A/N: I just realized that the page breaks weren't showing up on . I'm so sorry if the chapters read like a big garbled run on sentence. Also an FYI, only two chapters left.

Bring it all Back

Chapter 27

Qetesh

"I can't believe how fast they've grown." She stands at the edge of his patio while he fries up some burgers. It might be the last nice day of summer that they'll get between going off-world and the change of the seasons. "They're only a few months old."

She's talking about the sunflowers.

Convinced him to let her do a little planting in his backyard because it looked so bare. Sure, the yard has that grass that's so green it looks fake, and it's taken care of because recently he's become obsessive in the upkeep of his lawn. Maybe all guys just hit a certain age and become overly concerned with lawn care.

Didn't have to talk much to convince him, since their first year together, since the first summer barbeque he brought her home for, she's been talking about wanting to garden again because she used to when she was younger. He bought her a couple of packets of seeds and now the outer ring of his perfectly manicured lawn is a jungle.

He loves it.

Kneels with her knees digging into the edge of the soil, perfect white little shorts and bare feet. She's got Daisy braids and one of his dress shirts on. Still lays claim to his clothes when he's not looking.

"Maybe we're on a radioactive site."

She preens the dead leaves away from one of the flowers so large its head is starting to droop. "Do you think?"

"Well sunflowers are supposed to absorb radiation."

"That sounds like something the Daniels would know."

"Oh, I'm sure they probably do." Flips and presses a final time, then turns the barbeque off. "Come and get it while it's hot."

"Mmm, you don't have to tell me twice." She winks at him and he rolls his eyes. Her cheesy flirting an inside joke to them, but when she actually flirts with him, she barely has to say two words before he's in. Sometimes just the right raise of an eyebrow or a flick of her tongue over her lips.

They sit at the small patio table and eat outside. She tucks her legs beneath her on the chair cushion and he watches as she slathers four buns with ketchup and then downs two burgers without so much as a drink in between. "Hungry?"

"Starving." Speaks with a full mouth but then dabs at the corner of her lips to collect any stray ketchup.

"There's one left if you want it." Gestures back to the barbeque and watches her bound by in those little shorts. Hears the rustling of the bun bag and the snort of more ketchup. The burger is practically gone before she makes it back to the table.

Wants to ask her if she wants more, because he'll cook more. Wants to ask about the amount of ketchup she's eating and if that's her first craving. Wants to tell her there are ketchup chips down at the specialty convenient store that he can buy in bulk. Wants to ask anything about how she's feeling, or doing, but he's afraid too many questions will seize her up.

"Not feeding you well in the cafeteria?"

"Not as good as this, Cameron. You're a marvellous cook."

"Burgers, honey," Swigs back his beer, then opens the one he mistakenly grabbed for her because he's still getting used to the whole baby thing, it would probably help if they could talk about it. "They come frozen. All I did was flip them."

"Well you did that marvellously." Sneaks from her seat into his, and there's dirt underneath her fingernails when she plays with his hands. His blue dress shirt is tucked into her shorts, the loose material wrinkling.

"I don't like that you're still going on missions." Leans his head against her chest and she tickles behind her ear.

"I know, darling."

"I don't like the fact that I'm not there even more."

"Sometimes things just happen, you don't have to like them, but you have to go along nonetheless."

The sentence is cryptic enough to be straightforward. The tone, the insinuations. "Vala, if you don't want—"

"I don't know what I want."

He wakes up before she does. She's curled up under his arm, her legs kicking restlessly, bunching the sheets with the comforter at the foot of the bed. The noise she's making are almost words, he can make out some. 'Stop' in a Goa'uld dialect, but most of it is just tones, half whimpers followed by a harsh sarcastic scoff.

It's a common occurrence at night, whether they're in the house or stuck on base. Flails in her sleep, sometimes she works her way up to screaming before he has a chance to wake her. He catches her wrists when she starts to hit at him, collects them softly in one hand and caresses the side of her face with the other.

"Vala, it's all right. It's just—"

She bursts fully awake, smashing her forehead directly into his nose. He grunts in pain, his hand flying to pinch his nostrils, releasing her wrists and she takes off towards the ensuite, the door cracking off the wall.

"Vala." Throws the sheets off his bare legs and tries to regain his balance in the dizziness of what feels like a broken nose. There's another crack, this time of plastic against porcelain as he staggers to the ensuite, slapping on the light.

She's bowed over the toilet, throwing up three hamburgers, and the container of ice cream she ate for dessert. Tries to think of what he could say but can't really think of anything to make the situation better. Opens the medicine cabinet and shoves a pack of gauze up the lazy river leaking from his left nostril. Washes off the blood in the sink and fills a glass of water for her.

