the fucked up details of the case, this would be the one G would latch on to. Then he realized there was another part. “And no one ever petitioned to adopt you?” He’d thought about it often enough. G had to have been in the system so early that he didn’t even know his own name. That, Sam figured, put him younger than three. Most three year olds at least knew their first name. And from what little he knew about adoptions in the U.S. it didn’t make any sense to him that a White, male, toddler with no disabilities was never adopted. There was something he was missing. And from the way Nate acted, he suspected that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t in G’s file.
“Once,” G mumbled rather unexpectedly.
Sam almost asked him what he meant, but he was pretty sure he was just setting G up to shut down if he played stupid. “Seriously? What happened?”
G turned to stare out the side window, deliberately keeping Sam from seeing his face. Sam could tell that G was seriously debating whether or not he should explain. Sam could see the set of his shoulders that said that G was seriously contemplating getting out of the car and literally walking away from the conversation even as far as they were from civilization. He called on all his SEAL training to be patient and let G either decide to talk or decide to say he wasn’t going to before trying to push him.
It was almost fifteen minutes before G spoke again. “It’s not in my records. In fact there are no records of me until I was five and I went into my first foster home. No one’s sure what happened to the first set of records, but I’ve looked… I’m nowhere.” G shifted suddenly and met Sam’s eyes with an intensity Sam had never seen. “Sam, no one knows about this. Mostly because I still wonder sometimes if it’s … something I made up, but I’ve… I’ve done enough research to be pretty sure it’s not. I need you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone. Not Hetty, not Nate… not anyone. No one knows about this and I do not want them to.”
Sam reached over and squeezed the back of G’s neck reassuringly. “I hear you.”
“I was adopted when I was three. I don’t remember a time before I lived with Eloise. I knew all the other kids called their parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ and I knew that it was odd that everyone assumed she was my grandmother. But she was my mom for all intents and purposes. And when you’re three, you don’t get the whole biological aspect and you sure as hell don’t get the legal ones.” G crossed his arms over his chest and let the side of his head thunk against the window glass. “She was my mom as far as I knew, even if I didn’t call her that for whatever reason. It didn’t matter to me. I was three.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said, not sure how else to keep him talking.
“I remember being three, I think it was right after my birthday, and she took to me to the courthouse - I mean, I didn’t know what that meant at three, but looking back, that’s what it had to have been - and she explained that I was going to talk to someone and then after that we’d get McDonald’s for lunch to celebrate because it meant I got to stay with her for as long as I wanted to. I was three, I didn’t know what it meant to be adopted, but…”
“But you get it now,” Sam put in.
“So we went and everything was fine.”
“Until?” Sam asked, dreading the answer. He knew going in that this story was not going to have a happy ending, but he still wasn’t sure he wanted to know what set G on the hellacious path he’d have to follow.
“The first time I saw someone die I was five years old,” G whispered.
“Eloise died?” Sam clarified.
G blew out a long breath. He’d never talked to anyone about this, even with all the shrinks he had to deal with as a kid, most of them hadn’t known about Eloise and he’d never given them reasons to start asking questions about the holes in his record. Another breath in and out before he could start explaining. Decades of distance wasn’t making this any easier. “I got the chicken pox when I was in kindergarten. My teacher sent home a bunch of papers to keep me busy while I was out of school for two weeks. Eloise was helping me with some of them at the kitchen table one day when she said her head hurt and that she was going to lay down for a little while. She made it half way up the stairs before she passed out and fell back down them. I was five and I thought I could catch her the way she caught me when I fell or when I jumped off the swing set. She landed on me and I ended up with a broken arm.”
“The fall killed her?”
G shook his head. When I was with the FBI I got into her records… her autopsy records… She’d had a stroke. The coroner thought that when the paralysis set in, her legs came out from under which caused her to fall… which… you know, it’s all bad from there when you’re sixty-eight years old.” G shrugged not sure what else to say.
“Jesus, G…” Sam wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Eventually our neighbor heard me screaming and called an ambulance for us both. That afternoon, I met my very first case worker.”
Sam was completely speechless. He reached over and grabbed G’s hand and squeezed, but he knew that was mostly because it made him feel better.
He felt G tense under his hand. “And this is why I don’t tell anyone about this. I get enough pity as it is and I’m pretty sick of it. It’s what leads to disasters like in the operations center earlier.”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy; everyone thinks that cases like these are going to get under your skin, but what ends up getting under your skin is everyone thinking that the case - “
“Yeah,” G cut him off. “That’s pretty much it.”
Sam squeezed his hand again.
“Seriously, man, don’t tell -“
“I won’t tell anyone,” Sam cut him off. He really didn’t need to be told twice. He knew how rare it was that G took someone into his confidence about his personal history. He’d never jeopardize that. “Nate’s probably gonna -“
“I know,” G cut him off this time. For some reason he took comfort in the fact that they rarely ever needed to actually finish a sentence with each other. “For a shrink, Nate’s pretty easy to manipulate. I’ll tell him I told you and I don’t want to go into it again and at some point he’ll corner you to make sure I really did tell you and then he’ll drop it.”
Sam chuckled under his breath. Nate might be the company shrink, but he was pretty sure G had them all figured out far more than Nate ever would. He stretched his arms up as high as he could before hitting the roof of the car and let them drop, his right going around G’s shoulder. He squeezed G’s arm and shook him a little. “If we head back to the office, can you go in there without taking anyone’s head off?”
“I’ll drop it if they do,” G answered.
Sam noticed he only sounded about half as bitter as he expected him to. It was a start. “How about I drop you off at the police station so you can get copies of their records while I go back and knock some sense into those colleagues of ours?”
“I don’t need anyone fighting my battles for me, Sam. Been taking care of myself for a long, long time.”
Sam nodded. “I know. But there’s a difference between needing someone to run interference for you and someone volunteering. They need to be told to knock it the hell off. A conversation that will be twelve times more awkward for everyone if you’re standing there.”
G scowled but didn’t argue. Sam had a point. He’d rather not go through this every time there was a kid or something they assumed would set him off. And it would be a weird conversation to have. As much as he’d always dealt with his own crap himself, it was kind of nice knowing that he had a partner now who would step in and take some of it for him.
“Let’s find a place to get lunch first,” G suggested.
Sam smiled and pulled him in for a hug. “Your turn to pay. In fact, I think you owe me for the last two weeks.”
G was a little disconcerted by how much the familiar banter comforted him. “Oh, no. I paid on Tuesday and I paid for dinner last night during that damn stake out.”
Sam restarted the car and deliberately prolonged the argument as they headed back for the city. It was more than a small victory that G was letting him get his back. And he’d take all the victories they could get.