A/N: Special thanks to KNS for giving me advice on how to write this chapter.

Bring it all Back

Chapter 22

PTSD

Everything was going so well that he should have known.

The Jacksons' main goal is analyzing the fabled housekey Vala managed to bring back, the devoted almost all their work day and overtime hours to dissecting the symbols and trying to make any sense of the translations in the context of the Clava thing. With Sam running Atlantis, Woosley having been permanently removed and now sticking close to the IOA, and Teal'c still playing clean up to the Cyclone Planet—every his communications back through his words grow heavier, deeper, and shorter, it left him and Vala galivanting around with SG-7 and P3J-505 trying to set up political ties in other cities, particularly in the capital, which was very far away from the museum they had sort of robbed.

Loved being back in the field, but more so loved being with her. Would sneak into her room at the inn, slip between the sheets next to her and pull her body against his and fall asleep with a familiar ease. If they were camping out, she and him took the same shift, aware that any of their teammates could rouse. She would chance leaning her head against his shoulder and he would play with her fingers. They would talk in whispers, sometimes about the missions, about prospects, sometimes about more serious things, their pasts, their futures.

He kept thinking about how stunning a certain blue gem would look on her hand as he traced her ring finger.

Sometimes they have to be undercover, and they pretend to be husband and wife in order to gain entrance into particular parties. She wears the same black dress from his high school reunion and he dances with her, pressing her closely with a hand on her back. She's as graceful dancing as she is avoiding lasers and triggers. He spins her, watching her dress fan out to her thighs and she gravitates back towards him, her head nestling against his cheek and against her ear his lips motion the words 'I love you'. She picks up on it because by now she'd have to be blind and deaf not to. She doesn't say it back, but she rubs her cheek against his and sighs.

Then he's back in command running plays for each team member, for each team, with over fifteen teams, with five members each. He's so tired he doesn't even bother doing the math. He knows he hasn't seen her in almost a week and he's starting to get grumbly because of it. A two years ago it would've been the lack of sex, but now it's the lack of her. Just getting up in the morning and wading through a floor full of clothing, trying to find something clean, not being able to finish a whole plate of nachos, not having to submit paperwork for signing her out, it's thrown him out of routine and if there's one thing he survives on other than her, it's routine.

Teal'c is acting commanding officer of SG-7 because Dumas not only got leave without pay for drunken shenanigans, but rumor has it that he also managed to knock up his babysitter in between missions. After a week of waiting for it, Teal'c finally walkies him and informs him that Vala's been captured. His heart jumps, but she's been on and off that planet for the last six months. So has he. SG-7 as a whole has been there on and off for the last eighteen months. She can also break out of most prisons so he's sure within the hour they'll walkie him and tell him everything is okay.

Teal'c does walkie him requesting for a mission extension.

He okays it and asks about Vala.

Teal'c goes radio silent.

"Shouldn't you be off micromanaging someone else?" Daniel One asks over his shoulder, he's wearing those glasses that flip down different lens to make stuff bigger and he's never looked more like a certifiable dork.

"Can't. SG-7 isn't back yet." He picks up what looks like a Faberge egg, it's light and wobbles in his hand. "What does this do?"

"Don't touch that." Daniel two snatches it from his palm and places it delicately back into a holder.

"Seems like you boys are getting along okay now."

Two glares at him, before tracing ancient writing on a blown-up picture of a temple wall, while One scoots to a whiteboard and begins writing down a sequence of numbers, then translates them into a planetary gate code. "We're still in the process of determining which one of us is the original."

"And how's that going for you rays of sunshine?" Pushes himself up to sit on the edge of the table but lands on one of their glasses. He grins cheekily before they burst into a full-scale Jackson explosion.

"Mitchell—"

"Are you kidding me?"

"What are you even doing here anyw—"

"Just get out and go back to—"

"Just because Vala is—"

"You two deserve each other."

