Author's Note: This is a companion piece to my Stay With Me. It was inspired by the song We Came Home by Ariana Delawari which you can find on YouTube if you like. It's not necessary to read Stay With Me first, as a matter of fact, these stories can be read alone or an either order.
The world stopped in a blaze of fire she saw coming from weeks away. The fires burned and burned and still they all fought, holding the line against an unbeatable enemy. Colorado Springs was little more than ash when they retreated.
In Denver, all it took was a bottle of bourbon and an old motel for her to give up everything she thought she'd ever known. He was hard edges and soot nestled between her legs, face buried in the last warm part of her. In those days, his face, his long loved face, was rough with stubble that pricked her thighs.
She left before he woke the next morning and it was months later in Detroit when they crossed paths again. She needed food, water, transportation, and time to forget. He gave her the forgetfulness out in an overgrown field with her thighs clasped around his hips and her knees pressed into damp earth. She pressed herself against him for days, finding her pleasure in his mouth, his fingers, his hips, never his eyes. He gave gladly and she took, she took, she took until Seattle called too loudly and she had to go be the leader she should have become years before. He went East to be the leader he couldn't ever not be.
For a year or more they crisscrossed the country crossing paths in the flat states where they'd find one night or two to try to remember what they were fighting for. The people became incidental and faceless even in their small numbers, and it took his face to remind her why she still cared. He'd let her grasp his face between her calloused hands, shave his beard and see the shapes she fell in love with but could never have not even while she had him. Not because he wouldn't give himself but because she wouldn't take him. When she cried he didn't stop her, just wiped the tear tracks off her dusty face and reminded her what it felt like to be a woman with a man and not a General in torn fatigues and blown out boots.
She made her way San Diego and got word to him through the last remaining grapevine that a city still existed and when he appeared on her brother's doorstep he was like an apparition in blue jeans and she didn't turn him loose for days. It only took weeks for the next assault to come and their sanctuary was blown to hell and back and her brother along with it. When he and the kids went, she did too, in a way. No longer driven to win, she retreated and lost track of him. Somewhere between San Diego and Birmingham he started to track her. She never let him know she knew, but when she found a house still standing she made sure she claimed it, knowing he deserved it, knowing he would come.
At first, having him underneath her every night made everything seem normal even if she never could look him in the eye. When she dared, she'd let him take her up against the counter in the bathroom and then she could catch his gaze in the broken mirror, the buffer giving her the strength to do what she couldn't do in bed. She was with him but never with him, not entirely and it killed her to kill him bit by little bit, because he was there. Always there. And always for her.
By the time her forty-fifth birthday rolled around he'd convinced her she was still worthy of something resembling love.
Then came word that power existed out West and she went with a small group of foragers and came back with a naquadah generator to power the town. He liked the air conditioning, she liked the way she could soap his body up in a hot shower and slide around him in a way that made his knees buckle.
Slowly, others started to arrive. Daniel came, Teal'c too, each with groups of people large enough to rebuild something like a society. They built back up and when the people were enough and the food wasn't, the came word that there were supplies in Nebraska. She talked about rounding up a group of people but he made noise about a justice of the peace and asked her to stay.
It had been three years and a lot of miles, a lot of moving, a lot of doing but she finally felt like maybe she didn't have to be the driving force. She married him in front of their two best friends and a hundred strangers whose lives they'd each saved personally and, when it was over, there wasn't a party, there wasn't cake, there was just the finally running free.
Up through the war, they went home.