But there wasn't time to give it to him...he was needed to help set up the Council of Worlds. He was far too unstable to come to the Council so his hospital room became its first chambers. He faded in and out of sleep to the sound of voices arguing the fine points of its constitution as it was drafted and ratified at his bedside.
Council members were almost constantly in his room, working quietly while he or Carter slept and arguing vigorously when they were awake. Their arms steadied him when he took his first faltering steps on his prosthetics or overbalanced when he set at his bedside, massaged his spasming legs when he'd sat up too long, and performed his physical therapy as ably as any of his therapists. They called for his next dose of pain meds before he knew he needed it, and insisted he rest when he thought he could still push on.
And when he screamed on the field of Torantay, they wept in the hallway giving him what privacy they could until he returned to them on Danara. He hated every minute of it, but time was of the essence and only by working quickly could they hope to hold on to the more advanced worlds only loosely tied to the Federation. Without them the more devastated worlds had no chance for recovery or even survival.
The doctors weren't happy about it, but short of complete sedation they found it impossible to keep him down. And Carter was no different. Following Kaiyontra, she was driven to get the fertility research underway. She met with anyone who might have the training to begin that work at once. She had hoped they'd hear quickly from Earth. When they didn't, her disappointment was outweighed by her fear that without Earth's help whatever fix they were able to arrive at would come too late for Hazeldor and other of the planets with quickly dwindling populations. She couldn't allow the doctors' warnings to slow her down.
The physical battles she was fighting already kept her from accomplishing even a fraction of what she felt desperate to complete. On top of the demands her pregnancy made on her body, her injuries and therapies left her weak and exhausted. She spent more time sleeping than anything else, yet the doctors still felt she didn't take their concerns for her health seriously.
The opposite was actually the truth. If something happened, it was imperative that someone among the Standers understood the makings and maintaining of the CAADs and defense web. To that end, she spent what time she could diagramming every inch of her devices and writing out clear directions for anything that might require repair. It was a difficult task to perform one-armed from a hospital bed. Especially once the Council moved in. Mostly though, especially in the beginning, she slept through their noise; propped up in her bed next to the colonel's or curled on her side beside him in his.
She commandeered a nearby room to work in as her strength returned. Spending more and more time awake as her physical condition improved, she left them to their meetings to spend most of the day working alone or in Physical Therapy where the therapists tortured her in the hopes she might be able to use her left arm again. It was a painful process, but they were pleased with her progress.
The nights they spent together fighting through their own demons of pain and memories. His almost always came in the violent, loud thrashings of Torantay as though that one terrible incident had driven away everything else from his overworked subconscious. George was never far away and together they'd eventually bring him back to them until the next time. Hers came in vivid nightmares which jolted her awake and left her trembling in their wake. He'd hold her close while her breathing gradually calmed and she was able to sleep again.
He never asked and she never told him what they were about. The blast tearing through his body armor and into his chest on Hakter; his heart beating raggedly under her clenched fist as she tried to staunch the bleeding. Standers falling all around her while she desperately struggled up a hill she could never top. Lying in the dark surrounded by the cries and moans of the fallen on Torantay, fearing his child was dead within her and he was lying cold and lifeless on Danara. Hearing the explosion ripping him apart; watching the blood pouring out of what had once been his legs. And, of course, his nightmare was hers as well.
And there were others, too. The weird, terrifying nightmares of pregnancy made all the worse because of everything that had happened. Sad dreams of walking away from her dad, Daniel, Teal'c, her brother, even at times General Hammond. Finding herself on an unknown planet alone with his dead body. Nothing he needed to know about. Nothing she wanted to talk about it. She preferred even the time spent in Physical Therapy to the nights.
