A/N:Although this isn't a popular series, I've always liked it. Liked it so much that I have about another story or two ready to post right now. It definitely is a slow burn, and if you're patient enough (or if that's your thing) it will be rewarding. Also it gets dark as hell, so if you like that, stick around. There's probably going to be at least ten more stories in the series.
Sigh No More
He misses flying.
Misses the freedom.
Alright, so he had flight paths to follow and an itinerary, but it was never as bad as this—just press conference after press conference fielding questions about the gate: How big it is? How wide? How does it work? What does it feel like?
He's never even traveled through one.
Stands at a damn podium in Washington, or New York, or maybe just plain ol' Colorado, wearing his most nonthreatening expression, his teeth chomped together, and his smile so showy blind people can tell it's fake.
But the public loves him—he has a higher approval rating than Landry at the moment, and he thinks that stings the prez a bit.
They cheer for him while he waves, walking offstage leaning into the crutch for show, making his limp more pronounced than it should be when he actually doesn't need the crutch at all unless he's planning on going for a hike.
Behind the same blue curtains they put up and take down at every location, someone hands him a bottled water and he hands them the crutch in return. Still carries a bit of a limp for a few steps though as he beelines towards her, swerving through the people packing up equipment and discussing next steps and things that don't concern him that much. He can't let them concern him or he'll drive himself crazy and out of a job. It's getting to the point where more than half of what he reads as been written for him. Usually he's only allowed to answer the personal questions off script. Things about his dad and his brother giving their lives for the country, about his momma sitting at his bedside in that goddamn hospital, knitting him a scarf, hat, and pair of mittens in case he ever goes back to Antarctica.
They ask him about his personal life, because he's a pseudo-celebrity, and the public demands an answer.
What's he supposed to say?
There's this woman—the one who actually saved all their lives, and he's in it deep with her—but she's not from Earth and the military is already cutting off ties with other planets—shipped Teal'c back at the beginning of last week—and he just keeps trying to make up for all the shit Earth keeps throwing at her.
Should he tell the random crowd of journalists how every time the spark between them starts to flicker into something more, she ends up getting more hurt and he can't stand it.
He just tells them it's complicated.
The PR people love it because it adds mystery to his character.
But they must know.
Everyone must know.
Because as soon as he's done whatever broadcast, conference, or late night tv show he's booked for, he gravitates right back to her.
Comfort and familiarity found only in her as he drops to the couch next to her, pushing the cover of her novel up to see what's she's reading this time, and marveling at the fact that she's more literary than him despite not being from this planet.
Then figures that doesn't much matter anymore.
"How'd I do?" Takes a swig of his water so he doesn't have to answer her immediately, so he can just watch her, the style and bounce of her hair, the smell of it from just sitting next to her, the pad of her finger stamping to her lips for moisture to flip the page of the book, the tiredness clinging to her eyes because despite a third round of antibiotics, she's still not better.
Lam wants to do an MRI and maybe laparoscopic surgery, but she refuses, just wants her device back to heal herself.
She flips the page and doesn't glance up to him from over the cover. "Six out of ten."
"A six?" Chokes a bit and wipes the dribble from his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Yes."
"Only a six."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Dramatically sighs, rolling her eyes and resting the novel against her knee spine up, but he knows her well enough after two months on the road across America in planes and their very own shitty motorcade. Knows that she's playful, not short tempered or vindictive.
She leans across, a hand resting against his thigh making him hitch his breath for reasons other than pain, and then taps near his lips with the other. "Your smile was cultish."
"Hey, that's not my fault." Ducks his head back from her fingers as an intern passes too close to them and the last thing he wants is her to get thrown back into the gulag for frisky behavior. "They kept telling me to smile more."
"I don't think they meant that much, Darling." She brings her finger back to her lips wetting it and he thinks he's lost her to Fitzgerald again, but she reaches the finger to his chin and swipes it back and forth.
"Umm." Freezes because the action is way too personal, too domestic for the break couch with staff members scurrying by, trying to dismantle the setup. "What are you doing?"
"Well." Sits back and shows him the pad of her finger which is dyed blue with ink. "You also went on live television with pen on your chin like a dirty boy."
"Okay that's the makeup department's fault." Snatches up her hand, running the pads of his fingers over her palm, watching the grin blush across her face. "And if you keep calling me a dirty boy—"
Then he's waking up in a bed again, and for a minute he thinks the whole thing, the painstaking rehabilitation, the camera lens flares from his pictures in the paper, and the most gorgeous woman he's ever seen offering him salvation on a slab of Antarctic ice was just a fever dream.
He's in a very white room, a bright white room definitely not easy on the headache pooling behind his eyes.
A nurse appears in the doorway, dropping the armful of supplies, and bolts back out calling for Dr. Lam.
Something—
Something happened.
Because he's already been through this once.
Dr. Lam rushes in, yanking the stethoscope from around her neck. "Thanks for waking up again, Colonel."
"No problem." Groans as he tries to wiggle his toes, something he should have done immediately, but his head is a little out of whack from what he can tell, and that's not the only thing, because his little piggies aren't going anywhere. "What—"
"There was an explosion." Lam marks down something on his chart and hands it to the nurse, who is still picking up the supplies from the floor. "Riots broke out at the conference and someone placed an IED in the building."
"Any—"
"Major casualties, Colonel." She sounds cold but emotional at the same time, she still hasn't looked him in the eye and either her bedside manner sucks, or—
"Your old man make it out okay?"
"Beamed to Air Force One seconds before." Jabs the end of her pen against his foot and they just stare at each other, their faces mimicking each other's dread. "You feel that?"
"You know I don't."
Her face falls flat as she tries to mask her expression, but it's too late.
"Oh, Doc don't do this to me."
Maybe she can sense the panic in his otherwise limp body, maybe the way his voice cracks, because he can't do it again—the physio, the chair, the cane—he just got his freedom back. If he's got to go back to being confined again he's gonna—
"Before your thoughts mislead you, Colonel—" she checks his IV bag, adjusting the drip, and turns her attention back to him. "I may have an unorthodox solution."
Expects to have to go see her in the brig, watch her be shackled to the table again, but they won't chance moving him, not after the botched surgery they did before he regained consciousness, not after they've already made him rethink what it is to give his life for his country.
Every time she helps him it ends up worse for her and he doesn't know why she keeps doing it, except he does.
Then he sees her, and for the first time since waking up in the very first hospital bed, he knows she made the wrong choice in staying.
An orange jumpsuit blankets her body, boney arms sticking out from cuffs rolled up and hanging off her biceps. She shuffles her feet, chained together, and her hands clench before her as a guard marches her into the room, to the chair beside his bed.
In the last two days he has thought of her, but the overbearing notion of permanently losing his legs after working more than a year to get back into peak physical shape jarred him enough to put his own pain and fears before hers and he never should have.
How they treated her last time, how they let Lorne treat her, and he didn't forget, he just didn't remember.
"Holy shit, Vala."
She sits, metal clanging off everything, her gorgeous eyes sunken into a bed of dark gray as she holds her hands in her lap. He reaches for one of them and the guard shoots his own hand out to intercept the touch.
"Colonel, please refrain from touching the prisoner."
"Why is she—" Shakes his head at the guard and asks her directly, "why are you a prisoner again?"
She opens her mouth to speak, but the guard shifts in front of her, blocking the view of her face with his BDU pants. "Sir, she's a strong candidate for causing the explosion at—"
"She didn't—" Slams a hand to his face because ninety percent of the work the government does, the president does, is finding a scapegoat to cover the mistakes. The heels of his hands dig into the mattress as he shoves himself up, capturing a glance of her downtrodden eyes. "I know you didn't do it."
"Sir, please relax. I'll give her the hand device and she can—"
"She's not doing a damn thing until she heals herself."
"Sir, right now—"
"No, either she heals herself, and then me, without you present, or she doesn't heal me at all."
"Darling, it's—" Her voice is so hoarse, so dry and delicate, and so unlike what he knows she is. Her eyes glimmer a bit when she looks at him, and she might be starting to crack a smile.
But the guard rips his body towards her with such force that she flinches and drowns her own sentence, her own sentiment.
"Private, if you touch her, legs or not, I'm coming after you myself."
"Sir." The private rights himself, standing at attention. "It's impossible to—"
"Go talk to General Hammond—"
"Sir, the General—"
"Go talk to the president."
She doesn't get to heal herself, that's beyond being greedy, but President Landry okays his daughter to restart treatment on the lingering infection Vala's had for over a year now.
The guards leave them in peace for thirty minutes while she sits on the side of his cot and helps him roll onto his side. At first he thinks it's ridiculous, the channeling of her energy through the device into him, but after a few seconds he feels warm where she's holding it, then he feels the pressure from being reclined on his back for almost a week, then in the toes in his left foot as he wiggles them.
Tries to hide his tears, but her shaky finger wipes them away and she grins at him, helping flip onto his other side so he's leaning towards her with a leg that is healed better than before the crash. His hands curl tender around her hips, and she shuffles back into him, his new leg supporting her back as the same warmth flows through his right side, and through the trick hip that starts to act up if he wants to go for a jog.
He can sit up when she's done, but she barely can, toppling forward before he shoots an arm out to catch her.
"Are you—"
Pets his cheek as he pulls her on the bed beside him. Her body trembling hard and barely depressing the mattress. "It just tires me a little."
"You should've told me—"
"And then you never would have let me do it."
