Title: Come Home
Fandom: NCIS:LA
Rating: R
Length: 434
Content notes: Some mentions of kink.
Author notes: Written for fan-flashworks for the Amnesty challenge
Summary: Sam is willing to do whatever it takes to help G learn to trust someone. Sam's POV on the course of his relationship with G.



You will like your new partner (not at first, but soon enough, because sometimes that's how things go).

You will work together for a long time, learning each other’s strengths. You will achieve things, and defeat enemies, that would never be possible for either of you alone.

You will staunch the flow when he bleeds from wounds he got while saving you. You will endure torture knowing that soon enough, he will come for you. You are a professional, and so you know better than to feel safe, but you will feel secure that he will always have your back, and you’ll know he feels the same for you.

You will trust him more than you usually trust anyone, and you will wonder why he doesn’t do the same for you. But eventually you’ll understand that those little snippets, those tiny parcels of himself that he shows you, are far more than he has ever shown anyone.

That’s when you will realize that while he is the best partner you’ve ever had, to him, you are the closest thing he’s ever had to family.

You will see that beneath his cleverness, beneath his strength, is a fragility. You will refuse to see him as broken; you will see him as someone who has never had to learn how to make a home, how to live without secreting away his needs, his pain, as if they are smuggled cargo. Someone who has assiduously avoided love.

You will learn every inch of this man’s body. You will press your lips to his, press your fingers into his flesh. When he asks you for pain, you’ll give it. When he asks you to throw him down, to hold him down, pressed against the floor, so he can’t run away alone, you’ll do it. When he wants comfort, you will know that he would never, ever ask, so you won’t make him.

You will know that he doesn’t want words, doesn’t want to describe what you have. You’ll know that he thinks that neither of you will get the chance to grow old, and so he’d never let himself imagine growing old with someone.

You will tolerate his lack of faith.

You will give him warmth, every time he needs it, heated desire or comforting arms, until he understands that he’s not fragile any more. You’ll see him face bullets and bombs without ever flinching, but you will know that he has never needed more courage than on the night that he admits that to him, you are home.

You will kiss him, hard, both gratitude and claim. You will smile and tell him that you knew all along that it would be well worth the wait.