A/N: Another quick series concerning the Vala and Cam of the 'Road Not Taken' timeline. While this fic is set after Carter's visit, the majority of the other fics will be based before her visit.
Star-cross'd
It's nearing three o'clock when he jolts awake. The room is dark, the tv before him flashing static, as accompanying martial law, the skewed views of 1950s television schedules returned leaving very little but infomercials and news on after midnight. The broadcasting day was long over, and his legs still on pins and needles.
Proud for putting himself on the couch in his drunken stupor, and not hanging a louie in his chair and taking out the piddly books and memorabilia left on the shelf again. Half of him wants the Irish coffee without the coffee, if only to dull the pounding in his temples and around his left hip. To chase away the remnants of freefalling from the air and hitting a solid sheet of ice and the walking he did when he could.
The other things he did when he could.
Unsung heroes cast aside. Carter wasn't here to try and cajole him back into smiling for the birdie and cutting ribbons and shaking so many hands that the common cold just lived in his body. Trying to get over extreme trauma to his legs, his back, his neck and then getting blocked nostrils, heavy sinuses, and hacking up mounds of mucus was not a hero's welcome.
Vala didn't get a hero's welcome either, and she deserved it more than him.
Flew an al'kesh.
Watched her soar flawlessly through the harsh winds, curve into a turn and shoot the last shot they needed. Anubis's ship shuddered towards the ground, raining into fiery pieces and crashing upon the ice like hundreds of meteors tumbling down from space.
He closed his eyes to the image of the massive ship collapsing and opened them to a knock on the window.
And there she was.
Done up in what he thought was a fur throw, which she later explained was an animal hide blanket. Underneath she wore a solid metal necklace and long golden gown. She was freezing and bouncing around, huffs of her breath clouded in the air around her as her leather boots crunched against the ice.
"I was lucky the winters on my home world were colder than that." Told him one night, his head in her lap, his legs bent over the arm of the couch. Her cold hand, which makes perfect sense now, stroked across his forehead as they watched the regurgitated newsreel of him accepting some stupid medal or award that he doesn't even have anymore. "If not, I most likely would have frozen to death."
He really needs that drink now, and in his drunken, half-conscious mind he tries to stand and then remembers what they took from him.
Then remembers what they really took from him.
Then he cries. Exhales huffing out like cigarette smoke, and maybe that's what he wants instead. Anything to keep his mind off her.
Grabs the back of his chair and rolls it towards him. It's not as squeaky as it used to be, doesn't remember fixing it or allowing someone else to fix it. The nurse who checks in on him weekly must have done something while he was asleep. Always asleep, always drunk. Never here. Never now. Not anymore.
Groans as he hefts his own weight into the chair and as he sits, he hears a sound. Not squeaking or the ruffle of his pants against the seat, but something from the bedroom, the room he hasn't been in in at least a week because he doesn't need a separate room for sleeping anymore. He has everything he needs right here. No curfew because he never leaves.
No imprisonment without charge.
He also has no fear.
Gave his legs, gave his love, might as well give his life because it's not worth much to anyone anymore including the momma who abandoned him when he turned his back on their government.
"Your father didn't give his life for this." His momma screamed at him, hands pumped through the air in jagged motions, her face red and teary.
"Well I didn't either, momma." Told her before she shook her head at him, collected her purse, and burst from the room refusing to say another word. Still refusing to say another word.
Clenched his fists, and as he watched her go he swore lowly, a growl meant to scare, a threat. But her cold hand maneuvered around his arm, cool and calm on his wrist, and she tossed it over her shoulders like a scarf and he pulled her close. Her cuddling settled his heart. Grounded him like a plane stuck in ice. Like a woman with bare arms and bare legs wrapped in an animal hide hallucinatory outside his plane window.
Scrolls towards the bedroom and hears more noise, sort of burrowing—like an animal digging, and then the loud thump of his window slamming closed. Expects government agents or soldiers sent here to finish him off because Carter came to see him, and she was spurting the same propaganda he did years ago.
The door is ajar, but the room still smells musty, of clothes sweating, of radiators heating without warrant, but also a clear streak of fresh air from outside, the exhaust from cars and the loading dock across the street. The door is what gives him away, squeals when he shoves it forward with his dead foot and the momentum of him wheeling himself in, and immediately the sound stirs to a stop.