They both yank him from the table, ushering him with pushes and grunts outside of their lab door before closing and locking it. He has the pass, he can easily pop back in to shit disturb, but it's not worth it without her getting the glee he does.

He'll tell her about it when she gets back.

She does get back.

Three days later.

She's not the same.

The people who got her when Jackson took her on that friendly dinner with the pretense of getting romantic got her again. The same Clava bullshit. Grabbed her from the team in a market place while they were shopping for supplies and information. Had her for four days and it looks like they had her for years.

He's in a meeting with General O'Neill, sent to watch over him like Super Nanny and make him double guess himself without saying a word, and Woolsey. Apparently, a plan is in motion that will make most aliens on Earth literal illegal aliens unless the proper paperwork is filled out through the proper channels. The whole thing seems stupid with advancements offered to them by aliens, but it's not really a concern because the two aliens he knows and cares about work for the military.

Then his phone rings with the news of her return and he doesn't try to hide his relief as he bounces up from his seat, interrupting Woolsey to tell him she made it back safely and he's needed downstairs. O'Neill definitely sees through it, but he doesn't give two shits, he's out of the room before anyone gets out another full word.

By the time he makes it down to the lab she's gone.

"Where'd she go?" Asks Lam as she sits straight-backed on a stool typing up notes.

"Who?"

"Vala." He does a spin taking in the room, a few officers in the beds to the far left, but most of the them are empty. "Did you already discharge her?"

"Oh," Lam scoffs and rearranges her notes, "she discharged herself."

"What do you mean?"

"She left against medical advice. Said she was fine."

"Was she."

"Cam, you know I can't answer that."

She's not in his room, he doesn't know why he checks there first, but if the tables were flipped he'd have gone to her room to wait for her. He runs down another flight of stairs and swipes his pass at her door finding her bent over her vanity dabbing gloss onto a big ol' fat tire of a lip.

"Vala."

"There you are, darling." Twists the gloss shut and grins at him. It's big and bright and she looks like shit. Her lip is split down the center and scabbed over, and her shiner is new, red and swollen but the bruise isn't bad yet.

"Are you okay?" Asks as she grabs his hand and snakes it around her waist, drifting into him. He drops his face to her neck and she's cold. Very cold. "I didn't know it was this bad."

"This is nothing." One of her hands, her non-dominant, sort of smacks him in the cheek as she tries to soothe him. He goes to hold her other hand, but finds it burdened by a thick cast.

"Are you okay?" Asks again while her lips ghost over the side of his neck in separate and distinct kisses. He can feel the scab on her split. "I didn't know it was this bad, I thought it was just a prison, that you could do what you usually do and—"

"Cameron, I assure you, I'm fine." The cold hand on the side of his face a and a hard cast that he draws his fingers over say something else.

"What happened."

"Athena and her boys got a hold of me, just as last time. How a system lord still has so much—"

"What did she do?" His hands skim her face, tracing over the cut in her lips before she dives into a kiss. It's harsh and wet and it must be killing her. "Vala—" hushes him with her mouth and he finds himself falling into the kiss. "Vala—tell me what happened."

"Later." Continues kissing him and her hand creeps up his shirt, tickling over his stomach.

"Vala." Retrieves her good hand by the wrist and then threads his fingers with hers. His other hand pushes her back just an inch, holding her in place. "I just want to—"

"If you want to help, kiss me Cameron." She doesn't pull away or press forward but is just tight against him. Her eye will be swollen tomorrow.

It's not the time to be doing this, it's the time for ice packs and heating pads and tons of pain relievers and telling him what the fuck happened so he knows how he should help her and who he has to break in half.

But she's here, relatively safe and a somewhat unhurt and those three nights when he couldn't sleep, trained not to toss onto that side of the bed away. "Believe me, baby, there's nothing that I want more than—"

"Thinking of you got me through it." Her eyes flit away like she's revealed a horrible secret about herself. After hearing about Qetesh, about Ver Isca, about Fierenze, there's not much she could tell him to make him balk now. "I knew if I could get to you, I'd be safe."

They have sex. He has to remind himself to go slow even after she tries to speed things up, even after she nips at his earlobe and his neck trying to get him to be a little harsher with his mouth, his hands, but he can't because there's bruising blotched underneath his splayed fingers across her stomach and all he wants to do is kiss it better, but that does nothing and means nothing. She tenses, not in the usual way, when she comes and he has to ignore the tears in the corners of her eyes.

Lam wanted her on bed rest, she refused. Gave her a low dose of antidepressants which she tossed into the trash, which he scavenged and stowed away for later. They broke her wrist, cracked a rib but she says she barely feels it anymore. She can't use a Goa'uld ring to heal herself because they healed her broken bones and then broke them again, her body is used to the pulse at this point, by the time she's able to use one on herself she'll be fully healed.

She's on leave for the week until she can be cleared by psych. He and Landry told her the doctor was away until the end of the week to give her time to heal, but the next morning he expected to wake up in bed beside her, she was already up.

He finds her in the Jacksons' lab, they're working back to back again dressed in the same outfit and maybe Jackson likes having another ego to battle his own even if it is his own. She's perched on a stool at the back of the room, scrolling through pictures on her digital camera retrieved from the planet. Her right arm hangs at her side, cast heavy.

"Princess." He grins at her and she does the same, her one eye is swollen shut. "Jacksons."

He gets caught up in some argument with the Daniels at some point and she slips out. He doesn't see her until that night when he goes to her room and finds her sitting on her bed watching an old sitcom rerun and drinking from a half empty bottle of whiskey.

It makes him uncomfortable.

"Where'd you score the hooch?"

"It's a military base, Cameron. There isn't very much to do here at night."

"You mean before I kissed you?" Sidles up next to her and she stretches her arms above her head, the liquid in the bottle sloshes, but never dribbles out.

Her body is still lithe as it sways against his, and when he rubs down her back, he swears he can hear her purr. "Very true, except I kissed you."

"Uhh, no Princess." The bottle is loose in her hand and he motions for it. She glances at it, then at him and chuckles, relinquishing it easily. "I definitely kissed you."

"Noooo," she stresses and then hiccups and if it weren't for the reason why, she'd be the cutest drunk. "I got you right in the middle of your sentence about how we wouldn't work."

"I remember that speech." They'd been dangerously flirting for months starting with when a bomb exploded, and he reacted by tackling her out of the way of flying debris. Something about her body, even in clunky in BDU gear, felt right underneath him. Other missions made their friendship tense, their emotions obvious to them. Her bartering for him on a planet where he was captured to be used as a slave. Him shooting some asshole in the head the minute he held a gun to hers.

They'd been skirting around the subject for months and when she finally brought it up the army boy in him told him it was against protocol. He was team leader, technically her boss, though God, he would never say those words to her, and he already worried about her enough without—

Then he saw her face, and the way it fell. Not on a huge scale, a barely noticeable flinch like her heart had actually been crushed by his words and he never wanted her to look at him that way again and in that second he made the decision, stopped talking, stopped letting the rules and routine dictate his life and he bent and kissed her. He could taste the surprise on her and when she kissed him back, it just felt right.

"I remember stopping the speech to kiss you."

"Stop the speech and kiss me now." Grabs the collar of his t-shirt and reclines back on her bed, the tv flashing white light over her bare legs.

He stands the bottle against her bedside table and runs a hand from her shin to her hip. "You wouldn't be using me as a coping method—" his hand scoops under her lower back sliding into the band of her panties. "Would you, baby?"

"You're not my coping method, Cameron." Kisses his throat and tugs again at his shirt. "You're my comfort. You're my safety. You're everything I care about."

He's got to do something with that ring.

A/N: While the PTSD isn't fully flushed out in this chapter, it will be prevalent in future chapters.