By now she's leaning on her arm against the rim of the toilet seat, her chest still heaving but not blowing chunks anymore. His touch to her shoulder startles her, she's hot and sweaty and falling a bit to sleep. "I promise I cooked the burgers through."

She manages a soft grin at him. "I promise you, that's not what this was for."

Helps her move to sitting on top of the closed seat, and hands her the water, which she takes in small gulps. She told him ten days ago she was pregnant, but it's still new to him, this is new to him and he doesn't know why she doesn't talk about it with him. He readies her toothbrush and handing it to her and shifting from the spot in front of the sink.

Watches her reflection, her pale skin, the redness in her suddenly awake eyes. "Vala—"

"I don't want to talk about it, Cameron." Spits the words into the sink, then swirls water from the cup in her mouth.

"Do you want to talk about why you don't want to talk about it?" Takes the mischievous route because sometimes giving her the runaround works, sometimes he's just so damn charming that she's the one who rolls her eyes at him and gives him a half answer.

Spits the rest of the water into the sink, washing out the basin, her head hanging. "No."

Not the full answer he was looking for.

She soothes his aching nose with little butterfly kisses, with stroking of her now cool fingers against his cheek and through his hair. Brings him some pain relievers from the medicine cabinet and apologizes in hushed coos that make his hair stand on end. Wants to tell her she can full out punch him in the face if she just lets him in. Just for a few minutes so he catch up on the score.

"You never told me what happened on the mission with the Jacksons today." He strokes her fingers, feeling them twitch against him as she fights to stay awake.

"Just visited the embassy on P3X-something-something-something, I wrote the report, it was rather uneventful."

"The Jacksons didn't even do something memorable? No new planet government screw ups?" Drops her hand to his chest where the fingers sprawl out, relaxed.

"They made a stink when I made a stink about being scanned before entering the parliament building." Her lips press together as she nuzzles against his shoulder, turning so his fingers drag idly over her stomach and he freezes, waiting for her to buck back but she's too drowsy to care.

Wakes an hour later to the same jimmy legs punting away the sheet and blankets to the bottom of the bed. Her eyelids fluttering, and her hands and arms twitching. He sighs, reeling his arm back in, ready to wake her when her eyes slick open and she calmly raises from the bed. He thinks she might be returning to the bathroom for round two, but she stands at the window, long hair flowing down her back, almost touching her clasped hands.

"Honey." Rubs a hand over his face forgetting about the newborn injury to his nose and hisses. "If you want to spy on the neighbors it's better to do when they're awake."

She doesn't turn away from the window, doesn't waver at all, he can barely see her breathing against the limelight of the streetlight. "What planet it this?"

"What?" He checks the clock and it's a little after two. Normally he accepts her weirdness, accepts it in strides especially since she came back with her confidence and her character shattered in pieces almost a year ago. "Please tell me you didn't lose you memory again."

"You dare to question me." In a flash her body leans over his in their bed, her hand dangerously tight over his throat before he can even react. "You are nothing but a sacrifice to satiate my demands."

She doesn't smell like herself, the scent of her floral shampoo, the usual creams she uses, the ketchup from earlier, the sour scent of vomit covered up by peppermint of toothpaste. Her hands are rougher, skin hot, fingertips pointed. Her voice is deeper than usual but not as deep as—

"Vala," squeaks it out against her rapidly closing fingers. There is no expression on her face, flat with the obvious intent of murdering him, eyebrows and lips slack.

It's a long shot, but maybe not.

"Qetesh?"

"You dare to address me directly." Releases him, he coughs against the rush of air. Her eyes are wild, not memory loss level of wild. "I should gut you and bathe in your entrails."

Well, that's a bit excessive.

Scrambles, sitting up in bed and she watches him like a jungle cat, half in the shadows, eyes trained on his movements. "Where's Vala?"

"You presume to ask me—"

"You're dead." His mind stumbles through scenarios. If she attacks him does he risk defending himself? Attacking her back? "The Tok'ra ripped you clean out of her."

"Then how am I still here Tau'ri?" She breathes in deeply as if to double check. "Yes, you are Tau'ri. And she is—" Another deep inhalation and her face contorts in disgust. "She is impregnated. The waste of a perfectly good host."

"She is not your host." He flips out of bed while she—it—hell—escalates and she eyes him like she did each of the hamburgers, with pure hunger. "You're dead, disintegrated. You're just the ghost of a personality haunting her."

"And yet I control her." To prove a point, she bobs Vala's arms in an almost hypnotic gesture, like some form of ballet. But the movements stutter, her voice cracks in and out, the remnants of Qetesh fading. "I—control her body, I am privy—to information—only she knows. She remains my—"

"You're the leftovers of a space parasite, and you're fading away." She collapses half onto her side on the bed, knees giving out underneath her, and he stalks her, circles around, watching her limbs go weak as she loses control until her eyes scan his. He kneels down beside her with a cocky grin. "She's not your host."

"And you—Tau'ri pest—are not this child's father."

He's tired as hell but knows better than to complain.

Drove to work at 0230, Vala in the corner of the passenger's seat chewing on her fingers, not saying a word. Tried to turn on music, the top one hundred pop station she loves so much, and it didn't phase her. Offered to pick up McDonald's breakfast that she usually hops in her seat for, and she didn't answer.

Walks her down the too bright white hallways leading to medical and the doctor charged with overnights, vaguely remembers Dr. Rix returning from the Sun Tzu and taking on the graveyard shift. They don't touch, can't touch with cameras around ever corner and privates running around with their minds all screwy from overnights. He can't hold her, so she holds herself, arms folded over her chest hugging the faded blue t-shirt that she dried for too long on the line in their backyard.

As they reach the med lab door, as eloquent as he never is with words, he thinks they especially fail him now. She stands ready to press the button for entrance, but stops at his half-words, more like the guttural sounds exiting his mouth. "Just—if anything—if you need anything—"

In a movement so skillful it's almost liquid, her lips are on his, and the kiss doesn't pack the same skill, doesn't showcase her abilities at all, but it does what it's meant to do—relax him. Sighs against her and ignores the want to press against her, instead he presses the button for her.

At 0430 the Daniels are up and wrecking havoc in the hallways. Sort of boxing him in with one on each side. He spent the last hour going over inventory request forms for the SGC teams, everything ranging from 'bigger guns' to 'little pointed erasers for the ends of pencils'. The hour before that he spent brooding in his office, teetering on the edge of falling asleep out of exhaustion, but every time he did he remembered her—it—Qetesh and it's dying words to him.

"I looked in the logbook—"

"We looked in the logbook—" Daniel Two oversteps in front of first and corrects with a half grin half glare combination.

Daniel One concedes with an understanding nod and restarts, "we looked into the logbook and you've been signing Vala out three or four days a week."

"So?" Questions half awake as he fumbles with the keys to his door. The words have no truth, from what Vala's willing to tell him about her time as Qetesh, the symbiote had no honor, making and breaking deals, making and breaking people, no one could trust her which lead to her being double-crossed and the eventual downfall of her empire.

"Ugh, well—"

"Would you care to explain?"

The door pops open and his office is dark and inviting like that cave they got caught in the rain in. He tosses his keys to the desk and skips the main lights for just his little desk one. His to-do list is partially started and none of it are things he wants to do. "No."

"Mitchell if you and Vala have a thing—"

"We know you have a thing—"

It is too damn early in the morning for the Wonder Twins to be this hopped up on caffeine and giving him the worst interrogation he's ever had. It's almost offensive how they expect him to pony up to a relationship he's hidden for almost four years. "Look, Landry approved to me signing her out." It's not exactly a full lie, Landry or O'Neill had to approve his request each time and unless there was a damn good reason they always did, the played it off as friends, partners in crime sort of. "She needs to get out of this mountain. She gets depressed, and she's been here for almost six years."

"So speak to the IOA about—"

"Then the IOA can—"

"They're too busy with Landry trying to finalize some sort of alien act." Remembers he's supposed to read the latest info package Landry sent back for him and adds IOA bullshit to the bottom of his list.

"An act?"

"What kind of act?"

"Quid Pro Quo, Sunshines." Undoes the lock on his bottom desk draw and slams a group of papers as thick as a phonebook to his desk. "You can read it, but I want more information about yesterday's mission."

"Well, we gave you all the info you need—"

"Just read the reports."

"I did, twice in the last day. And hers. Mysteriously, all of you left out the part about the scanner in the government building." He could really use a cup of coffee right now, but the acid reflux wouldn't be worth it. He should technically just be waking up and ready to jog around the neighborhood, trying to make it home before the streetlights turn off. Then if he's lucky, she's up puttering around the kitchen trying to make him a 'manly man's' breakfast.

She would give him coffee.

"What about it?"

"It's completely harmless."

When they reach to snatch the scrapbook Landry has painstakingly stitched together for him, he rips it away first, waving a finger at them and it's such a Vala action that if they already didn't know, it would give him away. "Haven't heard anything I don't know."

Daniel One sighs and glances to Daniel Two who gestures for him to take the lead. "It's an archaic piece of technology designed during the height of the Goa'uld empire."

"Basically, it uses high frequency, low radiation particles to make anyone hosting a Goa'uld known."

