She drew in a slow, deep breath and he lightly rubbed her arm as it rested on his chest. "That feels good," she murmured.
"Well, hey there, sleepyhead." Jon nuzzled her hair, keeping his voice low. "How are you feeling?"
"Thirsty," she answered honestly. "Hungry. Everything hurts."
Her first response, and even her second, wasn't about pain. It was progress. Under the blanket, Jon ran the heel of his hand up her spine, putting light pressure on it. His fingers massaged her neck and shoulders before his hand followed the path back to her waist. "How's your head doing?"
She turned her face up to his and softly kissed his jaw. "I don't feel like my brain is being squeezed out my ears anymore."
"Well, that's a bonus." The image her comment brought forth made him want to shudder, but he refrained. "Be honest with me, Jenn. One to ten, what's the pain level in your head?" He continued to massage her as they talked, his only desire to ease her pain.
She moved so she was even more sprawled on him, giving him more access to her back. "About three point eight."
"About?" With her change in position, he was able to use both of his hands to gently rub her arms, back, shoulders and neck.
Jennifer chuckled. "Kinda hard to come up with an answer when you're doing that to me. Might start drooling soon."
"Not telling Molly that one." Jon kissed the top of her head. He wanted to spend the rest of his life like this. Away from the rest of the world, with the woman he loved.
Damn the war.
They stayed that way for several minutes, until Jon very gently rolled her onto her back and propped himself up on his elbow beside her. He smiled when her stomach growled almost immediately. "You did say you were hungry. How about I find some food?"
"I still feel like crap, but I want to get up. Can you help me get to the bathroom, then take me with you to the kitchen?"
Jon studied her, finally nodding his agreement. Rob had recovered well enough with the injection to walk independently. He had to see if Jennifer could do the same. Very slowly, he helped her move until she was finally sitting up without assistance. He knelt in front of her, ready to catch her if she didn't have the energy to keep herself upright.
Even in the dim light of the room, he could tell she was pale. The dark circles under her eyes were prominent and he hoped her eyes weren't as bloodshot as Baker's had been the night before. Her sleep-tousled hair hung down around her shoulders and she looked like she was going to fall over and go back to sleep at any moment.
When her stomach growled again, she smiled softly at him. "I feel like I haven't eaten anything in days."
"Then let's go find you some food," Jon answered. "But first, let's get you dressed."
Jennifer nodded at the sweater he pulled from the floor, along with the drawstring pants and socks she'd been wearing the night before. She allowed him to tug the sweater down over her head and slipped her arms into the sleeves when he held them up for her.
Sitting there on the side of the bed with him kneeling before her, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed their foreheads together. "Thank you for taking care of me."
His fingers closed on her waist and he saw the exhaustion in her eyes, as painful to see as the muscle aches she was experiencing. "I will always take care of you. I just wish I could do more."
"You held me all night. You let me sprawl all over you and cry. You rubbed my back and my neck and you made me feel like I'm not a complete whiner because I got a boo-boo. How much more can you actually do?" She pressed a kiss against his lips, allowing it to linger as her fingers stroked through his har.
"I want to take your pain away. I want to make you feel well again." He nuzzled her. "You didn't just get a boo-boo, Jennifer. You got hit with a digitizer." One hand moved from her waist to cup her cheek. "Please, don't ever scare me like that again."
"I can't promise that, but I'll do my best." She kissed him again. "I love you, Jon Power."
"And I love you, Jennifer Chase." God, it felt good to just be able to say it. "And I want you to know that holding you all night and having you sprawled all over me are some of the best ways I can spend my time."
"So, you're saying we can do that even when I'm feeling better?" She looked at him, eyebrow raised, a grin starting to turn up the corners of her mouth.
He kissed her softly. "Hell yes." With a grin of his own, he slipped her sock on one foot, then the other. "Pants."
By the time she was fully dressed and standing, a huge yawn escaped her mouth. "That took so much effort." She slipped her arm around his waist and walked slowly with him down the hall and to the bathroom.
Jon waited until she emerged from the stall and held out a towel for her after she'd washed her hands and face.
She sighed as she leaned against the sink and looked at her reflection. "I look like a transport hit me."
Jon wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her tightly. "You're a little roughed up, but you're still gorgeous to me."
