Getting rotated back Stateside is heaven enough, but getting rotated back Stateside right before Christmas is a gift from the gods, and Cameron Mitchell likes to think he's nobody's fool; he's got his ass on the next plane out and he doesn't even mind getting stuck at LHR while the airline tries to find him a seat, despite having been in transit for nearly two whole days at that point. It's Christmas rush, so there's nothing to anywhere even two hundred miles from home -- nothing to CLT, nothing to RDU, hell, nothing to GSP or TYS or BNA, even. But after a good forty-five minutes with a gate agent who's charmed by the drawl and the smile, he manages to finally score a seat on a nonstop to DEN with a promise of a standby seat to Charlotte on the 23rd, two days later.

He's pretty sure that Sam's already got her flight to Charlotte booked -- both Sam and Momma had written to him to let him know Sam was planning on making it out for Christmas this year, assuming she could get the leave -- but knowing her, she'd left her travel to the last minute. He's not at all sure what she's doing these days; all he knows is she's attached to NORAD, and in her letters, she says that she's having fun. But she's his next call after he updates Momma and Dad anyway, sitting on his duffel at the bank of pay phones, and he's positive he's mis-calculated the time difference when she picks up the phone.

"Thought I'd get your machine," he blurts, when he hears her hello.

"--Cam?" She sounds sharp and bleary at the same time, he realizes. Like she'd been asleep, and the phone ringing had jolted her awake. It sounds off, somehow, and he can't tell why. "Is that you? Where are you?"

"Heathrow. Looks like I'm gonna make Christmas after all. The airline couldn't get me back home, but they could get me into Denver in the morning -- are you all right, baby?" He frowns. "I didn't wake you, did I?"

She pauses, and he can hear some kind of shifting noises as the background sounds cut in and out. "No, I was just kind of dozing a little. You're coming here? Um, I'm booked on a flight in on Christmas Eve. If I can make it. I'm still not sure. There's a -- thing."

And that's wrong too, because "a thing" usually means a question about whether or not one of them is going to be able to get leave, and there shouldn't be any question about getting leave from a desk job to go home -- or home to your adopted family -- for Christmas. But he's on a transcontinental call, and he's not sure how much time he's got left on this phone card. "Can I beg a ride from the airport and a couch to crash on?" he asks. "The airline's promising they'll get me to Charlotte by Christmas, but I don't know exactly when."

She pauses. It's a little too long, a little too hesitant, but it could be explainable, if he just woke her up. "Um. Yeah. I don't know if I can come get you, but I'll send someone to pick you up. And -- of course you can stay here. Let me have your flight information."

It isn't until he's hung up the phone that he checks his watch and realizes it's eleven hundred on a Wednesday for her. And if she doesn't know if she's going to be able to get leave for Christmas, well, she wouldn't be home just because she wanted an early start for the holidays. He puts it aside, though, because they're calling his flight, and after all the trouble it took to get him on it, he's damn well not going to let it take off without him.

*

There's an airman holding a sign with his name on it when he lands, and Cam tries to make small talk, but the kid's having nothing of it; it's all "yes sir" and "no sir" and not much else for the hour and a half it takes to get to Sam's place. Cam has to fight the kid for his duffel when they get there; the kid seems to want to carry it to the door for him. (And there's something funny, he thinks, about thinking of someone who's maybe seven or eight years younger than him as "the kid", but he's spent the last five years seeing things that still weigh on him in the middle of the night, and the captain's bars aren't quite settled on his shoulders yet.) He rings the doorbell; there's a long minute before he hears footsteps on the other side, and the curtains twitch just a hair before Sam opens the door.

"Holy shit, baby," he says, before he can help himself, because she looks like the fourth day of a three-day pass. Her face is bruised and swollen, she's got a double shiner, her lip's split, and even in the dark and the streetlights he can tell the bruises aren't just confined to her face; she's wearing long sleeves against the winter chill, but he can see dusky marks along her wrists.

She grimaces, and then the grimace turns to a wince; the facial contortions must hurt like hell. "It looks worse than it is. Come on in before all the heat gets out."

He steps through the door she's holding open (and kicks off his shoes, automatically). "What in the name of God happened to you?"

