A/N: Spoilers for 4x17 "Priority of Life"
They've done this before and honestly, experience helps.
Sam raids the women's locker room before he leaves the barn, since he can't get Donna or Winnie to do it for him—and he'd honestly feel weird asking them. Apparently now the Chief of Police knows he's sleeping with his teammate, but if Raf or Winnie start asking him about it, he's gonna go up a tree like a squirrel: towards the nuts.
Things Sam gets from the locker room: Hairbrush, one, and hair elastics, six. Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner, two bottles. Light moisturizer, one bottle; Neutrogena facewash, one bottle. Mascara, one... mascara.
Things Sam forgets in the locker room: Jeans, jacket, and shirt, one each. Shoes, two. Jewellery, assorted. He does remember to get her mp3 player out of her car, though. Tomorrow he'll bring Natalie to drive it home.
He takes an extra fifteen minute to stop by her house and get her jammies and panda slippers, largely due to sentimental value. It's good, though, because he doesn't remember her shoes until he's on the road to the hospital and she'll need something to walk around in, especially since her entire uniform has probably been incinerated or disposed of with the biohazard waste.
She's still out cold, but they let him in to see her.
The fact that she has anthrax in her blood is weighed down by the fact that they got to her early: the mask they put on her was antibiotic, not oxygen. They patched up her artery, though the scar on her arm will be a whopper, like the smooth and glossy lines on her abdomen where the trauma surgeons cut her open and the plastic surgeons pasted over the broken, ropy skin. He knows those scars intimately. They were livid and frightening when new, and she reopened one preparing to requalify for SRU, but the second time he saw them they'd sunk back into the skin and faded pink and white.
Ed and Greg and Dr. Toth had doubted he'd preserve priority-of-life in there. They might know Jules, but they didn't go to bed with her, and they didn't see those scars every time they did. They didn't wake up when those scars ached so much at night Jules rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom, to rub lotion onto them.
The first time he'd made love to Jules last summer, he'd put his hand on those scars and known some things about the two of them couldn't ever change. He had her on the condition that SRU didn't take her first. Rules weren't the important thing. Rules weren't SRU. He had her until the choice to do her job killed her.
And he didn't get to keep her at the price of who she was. He didn't get to rescue his girlfriend ahead of the police officer. If it was a choice between doing his job and letting her die, she wanted him to let her die.
He'd known that. Always known that. It was what he wanted too, from her. And to be honest, not to judge, but from looking at Ed and the Boss and everyone else on the team, he thinks that's he and Jules have going for them. If you weren't a police officer, you married a cop expecting on some level for your relationship to come first, and you resented when you got wedged into all the slots of time not taken over by the job. You didn't talk over and decide that priority of life comes first. That hot call overrides personal crisis, every time.
He knows now that Jules had blue blood and being a cop is who she is. They've spent days struggling with worst-case-scenario planning, both of them trying to figure out what to do if they end up like Wordy. If I'm not a cop, who am I? And of course they've got it more or less figured (Jules keeps wanting to run a private firm teaching tactics and negotiation, so other cities can benefit from SRU research, but she'll never do it while she's on Team One) but there's no kidding each other. Losing his badge, or her badge, for any reason, would be pretty devastating.
But it's still not easy to take Jules's cold hand and watch her chest rise and fall, and comfort himself that he did exactly right, and she'll approve when she wakes up.
Someone needs to call her parents, but right now he can't manage it. It won't be him. If Boss remembers, he'll do it, or Ed. Someone else can tell them that their daughter has anthrax, because Jesus, that sentence scares him.
He brushes her hair, where it got matted in decontamination and from being pushed out of the way in surgery, until it lies smoothly around her face on the pillow. He sets the pyjamas and panda slippers on the counter in her room, since someone will have to help her dress anyway.
And then because he's done this before, he goes and buys thirty dollars' worth of magazines and dumps them on her bedside table, then goes home to sleep and eat, so after the debrief he can see her again tomorrow.