Daniel One picks up the conversation again. "The particles force the Goa'uld personality to the forefront of the communication centerl of the brain. Within seconds they would be easily identifiable among a crowd."

"And you two bozos thought that it wouldn't have any affect on Vala." He stands, still holding the dictionary sized layout of potential alien plans.

"What would it?"

"Vala has been symbiote free for over ten years at this point."

Pushes through them clustered at the side of his desk, and motions to them to get out of his office. They shuffle by him and wait in the hall. He tosses them the novel, and immediately Daniel One digs in with Daniel Two peering over his shoulder. They walk in sync, linked by words on paper down the opposite end of the hallway and towards their lab.

"Hey." Calls out and jogs the small distance between them. They're alert enough to stop, but both grimace at him for being interrupted so soon. "Did Vala ever talk to you about what happened to her when Athena got her."

"The first time—"

"—or the second?"

"Second." Checks his watch, the cafeteria might be open now. He could swing by the med bay, grab her and have a manly man's breakfast of greasy spoon eggs and thick hard waffles.

"No."

"Never said a word to us about it." Daniel One keeps his finger in place as a bookmark, they're already on page three.

Daniel Two sort of connects the dots to his question. "You think she's lying?"

"No." Knows she went through hell, knows she took it harder than any of the other times they pulled her away from violence. But in his mind, he hears Qetesh question the paternity of their child, and then he hears Vala start the simple sentence 'Athena and her boys'. That was over half a year ago and he knows it's got no play, but it might be more haunting that way. "I think she's not telling the whole truth."

Rix gives her the all clear, the digging up of Qetesh's latent personality, or whatever it left behind in Vala's brain receding according to an MRI and various blood tests. Knows they found out about something on the blood tests, but she hasn't shared that information with him. If she had an ultrasound or not, how far along she is and God, he wishes she would talk to someone.

They sit across from each other at a table in the empty caf. Workers are setting up for the day, for the impending rush in less than an hour when normal people wake up. He takes a sip of his coffee and it tastes like crap, and she pushes around very runny scrambled eggs on her plate.

"Not hungry?" Chances another sip, and it still tastes awful.

"I'm starving." Sighs into the side of her arm where she's resting her forehead out of sleeplessness, exhaustion, sickness, any combination of the three

Maybe it's the eggs, they're full of protein but stuff that washes away in the gutter looks more appetizing. "Do you want me to go get you a waffle?"

"No, it's fine, Cameron."

"They have chocolate chip ones, and blueberries, or—"

She pushes the tray away and her eyes are half-lidded, her words slurring. "I'm straddling being so hungry I could vomit and having an intense bout of morning sickness. I don't think I'll be eating until lunch."

"I could pick you up from your follow up with Lam." Toys with her fingers on the tabletop and expects one of her hidden grins, but there's no change in her barely there expression. "We could order in lunch, whatever you want."

"I think I might just take a personal day." Runs her hands through her hair, like she might rip it out, and then pauses, her eyes slipping closed briefly. "I mean if that's okay with you."

"Of course." It might delay a mission or two, but he knows the reasoning, the multiple reasons, and half of him wants to know. Really needs to know what's going on, healthy or not, boy or girl, his or not, from love or from—something else.

But then it really doesn't matter. They'll have a baby, or the won't. If it's his it's great and if not, well maybe he'll never know. Just needs her to be healthy, needs her to open up about it. He scoops up her hand, keeping it low to the table, but runs his thumb along her knuckles. "I'm here."

"I know you are, darling." She offers him a weak grin and it's not enough, it's not enough understanding. She doesn't get the implication of his words, didn't when he asked her to marry him either.

"No, I'm here. I'm not leaving." Play with her empty ring finger and knows this will last. Knows if they have a child, he's not going to care what Qetesh said. Knows in a year from now, things will be very different. "I'm in for the long haul."

"Cameron, I'm not sure you should be."

He shrugs, forgetting and taking another sip of his coffee, almost spitting it back out into the cup. "I'm here when you're ready to tell me things, or for when you're not. I know you've been through a lot, but talking about it has to—"

"I'm going to go lay down." She kisses the tip of her finger and pokes him in the nose, standing, swaying, barely awake.

He just has to be patient. He waited almost three years before he made a move on her, three long years where he just watched her switch between annoying the hell out of Jackson and flirting beyond reproach. Three years where he took her to meet his parents, where they danced at his high school reunion, where she somehow got him naked and chained to a hotel bed and left him with a twinkie, pay-per-view and a hard on.

And now they might be having a baby.

Or not.

They might get married.

Or not.

Just has to let her make the rules, because she's spent the majority of her life living under someone else's.