Bring it all Back
Chapter 19
Clava
He finally gets to leave the SGC, actually gets to walk through that beautiful blue blob and onto another planet, it's been over three years since he was forcefully promoted into team management. Still doesn't know what lead to Landry doing it, maybe he groaned about his thigh too much, maybe it was the fact that his team was slowly disintegrating and then reintegrating with extra pieces and a more floral concept.
The mission is easy, but he doesn't complain. Part of him is too old for it, if he was in any other facet of the military he probably would have retired by now, should've retired after the plane crash, but then things would have been drastically different, he never would have known about aliens, up close and personal. He never would have met certain people now essential to his every day life.
"Cameron, undies go in the hamper." She putters around his room grabbing stinky socks and week-old boxers off the floor, chucking them into a laundry basket that's never seen the light of day. If it wasn't for his housekeeper, his home would be a frat house.
"You know I have a housekeeper, right?" He's sitting on the bed, typing up a storm trying to answer all the emails he can before they have to drive into work. It's five in the morning and she's adjusting to his alarm.
She drops another handful of clothing into the basket, a stray sock plops onto the floor and she retrieves it with a very agile bare foot. He's well aware he licks his lips. "You should be doing this for yourself. You're a grown man. Every time we come here, it's a mess."
"Honey, I'm never here unless you are too."
She ignores his little prod, his way of half blaming her for the mess and getting himself out of crap because he only wants to be with her.
He does only want to be with her and he's thought about it a lot lately.
"Why do you have this housekeeper anyway? Why do two women need to clean up after you."
"Well she's government issued so it's not like I can refuse her, and the other one just loves me I guess." Absently. He said it absently and his fingers keep typing away before the implications of his words sink in and he stops. When he glances up she's stilled like an animal in headlights. Mouth slack and eyes wide, one pair of his boxers she excavated from under the dresser dangling from her fingers.
He thinks he wants to marry her, but the complications, job or otherwise are too overbearing to overthink the situation. Just wishes she could stay here with him instead of locked up in that dungeon of a mountain.
Then he starts to notice that she's not as cool with the 'L' word as he is, because she really hasn't moved a single inch and maybe it's the implication that she loves him, or the implication that by thinking she loves him he's projecting his own love of her, and maybe today he'll say it to her. But for now all he can manage is, "I—uh—"
She reboots, tossing the balled boxers into the hamper and dusting her hands off on her thighs. She's wearing these jeans that just hug her ass—and she said something and he missed it because he was checking out her ass. So he stares at her from over the screen of his laptop and waits for her to repeat it but she doesn't.
She sighs and her posture falls a bit. "We're going to be late." Then she leaves the bedroom and he gets another perfect view of her ass.
He thinks he's going to marry her.
"Can she do it?"
"Rodriguez, she was an interstellar thief before the SGC even accepted you. Do not doubt her skills."
He and Vala team up with SG-7 who, for the last year have mainly visited one planet: P3J-505. The planet is modernized, but not without its vast temples and pubs dragged straight out of a game of Dungeons and Dragons. They were tasked with retrieving an artifact that might help find the Clava Thessara Whatever after both Jacksons made a truce and went over his head to Landry, who was not happy being disturbed while in Washington working on the Alien Act.
The Jacksons, virtuously enough, managed to sneak out of any off-world duty by providing research back up to Sam, who is helping Lam and Rix analyze that weird pollen from a year ago. The team unanimously and without verbal confirmation agreed never to talk about again unless deemed extremely necessary.
When he tried to talk about it with Vala a few weeks after, she turned away from him in bed. When he tried to apologize she answered in a tone he's never heard from her before, small and quiet, almost removed, that she was tired of gestations being forced into her.
With Teal'c still assigned to help clear up the rubble of the Cyclone Planet, he needed to hop into duty and it's just like riding a bike. But it's completely not. Always worried about his team, it's his task to bring everyone home safe, and he thought it would be the same—it was for the first few months after they agreed their relationship was serious—but it's not the same. He worries about every single thing she does or doesn't do.
Right now, she's in a high security room with lasers and cameras and all sorts of alarm systems that can go off and lodge bullets or glass in her. She was the only one small enough for the ventilation system and he still finds it highly unlikely that there are no booby traps up there. She said to give her ten minutes before contacting her, well, she said 'distracting' her, but it's the same thing, and it's been eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds.
Thinks Rodriguez is breathing heavy beside him, but as he concentrates on the sound, he realizes it's his own open mouth pants because he doesn't know what the hell is happening in there. She could be on the ground knocked out by a poison dart that kills in ten minutes and have nine minutes and twenty-three seconds of her time gone.
