Love's Labor's Lost
Chapter 4
Et Tu, Brute?
He wakes up in a different bed, in a different grey shaded room.
At least this time he's on his back and not close to suffocating in a pillow. He can't really feel the pain in his back, and again, he wiggles his toes they respond, but slowly—slower than he'd like. There's a beeping to the left of him, and once his eyes focus on the equipment, he can tell he's back on Earth.
There's a window to the left of him which offers a clear view to the other side of the medical building standing strong in the starts of a snowstorm. For a second, just the briefest of seconds, he thinks that the whole thing was a dream, that he had a painkiller induced dream for the last two years during which his mind created his dream woman, who also happened to be an ex-host to a malicious alien.
He groans, shuffling his legs, and twisting his back, where he can feel the pressure now. Jackson sits to the left of him in the exact same chair he sat in last time. When the doctor notices him, he flaps away the newspaper he's holding, folding it up in his lap and adjusting his glasses up on his nose.
"You're awake."
"Do I even want to know what happened this time?" He pushes himself up into sitting, and the pain boils in his back down to the top of his one leg. "Where's Vala?"
Jackson sighs, shoving a hand underneath his glasses and rubbing at his eyes. "We managed to get to you before the Ori ships were completely obliterated. We ringed you up to the Odyssey per the President's orders, and back down to Earth."
"Where's Vala? What happened with the Ori ships? We were able to get them out of the galaxy?"
"You need to take it easy." Jackson stands, dropping a hand to his shoulder to settle him back to the bed. "You got shot in the back when we were ringing you out. You had to go into emergency surgery immediately."
"No." His brows fall as he thinks. He was shot in Seevis's pub. Vala was taking care of him on the ship—he was almost better before— "Where's Vala?"
"Mitchell, you have to—"
As Jackson tries to turn away, he grabs his sleeve, using what strength he has to wrench him back in place. "Where is she?"
Calmly, Jackson starts to unhook his fingers from his sleeve, once free, he ducks back, returning to the visitors chair. There's a half empty coffee cup on the side table, and one of the lights is angled away from the bed to shed enough light to read.
Jacksons steeples his hands, inhaling deeply—the doctor is smart, from what he knows, he's compassionate, has always been caring with Vala. The fact that he's taking extra time to compose himself, to calculate his words, isn't reassuring at all.
"Mitchell, what I have to say, you don't want to hear."
"Tell me."
"President Landry put a suspension on talking about what happened with the Ori invasion until we have all the facts."
"I was there, Jackson. I was—" He slams his fist against the railing, sending reverberations throughout the cot, and a pain spreading through his knuckles.
"Look." Jackson holds out his hand, stopping one of the nurses from coming into the room and adjusting whatever they're drugging him with to make him fall back asleep. "The best thing you can do right now is just get better. Let all of this settle for a bit, and once we know exactly what we're dealing with—"
"She's pregnant."
Jackson sighs heavily again, waving the nurse in, who has a needle full of something to inject right into one of the tubes leading into his arm.
As a last-ditch effect, he tries to collect whichever one she's going to need.
"That's my kid."
"Mitchell, just let them help you first, you—"
"She's my wife!"
"Uh huh." Jackson nods, collecting his paper, standing to the side as another nurse enters the room, taking the needle and injecting it instead into the iv bag. "Unfortunately for you, the government of the United States doesn't feel the same way."
A/N: Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar