Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS: Los Angeles

"Stop her!"

You duck around another corner, noticing that the footsteps from behind you are beginning to slow down. Whatever back-up he's calling for won't arrive until you've long since fled the scene. Your familiarity with these alleyways means that this race was over long before he noticed you jumping off the fire escape of an abandoned apartment complex.

It's not until you're at the top of a chain link fence –the last step in your getaway plan- that the police officer finally rounds the corner below you. You both freeze.

"Wait," he tries to sound forceful, but his hand is shaking and you realize that he doesn't know what to make of you, with your dirty hair and wrinkled clothes. The scars from a life on the run are stitched across your skin and the dark circles beneath your eyes are evidence of your restless mind.

Deciding to take your chances, you swing your other leg over the top bar and jump down to the other side. You turn to face him once you've hit the ground. There is a long moment where neither of you move, your dark eyes watching the gun on his hip.

"I just want to help." He sounds sad. You think that he probably has a wife and kids. Probably has a little girl with dark hair and big eyes and thinks she might grow up and look just like you. Probably thinks that bringing you back to your family will make you happy, will make all of this better. You shake your head, and back away from the fence as he moves toward it.

You don't look back as you jog down the long alley ahead of you, but you know that he's wrapped his fingers through the wire that separates you, watching you disappear back into the shadows of the city.

You learned early on not to make friends with the other runaways. Too concerned with survival to worry about the wellbeing of another, and the silences that fall between you are suffocating and sad and remind you both that you were not always this lonely. You try to remember that you chose this life for yourself. That this sort of fragmented independence is better than the emptiness of the foster system, that you'd rather have no family at all than a temporary one.

And you spend most of your time chasing ghosts from a life that does not even feel like your own, lost to the shadows of empty buildings, the smell of dust and decay. Footsteps from other children just like you echo through the hallways at night because no matter how far you run you can never lose yourself and this frightens you.

The warehouse you slept in all winter caught fire one night during a lightning storm and you managed to escape just as the sound of sirens cut through the crackling of the flames. Shadows of strangers disappearing into the night around you caught your eye but you stayed back to watch the building burn despite the best efforts of the firefighters below.

Fire consumes both your father and your freedom before you realize you're in this fight alone.

Most everything you own fits into one small backpack that you never let out of your sight. Because all the important things in your life have disappeared when your back was turned, and even if you've failed everyone else you love, you cannot fail yourself. It's largely empty, just a few changes of clothes for when the smell becomes too much to handle, and some photographs you stole from your Aunt's house the night you decided to vanish.

One is of your mother, back before she took off across the country for a life you could not share with her. She is young and happy and innocent in ways you could never be, and you wish that your last memory of her was not tainted by the fluorescent lighting of a rest stop bathroom.

Sometimes you miss her, but mostly you miss the way she laughed in the living room when your father tried to teach you how to dance and how she always smelled like cinnamon. And while she never really understood you, she tried her best and you wish you could find it in yourself to forgive her for giving up and moving on before you even realized that she wasn't happy.

Now it's your turn to stand on the other side of a chain- link fence and watch a girl run away from the only help you know how to give. So achingly familiar, a life you thought you'd left behind because you only dream about it every once in a while.

She waits a little too long to step off of the train tracks and you remember a time when you might have done the same thing. Standing in front of death just long enough to test the waters and to convince yourself that you still have enough control over your life to end it, if you wanted to( and for a long long time this was the only kind of power you had).

The train passes between you, and you know that you've lost her.

"Are you in love with your partner?"

She asks you this absently, but you suspect that she already knows the answer. And it's your move all of a sudden, but the girl across from you has all of the time in the world and you know from experience that she is not afraid of you.

Astrid, better than anyone else you know, must understand the implications of such a question. She understands the loneliness that can only be found on fire escapes and the rooftops of empty buildings. The hole in your chest that bleeds every time you watch a family pass by; how easy it is to be black and blue, angry and confused and so convinced that you deserve something more than you know how to earn. To be told over and over again that there is nothing you can do and always believing them just enough so that it hurts to wake up in the morning. How cruel the world looks from the outside. How hard it is to love someone when you've never known anyone who has not left you behind. And maybe she asks you this because she wants to know if you've found a way to lose the demons that you both share.

You do not answer her, but she seems to understand all the same, and you swear for a moment that a smile crosses her otherwise stoic face because she knows that this conversation could not have gone any other way.

You told someone once that you knew it was meant to be the moment you saw him. And even though everything else about that evening was fabricated and part of a skin you will never again wear, you are beginning to realize that that may have been the most honest thing you have said in a very long time.

Your first and only foster home, once you can no longer run from the ghost of your father or the memory of your mother, is with an older woman who lives by the beach. Her house is quiet and organized and she is kind and sympathetic, but you have never felt like more of a burden on someone than you do with her.

You often find her straightening your sheets in the morning or fixing the magazines on the coffee table after she think you've left the room, and you find that you have nothing to say to her at the dinner table each night.

Three months pass before you turn eighteen and you're gone before she can even ask you to go.

You try to tell him once and he stops you before you even really start.

You try to push him away and he somehow finds a way to stick around.

You wake up one morning and realize that you never stopped running away until he walked into your life.

This does not scare you as much as you thought it would.

You realize how far you have come.

You believe that everyone is a little bit broken. And it has taken you so long to heal that you'd forgotten what it felt like to be whole, but you're getting there. You will never forget your time on the streets and you will never forget the fear and the hunger and the sadness it gave you, or the woman it allowed you to become.

And you are made up of fires and photographs, a partner you love and the pink highlights of a runaway, dust and dirt and the fences that never keep out the important things. And you are stronger now than you ever thought you could be.

You are growing and you are learning and though you have traveled a long way you know there is still much left to do. But one day you will finally get this right.

And when you do, it will be beautiful.

Fin