She snorted in response. "Get your eyes checked, Captain." Her disbelief in his words didn't stop her from snuggling into him. "I should do something with my hair, but I have no energy to even brush it."
"Good thing I have been around you and Virago for years now." Jon grabbed her brush from the shelf by the sink and carefully worked out all the tangles before gathering her hair into a loose ponytail. "Will that work? I don't want to give you any more of a headache than you already have." With her nod, he secured it with a band.
"Thank you." She slowly turned and rested against his chest, her arms wrapping around him to hold him close. "Can I just take a nap here?"
"Nope. Food." He disengaged her arms from his waist and kissed her pouty lips before helping her climb onto his back. "Ready to go?" He turned his head to look at her and was thoroughly taken by those blue eyes staring back at him.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder and began to kiss his neck. "Sure. Back to bed?"
Jon groaned softly at the suggestion. He had stopped even the infrequent dating he'd been doing when he realized how deep his feelings for Jennifer had become. He was going to have to do some serious physics calculations if he wanted to take things even marginally slow with her. "Later. Food now."
With her stomach growling its approval, he carried her to the kitchen and deposited her in the chair beside Baker at the table.
"Look who finally woke up and decided to show that sweet face to the rest of us." Rob leaned over and kissed her temple. There was no argument from him when she turned in her seat to hug him fiercely.
Matt placed a steaming mug on the table in front of her and smiled, his eyebrow raising as he regarded her. "Do you have enough energy to share a hug with me?"
Jennifer stood carefully and was enveloped in his arms. Tears began to roll down her cheeks when he softly said, "I love you, Kiddo."
"Love you too, Matt."
He patted her gently on her back, then made room for Michael.
The big man had no sooner set the plates of food he was carrying down on the table than Jennifer was hugging him also. "I'm glad you're feeling better, Little One." He kissed the top of her head and after a long moment, turned her face up to his and dried her cheeks. "You need to eat. That's an order."
"Yes, Sir." With a squeeze of his arm, she carefully deposited herself back into the chair. Her eyes grew wide at the plate of food in front of her.
Rob smiled and handed her a fork and napkin from the pile in the center of the table. "It tastes as good as it looks. Don't know if you're as hungry as I was –"
"Starving," Jennifer interrupted him, eagerly stabbing the potatoes and eggs and shoving a forkful into her mouth.
Power watched the two through the eyes of their commanding officer. They were both clearly unfit for duty and he didn't even want to guess how long it would take until they were back to themselves.
"Jon, you need to eat too." Matt raised an eyebrow at him, urging him to work on the plate in front of him. "We've already had our share. The rest is for the two of you."
With fresh tears rolling down her cheeks, Jennifer smiled at them. "Thank you for taking care of us."
Rob nodded his agreement. "We owe you. Big time."
"Disagree," Matt grunted, tossing a wadded up napkin at him. "We take care of each other."
"Need to teach you how to block a napkin. Maybe then you'll block a digitizer beam." Michael tossed his own at him, rolling his eyes when he didn't even bother trying to knock it away.
They continued with the light teasing while Power and Chase ate and their moods had lifted considerably by the time they'd finished.
It had been too long since they'd been able to do this. It hadn't been until he talked with Sam that Jon had realized it truly had been more than three weeks since they'd been at the base longer than just a few hours at a stretch. They were running on fumes physically.
A stop at Alpha would hopefully help change that.
But first, a short debriefing, now that they were all awake. Well, almost awake. Jennifer's eyelids were growing heavy, no doubt from the huge plate of food she'd just eaten. And though Rob was more awake, he, too, was starting to fade.
"There's a couple of changes I'd like to implement, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on them." Jon pushed his plate a little further in on the table to make room for his arms. He leaned forward and regarded them all for a moment before speaking. "In the past, we've all done solo missions out of necessity and sometimes just because it's nice to get away on your own for a bit. Even though we've been reasonable lucky, we HAVE run into trouble."
"I'm looking at you, Pilot," Scout teased, poking her in the side.
She rolled her sleepy eyes at him, though she didn't try to deny his words.
Jon knew what Baker was referring to but chose to let it pass with only a mild correction. "Every one of us has either been attacked or made it out by the skin of our teeth. Yesterday…" he trailed off, the churning in his gut growing once again.