"Are you okay, dude?" Rodriguez asks, raising his eyebrows to his hand grasping so hard against the walkie that the plastic is cracking, shaking the device in anxious tremors.
"I'm fine, and that's 'Sir' to you."
"Vala doesn't call you sir." He waits, his eyes narrowing and his hand stilling out of irritation until the private adds, "Sir."
She does call him sir, just not at the SGC and not in front of anyone else, and not when they're not in the bedroom and usually not when they don't have those fuzzy pink handcuffs out.
He's strongly considering marrying her because when he thinks about it now, he gets a little jolt of excitement, like the adult equivalent of a kid on Christmas.
Then he notices it's been ten minutes and forty-seven seconds and that excitement saps away into the fear. The fear he has of someone coming back and telling him she's gone, the fear he knows will drive him back to whatever planet she's on to see because he won't accept it otherwise, the fear that will slowly deconstruct him because she's the only one who could make his pieces fit together so well.
But there's bumping, the knees and elbows of a crawling ex-free agent, really pirate thief and he's seen her hotwire a cargo ship before, her ass pushed out while precise fingers pulled and connected wires and he might have stifled the groan in his throat too late and Jackson might have given him an awkward raised eyebrow.
She topples out of the vent, flips over herself and lands perfectly on her feet because to her it's just like riding a bicycle even though she's never ridden one before. He manages to stifle the same groan before Rodriguez notices, and he breaks their cover from behind two very ornate wooden chests.
"Got it." She grins and holds up a small golden key. It's the size of a regular house or car key and it's tarnished into a dull brown color.
"Wow." Rodriguez holsters his P-90 at his thigh and is honest in his amazement because he doesn't know better and can't even begin to understand half the shit that she can do. "Good job, dude."
She squints her eyes because she doesn't understand the slang, and he grins at her because of course she did it and of course she's safe and one day she might be his wife and he gets that little jolt of excitement back.
Everything is fine until they try to walk out the front door. Major Dumas, who, he agrees with Vala, is a major dumbass, was supposed to be watching the front but to entertain themselves at a local pub instead. She later confirms this is a usual thing and if there's anything the boys of SG-7 are better at then drinking it's impregnating random women.
Outside the front door, he's taken, like a sucker, by the head of security that she so flawlessly flirted with earlier to get her access into the museum through the back. The guard glares at her and demands she give back what she stole. The gun is to his head, the cold metal pooling at his temple and he can feel where the dip of the barrel is against his skin.
Protocol states that while it's important to value team members over items, if the item is Ancient in origin, and could say, pay for an entire planet's military funding so that a certain General could come home from Washington, that precedence is given to it. That there should be a plan put in motion to obtain both said teammate and the artifact.
Vala, in a sturdy calmness nods once and produces the key immediately. "You let him go and you have my word, I'll toss it to you."
The guard, a grizzled older man, must be good at reading people despite letting her just walk into the place, or he must still want a chance with her, because he nods once and when she tosses the key, the pressure on his temple relieves and the guard snatches up the artifact with a stiff grunt.
He toddles back over to her, his ego as bruised as his temple.
"Are you okay?" Her hand raises to graze the side of his face, but he jerks out of the way, whether it's from knowing Rodriguez is still watching or knowing that he's not as sharp off-world as he used to be, he doesn't know.
All he knows is that she looks hurt.
They return to the SGC with a drunk Major Dumas and two buzzed privates in tow. Rodriguez skips ahead before them, eager to see the discipline of his butthead teammates. Walter announces as soon as they hit the metal slope from the gate that General O'Neill is visiting and wants a word with him about how he's running the place.
Considering he just spent the day staking out and breaking into a museum to watch his girlfriend endanger her life only to rescue his, it's a bad fucking day.
He walks ahead of her, still not sure if the hardness in his gut is coming from the alternating bursts of excitement and fear, or from being incapable in the field anymore. He is getting up there. She still handles herself fine, great, better than him and he realizes that he doesn't even know how old she is.
Dreams of marriage are just that. They're way to different, they're not even both from Earth, he would have so much to teach her, taxes, holidays, what's appropriate and inappropriate to wear, to discuss, to ear, in different settings. The IOA would have a fucking field day, they'd both lose their jobs and end up in his shitty little house hating each other.
But she reaches for him. Grabs his hand and he stops out of respect, maybe because if the tables were turned she would offer him the same civility. She doesn't say a word as her hand slides into his, and their eyes connect as she drops something into his palm, then struts by him like nothing happened.
When he glances down, his fingers are curled around the Clava in the Clava Thessara blah-blah-blah.
He's going to marry her.