In the light cutting through the slats of his cheap, slightly broken plastic blinds, she stops picking up objects, the ones she knocked off his bedside table when she broke into his room, and collects herself standing tall, looking malnourished, wearing a black top and a very loose pair of BDU pants.
"Hello darling."
The rooms is pungent like it's a storage unit, but she cannot complain because she knows her own scent is far worse. Basic amenities is a big fat lie because they kept her in that room, in that closet for over a year without an attached washing facility. She was stripped of her sense of privacy, on camera, on display, taken to interrogation rooms where they would waltz before her with water and decadent meals of a disk of meat between two primitive shanks of bread, she forgets the Tau'ri name, and force her to watch while they ate. Drew her blood, collected samples of whatever they pleased and cut her hair to conformity.
Life as a prisoner was something she grew used to, until her consciousness returned during the second hour of the townsfolks beatings, boot tips shattering rib bones and bruising her lungs, knees jabbing down into her spine, holding her down, hands everywhere and her body wasn't her own.
Fought with Qetesh, even while battered against the wall of a dungeon as she was left to be stripped and quartered the next morning in the town square, until the Tok'ra plucked her up, and drilled a needle into her brain removing the symbiote, the ugly little snake, the parasite who held her hostage for decades and claimed her body as it's own vessel.
Had just regained a modicum of control over her own fate when she noticed a plane go down from her al'kesh. Watched as the poor pilot's head whiplashed. Curved her speed and took aim at Anubis's ship. The last nine months of playing wife to him, of acting as an insatiable sex God to the God of death washed away as soon as she fired and took down the bastard's boat.
Landed the al-kesh without so much as a burp or hiccup, and she crunched her way through solid ice and snow towards the smoking plane, afraid that if the fuel tank caught heat it may explode. The secondary pilot was obvious deceased, but when she knocked, the man in the front, who had blood flowing down his face from a cut in his temple and a broken nose, squinted his eyes at her.
With one hand flat, and the other cupped, she motioned for him to open the cockpit up, there was already a break in the glass and the wind which picked up suddenly roared through littering it with plump flakes of snow. He squinted his eyes again but slapped his hand at the control panel three times until depressing the proper button and the dome receded.
She hugged the hide, a present from Anubis for the harsh climate, around her body tighter, just beginning to feel the prick of cold on her bare extremities. Before she could announce she wasn't going to hurt him and that he was in danger from any Jaffa or Goa'uld who wandered by his completely obvious vessel, he groaned against the snow drift. "Lady, it is too damn cold to just be standing there."
Thought of it as a complaint at the time, thought that perhaps he'd bashed his noggin too hard off the metal and electrical components of his ship and was merely agitated at the unannounced sight of her, but almost a year later as she nestled between his legs with a bowl of popcorn, her back stretching into his bare chest that exuded heat and tingled her skin, she made haphazard mention of it and he chuckled, his mouth full of kernels as he handed her the remote for the television.
"I was terrified for you. I thought you were just a beautiful, upper-class woman who got stuck in the cold."
"And the fact that there was a System Lord's ship imploding in the background mattered very little to you?"
"Honey, I smashed my head so hard off the console that I didn't remember I was in Antarctica, let alone shooting at aliens." His nose tickled the side of her neck, staccato exhalations heating her skin and the smell of butter and popcorn and him intoxicating. Craned her neck to allow him better access, and as his salty lips trailed over her skin he added, "but I knew the instant I saw you that I was in love."
"Really?" Gasped at the suction of his mouth, the flick of his tongue, raked a hand through his hair, encouraged, held him in place.
"Really." Hand slid up her bare leg and under the cuff of her shorts, his lips retreated into a smile. "I'm just glad you ended up being real."
As short-lived as their relationship was, it's unrivaled in her experience. Having a lover or a partner devote himself enough to her, to put her needs first without the golden clasped nails of a system lord as incentive was alarming, made her nervous and paranoid until his compassionate actions became an ordinary exchange. To have her hand held, or his coat draped around her arms in a bout of shivers was normal to him and after that not once did it unnerve her.
Until now.
Standing frozen as if in crosshairs, eighteen months spent together, nine months spent apart and the anxious part of her surfaces through the fatigue and starvation, through the need to have a full night's sleep without waking herself up to ensure she's alone. He cared for her before, unabashed, refusing to be dissuaded by military advisors who reassured that if the public became privy to their interspecies relationship he would be abandoned, and she would be endangered.
He was dissuaded.
He hardly looks nurtured and she's never out of danger.
The soft prodding to drop the relationship simmered into demands, and then threats. The threats and his deteriorating health and their disagreements on the importance of his planet knowing the truth. Adopted a drinking habit and became looser lipped with his feelings about the army, about his planet, about her. Perhaps he still harbors those issues, even if they were provoked. People evolve and adapt and perhaps in his multiple nascent addictions, his initial concern and worry about her wellbeing has been snuffed out. Surely, he has more important—
"Are you okay?" His voice is deeper than she remembers, holds more of the twang she heard from his mother berating him.
The room falls silent again after, the gravelly question echoing in her mind and the backfire of an engine outside makes her jump. Despite this being their apartment she only spend a month here before being detained. The layer of dust on his bedroom furniture does more explaining than he offers. "Fine."
"Are you—" he maneuvers closer to her, a wild animal with memories of domesticity. "Are you really here."
Angles an eyebrow at him in challenge, the faint grin dropping from her parched lips. "Should I not be?"
"How did you—" Hands pause over the wheels and he stops himself from further entering the room. Rests just in the white slashes of streetlight between bent backwards blinds. "No. I don't care. Are you okay?"
The repetition earns him a grin because it's genuine. His need to ensure, his need to protect, as fiery and dangerous as his government's. Allows her the reinforcement to take a step forward bathing herself fully in the striped light. "I'm fine."
"Jesus, don't they feed you in the gulag?" Meets her at the area rug near the end of the bed. The one they chose together. All the framed pictures of her and of him sit turned towards the wall, shocked her and she knocked over the end table, wanting to sneak back out before he discovered her.
"Gulag?" Knees give away beneath her as she perches on the edge of the bed, the comforter she chose still in place, made with army precision and the dust that jumps into the air tells her it hasn't been slept in recently.
"Not important." His hand encircles hers, fingers dried and calloused and as warm as ever. There's a bit of grit to them, like he might have done some work with his hands, but by his dishevelment and the thick layer of alcohol floating off his breath, she nixes that idea, then becomes distracted when he presses too hard on the area where they usually snap the cuffs too tight. "What?"
"It's nothing." Tugs her arm away, fingers ringing around her own wrist to try and knead the pain away.
"Did they—"
"It's not important."
She reaches to touch his face, freshly shaven and likely smooth under her fingertips but his hand snatches hers from the air before she gets a chance. "Then tell me what is."
"I'm hungry." The words crack his solemn expression, because she's seldom ever not famished. "And are you really not going to offer me the services of your washroom?"
"It's your washroom too." They decided on the small apartment together after funding was cut, after his medical insurance was revoked and with it, his ability to navigate stairwells with unintended ease. Decorated it together, in trips on the bus out to discount and second-hand stores, when the public transit ran out of seats and she stood to accommodate others, he yanked her down into his lap and they laughed despite the chagrin of the other passengers. "I'll order a pizza."
Stands smacking the dust away from her clothing, from the bedspread, but then decides it's going to need a rewashing and her actions are fruitless. Opens the dresser drawer that houses her clothing and is surprised to find everything folded and uneaten by moths or other pests. Flips through the pile of tops, messing up the machine perfect folding of a soldier, wants to ask about the upkeep on her clothing when the rest of the apartment has fallen into disarray, but decides that is a conversation for later.
Before stepping by him and towards the bathroom, she stops, planting a kiss in his greasy, unkempt hair that she hates, she really, really hates. He slings a hand around her hips and despite her reservations, knowing her body has stories she doesn't want to discuss, the broken and reset bones, the fanning and fading contusions, the waning athletic muscle for an overall malnourishment, her lips putter before she can damper her trust. "When you're done, come keep me company."