And there's that weird fractional hesitation again, before she says, "Car accident. Really, I'll be fine in a few days. It doesn't even hurt, I promise."

He winces. The light's not all that great, but he drops his duffel and takes her chin in one gentle hand anyway, carefully tipping her face so he can get a better look. "Baby, you shoulda told me to get a hotel room," he says. "I don't mean to --"

And then he stops, because -- something's wrong again, and it takes him a second to put his finger on it. No cuts from broken windshield glass, but that could just be luck. There's a red and angry welt across her forehead, probably where she hit her head against something, but that part's not bruised and there's no swelling. Could just depend on how she hit, of course.

But those bruises on her wrists are too regular to be anything other than the result of restraints, and that makes him see red.

She's looking at him with resignation, like she knows what he's thinking, and that makes him even angrier. "You back with Hansen?" he asks. He tries to keep the censure out of his voice, but he's got about as much use for Jonas Hansen as he's got for tits on a bull, and he'd thought for sure she was done with him for good.

"What?" She looks confused for a second, then realization dawns. "No. No. Jonas is -- well. Jonas is dead." Good, Cam is about to say, I hope he's burning in hell if he did this to you, but she keeps going. "He was killed in action about -- five weeks? Six weeks? Something like that. I keep losing track of time. Cam, I know this looks bad, but really, I'm fine."

And damn, but she's lying through her teeth. He knows her; not only is that car accident story flat bullshit through and through, but so's the part about being fine. She's moving like everything hurts like a son of a bitch, and he sighs. Everything else can wait; time to get her off her feet before she pitches over.

"Show me where to throw my stuff?" he asks -- a temporary change of subject, and she knows as well as he does that he's not going to let it rest. But her shoulders ease just a little, anyway.

"Through here," she says, and shuffles along down the hallway.

It's a nice house; he hasn't seen it yet, hasn't gotten out here since she was reassigned out to the Springs, but it's got good solid bones and she's done nice things with it. He catches sight of the afghan Momma knit for her last year, thrown over the back of the couch, and it makes him smile. She leads him through the living area, past the kitchen, and down the hallway. "Bathroom," she says, reaching in the door and flipping on the light for him, and then stops and sighs. "And I haven't finished setting up the guest bedroom yet, so you've got your choice. You can have the couch, or you can sleep in with me."

Wouldn't be the first time they'd shared a bed -- platonically or otherwise; they've always been closer to family than lovers, but there's been more than a few times in their years of history when neither one of them was attached and one or both of them was lonely or needy. He tries to figure out if her offer was an invitation or just made out of nothing more than politeness, and then sighs and figures he's better off asking straight out. "Wherever you want me. If you're hurt, I don't want to be in the way."

It earns him a smile, one of her little ones, and she turns and keeps going. "Big enough bed," she says, and leads him on through.

It is, and the room looks like it catches the early-morning sun, which he knows she loves. He drops his duffel where she points and waits for her to give him some kind of cue; he doesn't want to push, but there's something wrong here, something off, and he's not going to leave it be completely. "Shower's through there," she says, gesturing -- and then wincing again -- to the master bathroom. "You must feel gross."

"Oh, hell yeah," he says, automatically -- she knows as well as he does how awful travel can be, and he can remember what feels like hundreds of arguments about who gets the first shower. "You gonna be okay if I go shower, though?"

She gives him a faintly amused look. "I have two black eyes and a minor concussion. I'm not bleeding to death and nothing's broken. I've been taking perfectly good care of myself for the past three days."

She'd written to him about some of the friends she was making on her new assignment; Cam wonders, darkly, where those friends are. He sure as hell wouldn't have let anyone on his team be making do for themselves while injured. But he lets that pass too. "Okay, then," he says, and then points a finger at her. "And I know damn well the next words out of your mouth are going to be wondering if I've eaten and offering to make something for me, and don't you even think of it. I'll feed us when I get out of the shower."

Sam winces yet again; this time, he figures, it's thinking about the contents of her cabinets, which he knows full well are usually empty. She doesn't cook -- lives on takeout and the mercy of others -- but he's always been able to scrape up something from what she's got on hand. "I'd better call for a pizza," she says. "I have -- less food than usual. I don't get to the store often."

