Scars

Disclaimer: Not mine.

A/N: I really like Neal/Sara. I thought I wouldn't but I do. A lot. And I keep wanting more Neal/Sara fic, and I figured I should do my part to contribute, and well, this is what came out. Hope you like it (I think I kinda do) and please review! (No, I am apparently not above begging.)

Sara doesn't ask about his scars.

Sometimes, when they're lying in bed together, naked and comfortable and just enjoying the warmth of skin against skin, she'll trace them. Ghosting her fingertips over the barely perceptible white line that runs from ribcage to hip, the rough, jagged flesh behind his knee, the dime-sized circle of puckered skin just behind his ear, mostly hidden by his hair, and a half a dozen others, almost too faint to see.

He can tell she wants to ask, knows that look in her eyes, and is all too well aware that Sara is not the type of woman to let something go. She's wonderfully curious and has a tenacity to rival his own, and most of the time he kind of loves those things about her, because it makes her fun and interesting, and one of the worst things someone can be is boring. But even though she wants to ask, even though she gets that little frown on her face every time her fingers run over damaged flesh, she doesn't.

And he can't figure out why.

At first, he had thought he'd outlast her, that certainly she'd end up asking about his scars before he asked her why she wasn't asking, but he'd never claimed to be a patient man (and Mozzie would have laughed at him if he had.)

Neal stared at Sara through half-lidded eyes and squirmed a bit as one finger trailed it's way down from just below his arm to the jut of his hipbone.

"Why don't you ask?"

Her eyes shifted up from his torso to lock onto his own. "Hmm?"

"My scars. You wonder, but you don't ask. Why?"

She laid the hand that was still by his hip onto his skin, and slid it all the way back up to his chest, and rested it over his heart. "If you ever want to tell me, Neal, I'd love to listen. But I'm not going to ask and give you a reason to lie to me."

He opened his mouth, and he didn't know if it was to protest or placate, but she stopped him before he could find out.

"It's okay." She smiled, that soft smile she had, that he sometimes thought might be just for him. "Some things need to be given. Pieces of a person, they can't be stolen." Her eyes fell from his to her hand, and she said quietly, "Or they shouldn't be." She smiled at him again, and kissed him with that smile, and then snuggled down beside him and laid her head where her hand had been. "I don't mind waiting."

Neal wrapped himself around her and tried to sleep.

And another time, when she ran her fingers over familiar scars, he quietly told her a story about a boy who was never smart enough, or fast enough, or good enough to make the grown-ups happy.

Until one day, he ran away, and learned how to put on a mask, and pretend he was.