His hand covers her forehead and the heat there denies her shakes. Interested, he slides his hand to the collar on her orange coveralls, folding it down as she did for him in the interrogation room because he wanted to meet her. The figment of his imagination. The person who pulled him out of the darkness in his own mind. The woman who saved his life—more than once now.
The bullet wound stands out almost fresh, red on purple on black on pure white skin, the hems of where it's been stitched oozing.
"God—"
"It's fine.".
He helps her sit, directing her back to the head of the bed, resting against all the pillows the nurses change twice a day for him. The hand device sits on the bed next to him and he scoops it up, confused at how it sits so small in his palm. "Why don't you—"
"No." Shakes her head and crawls forward using her hands to scuttle.
"Vala—"
"They'll know, Cameron. And—" Stops and darts her eyes to the door, nervous, curling her legs under her crossed arms.
"And if this is how they treat you when you listen—"
"I've had worse."
"That's not something to brag about."
She laughs once, raspy in the back of her throat and teeters to her feet, barely keeping balance where his legs are solid and supportive now. One hand combs through his hair, while the other plants on his shoulder for structure. "I'm not bragging Darling, rather just trying to placate you."
"You need to stop doing things for me."
"Well I'm in too deep now, I suppose."
When her hand slips from his hair, he catches it like before, on a couch when he was staring into her eyes and watching the way she tired to hide her blush. Gently, he guides her closer and she observes him with an arched brow. Still weak, still uneasy, but fits so easy, so simple between his legs.
He didn't want it to be like this, doesn't know how he thought it would be, more alone, more relaxed, maybe after a real first date. But he has to take his chance now, because this might be it, the only one he gets.
Leans forward and presses his lips to hers, cracked and dry and hiding, and his hands around her hips, for nothing but to hold her up, offer the support she sacrificed for him. Her palms press into the hospital scrubs over his shoulders as she inhales deeply in reaction. His tongue flicks against her lower lip as she arches her body into his, exhaling now, and the heat from her body is intense, but the kiss is slow.
The kiss is lacking and everything.
As her mouth opens to him, his thumbs kneading her boney hips, the doors clacks and creaks and the speed she disengages from him stumbles her backwards.
No one says a thing as the guard snaps on all the shackles and redirects her out of the room, but he glares, making sure that the private knows he'll be true to his word.
He doesn't tell her he'll break her out again, that he has pull now as the poster boy for a wilting military, and if they want him to keep up the act, then they're going to have to give into his demands for her basic rights.
Doesn't tell her because he has a feeling she knows.
It takes him a week which is way too long.
Talks to General Hammond who tries to redirect him to more 'pressing' matters of addressing the public to let them know that acts of violence of American against American will not be tolerated, especially on American soil.
Tries to talk to President Landry, who is only available through his speech writers because he's too busy doing damage control.
When he gets into in his big, clean, warm bed without so much as a charley horse, he thinks of her, and even without the stiffness he can't sleep.
During his morning jog, she's all he thinks about.
They hold a press conference, one where he's ready to just blurt the truth out about the alien who saved all their lives, who's saved his twice over, who is giving up bits of her health for him, and rotting away in a small cell buried underground.
But as President Landry takes to the podium to talk him up, to introduce him even though he's basically the Brad Pitt of the government—and is still getting asked if there's a special lady—three shots ring from the crowd followed by an eruption of screaming and panicking.
Landry takes two bullets.
One to the stomach and one in the shoulder.
He jams his hands around his discarded suit jacket, pressing all of his weight into the president's stomach, thinking how it's only fair, because her bullet wound is still kicking her ass.
Gets beamed to Air Force One still holding the jacket in place and Lam is already there spouting out demands through a stoic face and panicked tears. Takes five minutes to assess the wound and blurts that he's losing blood too quickly for her to diffuse, that he's bleeding into his belly, and it's pooling.
It shows.
Landry's almost as white as Vala.
Then it hits him, their way out of this.
"The hand device. Vala can heal him."
Lam denies it at first but, after another minute of watching her father's breaths grow shallower, and seeing the suction at his stomach, she nods, approving it.
Hammond returns the nod.
She's beamed up in shackles of course, eyes wide in fear until they land on his stern face and he nods towards the president.
And without a second thought, she heals the president who's shown her next to no basic rights since she was shot and abducted in Antarctica. Stands over him with the device, biting her lower lip in focus, and the orange light shines down onto the hole in his torso.
And everyone stares in silence as it begins to heal.
All he can think is she's a better color than she was last time, and he supposes that he has Lam to thank for that.
Lam who fully embraces her, as she threatens to crumble to the floor from exhaustion.
When Landry comes too, saying some sarcastic, caustic remark, everyone coos over him, offering their relief and congratulations.
But he tugs her hand over to a seat and sits beside her focusing on how the sensation of her fingers held within his palm relaxes him.