Written for my H/C bingo wild card square, and I picked 'drugged', and so here you have it, 3k words of my feelings about the fact that I strongly headcanon that G is passively suicidal pretty much constantly. It's not like he's going to Do Anything about it but it sure is there.

Whatever it is he was dosed with here, I completely made it up, there's like. No scientific accuracy re: truth serum at all.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think!

Show your hands if you need a new coat of paint

If your bones are now heavy things

Like anchors hidden somewhere neath your skin

If your head's just an empty box

Or if your heart has become spare parts

If your days are now just something you must bear

- Radical Face, 'We're On Our Way'

It's bitter luck that Sam is the only one in earshot when G makes the sneered admission to his captors. It was a snatch-and-run kidnapping, just grabbed off the street and pulled into a van, throwing NCIS into high alert, everyone dashing around in a panic trying to find him. They split up, covering as much ground as possible before it's too late. Sam found the warehouse his partner was being held in, creeping through the back with his gun drawn. Backup is on its way but the closest person is twenty minutes out. He's on his own.

G's only been gone a few hours, surely not long enough to do serious damage if they were interrogating him rather than killing him outright, but when he hears those words Sam thinks that the damage was done long before G's kidnappers even got there.

"Killing me is a pretty lousy threat here, buddy. Surprise! I already want to die! You can't hold my life hostage, I don't even want it."

Hearing this, Sam feels his heart stop cold in his chest. As G says those last two words, they make eye contact over one of the abductor's shoulder, and G's entire face blanches.

"Oh. Shit," he says flatly, in a move that shocks the hell out of Sam, because it gives his position away to the men holding G captive. Sam wonders, in the frightened, jangling alarm bells part of his mind, how bad off G has to be to have made that mistake.

For the moment though, all thoughts of the slip up and the terrifying thing he has just heard have to be driven from Sam's mind, in favor of dealing with the hostile men now aware of his presence. There are only two of them, and in the end they're easy enough to take care of. G's head is lolling down against his chest when Sam reaches him, and he's mumbling to himself inaudibly under his breath.

"G," Sam says urgently, tilting his partner's face up and putting two fingers to the pulse point at his throat. G's heart is still beating strongly, although it seems too fast to be normal. "Hey, how're you doing? You okay?"

Ridiculous question. Of course he's not okay, and he definitely isn't going to be honest about it. He never is. He's going to say 'I'm fine', just like he always does, he'd never admit to-

"Not really," is the frank response that he gets, which is startling. Even when the answer is no, G always says yes, he's fine, everything is fine and Sam needs to stop fussing. Not once has the question 'are you okay' been met with a simple, direct 'no', which prompts Sam's mind to jump instantly to 'oh my god, he's dying'.

Except, Sam has seen G dying, more times than he'd care to think back to, and even then it hadn't gone like this. He realizes this at the same moment he registers that G has continued speaking, and that is when he really gets scared.

"Left side of my face is pretty bad, hurts to talk, I got tased a couple of times, and I think the one guy went at me with a crowbar, which really sucked."

Sam sits back on his heels, getting a good look at his battered friend. True to his word, the left side of G's face is indeed pretty bad. Red and purple new bruising blossoms across his jawline, creeping up across his cheekbone. His lip is split fairly deeply, and blood is trickling down his face and neck, seeping into the collar of his shirt.

"You'd think the universe would have long since satisfied its need to beat the shit out of me," G is saying as Sam slices through the cords holding his wrists behind his back with a swiss army knife. The skin under the cord is red and raw, torn up by G struggling against it. "You ever noticed how often I get beat up, Sam? I get beat up a lot."

"…I'd noticed." Sam wonders for a fraction of a second if G is maybe drunk off his ass, or really, really concussed.

Getting G up onto his feet is not the easiest thing Sam has ever accomplished. When he first tries, G lets go of his arm with a sharp gasp, curling in on himself and dropping like a stone back onto the chair.

"Ow," he hisses, arms held protectively around himself. "Oh my god. Holy shit that hurt."

"Are you finally admitting you experience the human phenomenon of pain?" Sam jokes, trying to bring some levity to the situation. It's hard, with the words he'd overheard still stuck irremovably in his mind.

"I tried not to," answers G, apparently still in his stint of radical honesty. "It hurts really bad and I tried to say it was okay but it came out different. I always lie to you about how bad it is, but I couldn't this time." He frowns sharply, wincing. "Shit. Forget I said that. Shit."

Its getting harder and harder for Sam to pretend there isn't something horribly, horribly wrong here.

