Tuesday Night

The door chime startled Elizabeth away from her laptop. Sitting up in her chair, she rubbed at the pain between her eyes in the center of her forehead and wished she could blame it on overwork. She glanced down at the keyboard and angrily brushed away the solitary drop of moisture she found there. Her suit jacket still sat in the corner. She'd come back to her quarters Monday night and just left it there. Even picking it up now felt awkward, as if touching it would bring back the demons who had taken her chief surgeon.

She held it to her chest, forgetting to go to her closet when the door chimed again. She opened the door and started to apologize for taking so long. "John, I-" she didn't have to finish.

John was already walking away. He was out of uniform, clad simply in his black workout pants and a white t-shirt. He paused, turning back sheepishly when he heard her voice.

"I thought you might be asleep," he offered simply. His face was still and his hair was wet. When he grew closer, Elizabeth could smell shampoo.

"I never sleep," she teased as her smile cracked. "Remember?" she asked and folded her arms across her chest.

"I like blue," John announced softly as he studied her pajamas. The pink plaid flannel pants were far cuter than anything he had ever pictured her wearing to bed. The dark blue T-shirt was the wrong shade to match them, and as he took a step closer John realized he liked that.

Elizabeth ran one hand through her hair nervously before moving out of the way and unblocking the door to her room. "Do you want to come in?" she wondered. The question hung like a banner between them.

John looked at the floor, noticing her feet were bare on the burnished metal. He looked up again slowly, finding something in her unsteady gaze. "Yeah," he admitted without any volume. "I couldn't sleep," he started to explain, "picked up my book and..." He shrugged instead of finishing.

"I've been trying to finish my report," Elizabeth offered in turn as the door sealed them both into her quarters. "Where did you find time to shower?" she wondered with another failed attempt at a smile.

John peered down at her wrist because his own was naked. Lifting it just slightly with a hand still warm from the shower, he checked the time. "It's oh-three hundred," he murmured.

Elizabeth let him keep her hand. "It was just twenty-two hundred," she replied with quiet shock. "I just left my office," she continued, surprised. He stood next to her, silent and still with his hand loosely clinging to her wrist.

"It's okay," John promised as he released her. His eyes were too soft.

Her headache roared again, promising to fight its way out from her forehead if left unnoticed. "Do you want to sit?" Elizabeth asked dumbly. The sofa was a few steps away and her feet were getting cold.

"Okay," John replied after a moment. He followed her to the sofa and kicked off his sandals. They sat there, a black mark against the reddish floor.

Elizabeth sat stiffly next to him, still clinging to her suit jacket in her left arm. When she tried to force herself to be comfortable she found it again. Standing immediately, she apologized as she moved towards the closet. "Hang on," she said without turning back. "I was just tidying up."

"From what?" John asked lightly. He threw his gaze over the impeccably clean room and then brought his eyes back to her.

Clinging to the edge of the closet, Elizabeth felt her eyes burn their anguish. Turning back around was harder than she imagined. "I left my jacket out," she replied simply, not realizing it was a rhetorical question. "Sorry," she stammered. Making her way across her own floor made her stomach knot in her belly.

"His mother makes the most wonderful little flat muffin things," John ventured as he tried to demonstrate them with his hands. "I thought she bought them, and I was asking the woman next to me, one of his classmates, if she knew where I could get some," he continued as he stared down at his knees. "And she came up behind me, Mrs Beckett and smiled the most beautiful smile as she thanked me for enjoying her cooking so much."

He leaned his head back, staring painfully up at the ceiling as his eyes rebelled against him. He rubbed one hand through his hair, feeling it flatten damply to his head. "She thanked me," John repeated as he lowered his gaze.

"He used to tell stories about her," Elizabeth rescued him with a clearer voice. Pulling her knees up onto the sofa, she hugged then to her. "Every time I had a physical he had a new story," she remembered softly. Even her voice was failing. "He was saving the one..." her voice faded entirely, and her words died lodged in her throat. Swallowing the lump let one of her tears escape down her cheek like the first rain drop of a summer storm. Her hand caught it as she locked down her control. "...the one about his mother and the dance where she met his father," she finished.