"Uh-huh," he says, and tries to figure out why that simple fact is delivered in the voice that says she's hiding something. Then gives up, because there's just too damn much here for him to figure it out without getting into things that are best gotten into after the shower and the food. "Sausage and pepperoni on my half."

"Like I could ever forget," she says, and shoos him into the bathroom.

He comes out of his shower smelling like a rose garden -- literally; his baby girl has always been a fascinating contradiction, tough as dirt when she needs to be, grease and grime under her fingernails, but she likes to smell like a girl while she's doing it -- and dresses in the last clean t-shirt and pair of sweats he's got. She's curled up on the couch with a mug of tea, wrapped in Momma's afghan, and she's got her nose buried in what looks like a scientific journal. He makes a beeline for the kitchen. "Get you something?" he calls over his shoulder. He's never been in this particular kitchen before, but they know each other too well; they've never once been 'guests' in each others' homes.

"I'm good," she says absently, her mind clearly still on whatever she's reading. "Coffee beans are in the freezer. Or there's beer in the fridge."

That's new too; he's always had to bring his own beer before. But he takes one and brings it over, sets it down on the coffee table and settles himself on the other half of the couch, and she puts a piece of scrap paper in the journal as a bookmark and sets it aside.

"Hey," she says, smiling at him, and he has to smile back, because really, his heart never fails to overflow at the sight of her. "C'mere."

He holds out an arm, careful not to jostle anything that might be bruised or battered, and she flows up against him and tucks herself along his side. He rests his cheek against her hair, and she breathes out contentment and nestles herself comfortable.

There isn't any tension running through her -- or rather, there is, but it's pain tension and not the kind that comes from being in a bad place. So he feels like he can ask. "You gonna tell me what really happened?"

She sighs. "I would if I could. And I'm not just saying that. But there's -- things."

Things. Something clicks. Hansen was killed in action, she said. And he knows damn well she's not listed as Hansen's next of kin anymore; Cam made damn sure of that, when she'd finally wised up and dropped him like a hot potato. Therefore, she must have direct personal knowledge of Hansen's death. Therefore, she must have been there, or nearby.

Therefore, NORAD is pretty much a load of steaming bullshit, and whatever it is, it's a cover story for something that leads to injuries so bad that a car accident is a plausible explanation. To anyone who doesn't know her well enough to know she's lying through her pretty little teeth.

And it raises as many questions as it answers -- because who the hell gets himself KIA in the middle of Colorado fucking Springs, and how? -- but if there's one thing he knows, it's classified, and he knows how hard it can be when the people you love are pushing for a better answer. So he sighs, and she relaxes at the sound, because (he knows) she hears in it the sound of him fitting a few pieces together. "Okay," he says, and she relaxes a little further. "This is the sound of me not asking. But you'd tell me if you needed me."

It's not quite a question. He's sure she would -- pretty sure, anyway; she's a stubborn one, his Sam, and she's usually convinced she can handle the world on her own terms, right up until the world rubs her nose in the fact that she can't. But she's easy enough with him that she can usually find her way clear to letting him know she needs him, and that'll have to be good enough.

"It's complicated," she says, and then, a second later, "Thank you."

For not pushing, she means, and there's enough heartfelt emotion in it that he's glad he didn't. Which means that whatever she's into, she's still working her way around to being comfortable with it, and the last thing he wants to do is make her burden any heavier, so he just rubs his hand along her back -- gently, since he's not sure what's bruised and what isn't -- and says, "Anytime, baby. You know that."

"Believe me," she says, "I do." And hearing it, he's glad, suddenly, that the gods of commercial air travel dumped him here and now, because this is the kind of conversation you can't have in a house full of Clan Mitchell at the holidays. And it's apparently the kind of conversation she needs to hear, because she's pulling the afghan around her a little more tightly and leaning on him, like he's her anchor, which is pretty much exactly what he's always tried to be. He'd known from the first moment he met her that she was going to take the world by storm -- and that should have been his first clue, and long before he even got here to see her, because his baby girl's always been a rising star and there's no way she'd leave the Pentagon for a desk job in the middle of bumfuck Colorado if she didn't think it'd get her somewhere. And he's going places too, but he's not interested in going to the places you have to fuck over the people around you to get to, and he's glad, now, for the inconvenience that dropped him here instead of back East, because she's settling in like she's actually relaxing.