"I can't stop trying to talk, Sam, I can't keep my mouth shut for two minutes. I didn't say anything important to them, they didn't get anything important out of me, but I told them my favorite color, and that I like cats more than dogs, and that I don't know what my birthday is, or my middle name, or my first name at that and-"

"G," Sam interrupts, getting more and more panicky the longer this goes on. It's as if G hasn't even heard him.

"I didn't want to say any of it but I couldn't help it, it's like the words were just itching under my skin and I couldn't keep them down. I couldn't stop talking, Sam, but I didn't give them what they wanted, I promise."

"I believe you, G, what-" And again Sam is cut off before he can finish his sentence.

"They made me, I didn't want to talk but they made me, and now I can't stop, I can't stop talking."

It clicks in Sam's mind at the same time that his foot comes in contact with a small bottle on the floor, rolling against his shoe.

"They drugged you."

"I don't know what it was," G confirms, hand going to the needle mark at his neck. "Like sodium thiopental on steroids and with a few extra tricks thrown in, and it burned. Now I get on a roll and I just can't stop." He shifts uncomfortably, looking around the room. "Listen, can we please get out of here?"

There's a quality in G's voice that makes Sam nervous, a kind of rawness that makes him want to get his partner somewhere safe right now. First he has to make a phone call, though, let Kensi and Deeks know that G is safe with him. Then get out of here before the backup arrives. If there's one thing Sam is sure of, it's that G is not going to want anyone to see him like this, hear the things he could potentially say.

G doesn't manage to stay silent for long, once they're safely in Sam's car. His voice floats across the vehicle from where he sits slumped against the car door, watching the road pass on the way to the hospital Sam's insisting on taking him to.

"You heard what I said. At the end there."

Goddammit. "I wasn't going to ask," Sam says, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the road. If he doesn't ask then he doesn't get an answer, which means he can hang tight-fisted to the idea that it was a lie, some kind of ludicrous, addled attempt at getting his kidnappers to let go of the threat of death as leverage.

"I can hear you not asking all the way over here. You heard me say I wanted to die and you don't know whether I meant it or not."

Sam stares straight ahead at the street, hands tight on the steering wheel.

"Everyone would be better off if I was dead."

G doesn't sound upset or worked up, he just sounds tired and in pain. It would have been better if he had sounded upset, because then it could have been an outburst, a dramatic accusation by an agitated man who doesn't really mean what he is saying. But the calm, resigned nature of the statement combined with the drug still in G's veins, compelling him to speak only the truth, far past what he wants to admit, both lead to the conclusion that he means every word in utter sincerity.

"You're wrong," Sam says, trying to keep his voice under control. This is nothing he was ever trained for. There's no handbook on what to do when your best friend gets dosed with some sort of super drug making him tell the truth about things he never wanted anyone to know, including apparently confessing to being suicidal. "That's- That isn't true."

"It is," is what G comes back with, in the same subdued, exhausted tone. "And I'm just so tired, Sam. I go to sleep every night tired and I get up in the morning tired, I'm just. I'm tired. I'm tired of fighting through all this. And I don't make anybody's life easier by doing it either, everywhere I go, people just- People get hurt. It'd be easier, for me and for everybody, if I just gave up." G's forehead knocks lightly against the glass of the window, not looking at Sam, hands clenched into fists in his lap. "If I just. Died."

Sam's throat feels raw and dry. He knows G can't help what he's saying right now but inside he's begging his friend to stop talking, wishing he could go back in time to this morning when they stopped to get coffee on the way to work, back when he didn't know any of this. G seems to notice the look on his face and he snorts dryly.

"You don't have to worry about it, I'm not going to do anything. I never do. I think about it and think about it but I never- I'm not going to shoot myself or something." He winces at the same time Sam does. "Jesus, cause that's a mental image we all needed"

The silence only lasts a scarce few seconds before G's voice starts up again.

"I don't try any more. I did when I was younger. Four times, when I was a teenager. Tried a whole bunch of stuff, but I couldn't even get that right."

"And now," G continues, voice getting louder, harder. "I'm sitting here, dumping all of this on you, as if I don't dump enough bullshit on you already. You weren't ever supposed to know any of this, nobody was, and now it's all out. Fuck."

"You don't… dump anything on me, G, and you don't need to tell me any of this if you don't want to."

"I can't STOP!" The outburst is sudden and G's voice cracks on the words. "I'm trying to stop, I don't want to tell you, this isn't your problem and I'm sorry, but. They shot me up with god knows what and now I can't stop talking, I would stop if I could but I can't, Sam, I can't."

The phone in the center console starts ringing at that point, a shrill sound in the abruptly empty air of the car.

"Is that Hetty?" G asks, once more unable to stuff the words back in his throat. He sounds like the words are being torn out of him, like he's trying as hard as he can not to speak but is completely powerless to stop it. "Don't tell her I want to die, Sam, you can't tell her I want to die. If she finds out then I'm done for she'll have me locked up somewhere I won't ever get out of please, please don't tell her."