"It was a street dance," John interjected as he watched the trail of her tear dry on her cheek. "The fiddlers spilled out of the pub," he explained and managed a real smile. "His father was the student who leaned out the window to try and shut them up."

"Did she go up and kidnap him?" Elizabeth wondered as she rubbed her other eye. Her tears were coming faster now, burning through the fragile control she had put some much energy into.

"No," John chuckled and leaned forward with his forearms resting lightly on his knees. "She went up to give him a piece of her mind..." he swallowed quickly, "...and won his heart while she cursed him for being such a 'bloody stick-in-mud'," the words didn't sound right without Caron's accent as he repeated them. He tilted his head towards her. "I could never get him to stop talking whenever we did my aftercare visits."

"You are in his..." Elizabeth stopped; biting her lip and closed her eyes. Tears ran hot down her cheeks now, and the ache in her head and slipped down into the roof of her mouth. "...the infirmary a great deal more than the rest of us,"

"I can't count how many stitches he's put into my body," John offered honestly. The tears on her face had reddened the delicate skin around her eyes and a few of them lodged in her nose enough to make her sniff. "And I'm pretty good with numbers," he tacked on with part of a smile.

"I can't sit here and write how it happened," Elizabeth whispered as she stared at the darkened screen of her laptop. Sitting up again, she sent her feet back to the floor. "I've been trying and I just..."

"...I used to think I'd get used to it," John murmured as he slid a little closer on the sofa. "That someday I wouldn't feel like my guts had been ripped out when I lost a friend." He lowered his head to his hands, and he would have managed to fight his own tears back if it weren't for the hand on his shoulder.

Elizabeth's fingers were cold through the thin fabric of his shirt. His left hand reached across his chest, grabbing them and hanging on. "I think they grow back," he muttered as he turned his head towards her hand. "No matter what I do, they keep coming back."

"That's good," she replied simply, reaching her free hand for his chin. Touching his face was almost too intimate and for a moment Elizabeth remembered being this close to him when Phebus had kissed him. His lips were wet now as his tongue nervously ran over them. "A good man needs a big heart," she reminded him and released the smooth skin of his face.

John's free hand lashed out and captured hers as it slipped from his range. "I couldn't read my book," he whispered and watched one of her tears sink into the soft fabric covering her knees. "I couldn't be alone."

"You're not," she corrected him firmly. "None of us are alone," Elizabeth said shakily. She wondered how pathetic it sounded to him. "We're here together," she continued with slightly more strength.

"I knew you'd be awake," John explained himself as he started to stand up.

Elizabeth didn't let go of his hand and he stopped moving. "It didn't hit me," she choked on the lump in her throat and nearly couldn't continue. "I made it through so much of yesterday in a blur," she said; shaking her head and tasting salty tears on her lips. "Then it got quiet and I..."

She didn't have to finish. Strong arms wrapped themselves around her and suddenly she was clinging for dear life to her military commander. John's fingers dug deeply into her back. His shirt went translucent as her tears soaked into it. The dark hair of his chest left shadows beneath the fabric. His hands held her as if letting her go would lose her forever.

John didn't have any tears and she shed hers for both of them. As her back shook beneath his hands, he felt something loosen in his heart. As she sobbed, he rocked. He thought about Carson's bravado the day he'd nearly been killed by the drone back in Antarctica. He pictured his friend and remembered the moments he nearly couldn't recall. Carson's gentle smile in the haze of pain and drugs that always promised he would be all right.

"We're going to be okay," he promised both of them. Elizabeth's head slipped into the hollow of his neck and John lost a tear in her dark curls as he pressed his face into them.

She lifted her head, eyes bloodshot and puffy with tears as she met his. Cupping his chin, Elizabeth kept him from wiping tears from his cheeks. Instead of cool fingers, her warm lips kissed them away. She lowered her head back against his shoulder and the sofa held them both.

"Scones," Elizabeth murmured after a long silence. John lifted his head sleepily from hers and tried to figure out what she meant.

"The flat muffin things..." she reminded him gently as she wound her fingers into his own. "They're called scones."

"Oh," John replied softly as he snuggled closer to her on the sofa. "That's good," he added sleepily. "I didn't want to ask." He felt the air sigh out of her chest and watched the first fingers of dawn peek grey over the horizon.

In his dreams, Carson smiled.