"Jon." Matt softly brought his attention to him. "Two kids were rescued yesterday and reunited with their dad. And we all came home."
Jon drew in a very slow, deep breath, his eyes on Jennifer. They were in the middle of a debriefing, but he didn't much care. It was still too close to the surface. It was still too real. "If we'd continued with the plan I'd made yesterday, we could have had a very different result. In fact, I am certain we'd have had a very different result." He would take full responsibility for the decision to send Pilot alone, even with Scout's dissent. "Rob, you were right. It was NOT a good idea for Jennifer to go alone, especially on a skybike."
The young man nodded gratefully, then poked Chase again in the side. She smacked his fingers and rested her chin in her hand, elbow on the table.
Jon allowed the antics to continue without even a pointed look at the two. "With that said, I would like at least two of us on each mission. We've hit a few snags even running like that, but at least one of us could call for backup."
Nods all around the table.
"Mentor is currently running full diagnostics on your suits. We'll figure out what, if anything, needs to be done with them when that's complete."
Both Chase and Baker looked like they were going to be sick.
"Stop." Jon was already shaking his head. "You two are far more important than the suits and I don't want to hear any arguments from either of you." He raised his hand to stop their protests. "We've got two more hanging up in the chamber. The next one is almost ready to go. We know how they work and we can take care of them."
Though neither of them looked convinced, he continued. "Given the circumstances, I'm going to talk with Captain Polarski about bringing Abraham Carter with us for a few weeks. If Dr. Carter will agree to it, of course. He'll get to see what the job entails, how we work together and what he'll have to work with here, and we'll be able to evaluate how he meshes with us as a unit. If everything works out, I'd like to offer him a suit."
Jennifer protested anyway. "Jon, we don't even know if our suits are going to be okay. If they're not and we do need the two in reserve, that last one –"
"Will be put to very good use," he finished for her. "You're all worth it to me. Having a doctor on this team is something we've talked about for a long time. We needed one desperately yesterday and I don't like having to hunt down someone in the hope that we make it there in time."
She relented, though he knew she wasn't convinced.
Jon continued with a few more loose ends from both Locke and Cypher, his eyes moving to each of his team members as he talked, but returning repeatedly to Jennifer.
Rob was the one to rest his hand on her shoulder as her eyes closed. "Why are you falling asleep already? You've barely been awake an hour."
"Tired…" she nearly whined, surprising even herself with how it came out. "Why are you NOT this tired? I feel like I could sleep for days."
Matt knelt beside Jennifer and quickly collected her vital signs while another blood sample was analyzed. It seemed like the med kit was going to become a permanent part of his belt. "Sam and I have been going over the results from both of you and we're seeing a bit of a difference between you. You were similarly low when Molly took the first round right after it happened, but as of the last set, Rob has started to rebound while Jennifer has remained lower. I had Mentor analyze the suit data. Remember, Rob was fully charged when we started the mission and he was using the holofield for right around twelve minutes before Soaron showed up. That took his suit down to eighty-seven percent. Jennifer's was at ninety-four percent, but, like me, she took a couple of hits from the mechs before we could take them all down. That sent her suit down to eighty-two percent. Not much of a difference, but when the digitizer hit, that meant she had five percent less than Rob."
Jon felt the color drain from his face. "They were in the beam the same amount of time."
Michael turned to Jennifer, worry evident in his face and the way he held himself. "Your suit was depleted before Rob's."
Matt nodded. "Add to it that Jennifer is clearly smaller in stature than Rob. We've seen it before, that smaller people take upwards of ten seconds less to digitize than larger ones, so it stands to reason that more of her 'energy' was taken relative to yours before the beam was deactivated."
Jennifer folded her arms on the table and rested her head on them, yawning before she spoke. "That's just frelling fantastic."
Masterson looked at the values the analyzer flashed and patted her shoulder. "The good news is that your numbers aren't getting any lower. As of right now, they actually went up just a bit."
She gave a weak thumbs up, closed her eyes and was asleep.
For Jon, that settled it. "Gentlemen, we're going to Alpha. Please, pack your bags." He moved to Jennifer's side and scooped her carefully into his arms. "I'm going to strap her onto the bunk in the jumpship so she can just keep sleeping without being moved around. We'll wake her up when we get there."