It's at that point that Sam pulls the car over on the side of the road, throwing it into park and answering the phone. When he puts it up to his ear he spots G out of the corner of his eye, literally pressing a hand over his own mouth, stifling the words still trying to get out.

The decision to say nothing to Hetty about the scary things G has said in the last ten minutes is an easy enough one to make. Even if neither of them know for sure how she would respond it wouldn't feel right, not when Sam shouldn't be hearing any of this, shouldn't know the things G keeps closest to his chest unless willingly volunteered by the man himself. It feels wrong even knowing it, knowing right alongside it that G doesn't want him to know, without even considering telling someone else.

Protocol says that he should say something. Protocol says that a suicidal agent should be removed from duty pending psychological treatment and evaluation. But Sam knows G, has known him for years, and no matter what protocol says he should do right now, he's going to do what it takes to have his partner's back.

"I'm taking him back to my place, patch him up there," he finds himself saying, carefully watching G's face. "He got dosed with something, keeps spouting off everything that comes to his mind, we don't want him to say something he shouldn't in front of the wrong people. Yeah. Yeah I know. I know. Of course I will. I know, it's just not a risk we should take right now. Mhm. Sure. Bye."

The call is over quickly, leaving Sam and G staring at each other at the side of the road, in a silent car.

"Thank you," G says eventually, breaking eye contact and staring steadily down at his own hands. There's blood on one of them, a smear on the palm where he had reopened the clotting split in his lip when trying to keep quiet while Sam was on the phone. "You didn't have to do that."

Sam watches the blood drip down his best friend's chin, the bruising just visible under the collar of his shirt, tugged down a bit at an awkward angle. He doesn't know what the hell to say right now, but he has to say something.

Before he can get a word out, though, G moves, suddenly lurching for the door and flinging it open and pulling himself out of the car. For a moment Sam wonders if he's been sick, until he gets out of the car himself, and rounds the hood to see G, leaning against the vehicle muttering at a nearly hysterical rate. His hands are shaking so hard Sam can seeit, and the words that drift through the still air feel like someone has jammed a hot poker in Sam's chest and twisted.

"…bridge by the house and every time I go by it I think what if I jumped off, and I'm scared to take painkillers home from the hospital cause the bottle sits by my pillow and all I want to do is screw off the cap and take all of them and go to sleep, and I want to just give up and stop fighting, my whole life has been one fight after another and I'm tired, I can't, god, I can't."

"G," Sam says in a cracked voice, feeling the back of his eyes burn. G looks over at him and his eyes are red rimmed and Sam can see teeth impressions on his lower lip where he's tried to bite it shut in a vain attempt to just stop talking.

"I'm sorry, Sam," is what G says back, shoulders heaving harder and harder as his breathing grows ragged. "You didn't ask for any of this. I'm sorry I'm- I'm sorry. It isn't fair to you, and this isn't your problem, it's not-"

"It is." Sam interrupts to say this, because this is something he can say, this is one piece of this mess that he knows what to do with. This is a road he's walked before, and he knows it well. "It is my problem. Whatever's going on with you, whatever it is you haven't been telling anyone, I may not know how to help you but you're in pain and that is absolutely my problem."

The noise G makes next sounds like a combination of a choke and a sob. Sam moves to catch him right as his knees start to give out, wrapping his arms tightly around his partner and holding him close. It seems as if whatever he was injected with has dug its claws in and ripped off every mask he has ever worn and what's left behind is a vulnerable, angry, scared person in an unimaginable amount of pain.

"It's okay," he says quietly, feeling G's hands catch in his shirt, clenching hard in the fabric with a kind of desperation. "I got you. You're not alone, you don't have to fight this alone. I've got you."

Every part of G's body aches, from the beating he took earlier and from the effort exerted to stay alive, to keep going day after day. Hanging onto the back of the shirt under his hands, G continues to mumble into Sam's shoulder, inaudibly saying that it feels good on some level to finally be free of this secret, to finally tell someone how hard he's been trying just to keep living when everything in him wants to just stop. He leans against the solid presence in front of him, letting Sam hold them both up.

He doesn't know how long this drug is going to last, how long he won't be able to keep a word he thinks to himself. Never before in a life full of considerable amounts of fear has G Callen been so afraid as he was in that car, confessing one of his most closely guarded secrets with no idea what kind of a response he would be met with.

But Sam hadn't told Hetty and now his voice sounds just above G's head, telling him everything is gonna be okay, and for the first time in a really, really long time (maybe in forever) G finds that he just might believe it someday could be.