Until the phone rings, and she's bolt upright again, like it's the end of the world come to call. He rests a hand on her shoulder just as she's about to struggle out of the nest they've made for themselves. "I'll get it," he says, and she looks like she's about to protest, but he's already on his way to the kitchen.

"Carter residence," he answers. It's a cordless, so he's already making his way back to bring the phone to her.

There's a pause. "And who's this?" comes the voice. Slightly nasal tenor, not anybody Cam knows. Not that he'd know the sound of Sam's brother or father if he heard them, since he's never met them and from what Sam says he doesn't really want to, but the caller doesn't sound like family.

"Just a friend. Hang on," he says.

Sam's giving him the question-eyebrow; he passes the phone over. "Hello?" she says, and then her face relaxes. "No, sir, just an old friend from a few deployments ago -- no, he got routed through Denver. He needed a place to stay. Yes. Yes, sir. I know. I know."

Cam settles himself back down on the couch, picks up his beer. He's trying to pretend he isn't listening, which of course is futile, since she knows damn well he's listening. Must be her CO; judging by the sound of it, by the tone of how she's talking to him, she likes the guy. Is easy enough with him to put that little bit of snap in her voice, at least, even if they've just started working with each other.

"No, I'm fine," she's saying. Meets his eyes, rolls hers a little -- sorry, she's pantomiming. Gimme a second. "I'm fine. A little sore, but I'm better today. I'll be in tomorrow." Pause. "Yes, I will, I'm not sitting at home and staring at the walls for another day." Pause. "No sir, I'm not. I promise." Pause, longer this time. "Well, tell him he shouldn't. And no, I can drive myself." Pause. "I told you I'm fine."

Another pause, and then she makes an exasperated noise and pushes the phone at Cam. "He wants to talk to you."

Cam raises an eyebrow, but takes the phone. "Hello?"

"I don't care what she's telling you," the man on the other end of the phone says, "she's in no shape to drive. If you let her behind the wheel of a car before she gets medical clearance, I'll bust you to scrubbing toilets in Duluth. And try to talk her into taking tomorrow at home."

"Uh. Yes, sir," Cam says -- it's automatic; he has no idea who the man is or what his rank is, but that's command voice if he's ever heard it. "I --"

But there's a click and a dial tone humming in his ear, and he blinks, then turns off the phone and sets it on the table. "Well, then."

"Sorry," Sam says, with a little smile. "He's -- overprotective."

Well, Cam approves of people being overprotective of the people he loves, so he's not going to object. "You like him, though," he says.

She gestures, a bit helplessly. "He's ... something else. But yeah. I do."

Cam nods. Good enough for him. Sam's not the best judge of people in the world, and he'd like to actually meet the guy in order to confirm it, but this'll do for now. He still wants to know what's going on, but if Sam's CO cares enough to be threatening a total stranger over her welfare, it's a good sign that whatever it is, whatever it'll dump her into, she's got decent enough people watching her back.

Still. The bruises make his heart hurt just looking at them; nobody should treat his baby girl that carelessly.

Whatever he's about to say is forestalled by the pizza arriving, though, and in the fuss about who's going to pay for it (he wins) and the obtaining of napkins and paper plates and the spreading out of the pizza box on the coffee table, he lets it drop. He drags through his past few months for some funny stories, which is harder than he'd expected, and doesn't press her too hard for stories in return, though he does note with interest the few names she drops: Daniel, Janet. She speaks of them warmly, at least. Then it's on to family gossip -- Sam keeps in touch with Momma more often than Cam can, since she's Stateside, but Momma saves the good stuff for her weekly letters to Cam, so they've both got bits and pieces. And by the time the pizza's nothing but crust and bones -- Sam's appetite is just fine, Cam notices, which is something else to reassure him -- it's later than he'd realized and he's stifling a yawn against the back of his hand.

"Oh, God," Sam says, noticing. "How long have you been awake?"

"Couldn't tell you if I tried," he says. "I've been in transit for like three days."

She makes a small noise of sympathy and tosses her crumpled napkin into the empty pizza box. "Bed, then," she says, firmly, and stands.

He catches her elbow as she goes suddenly pale and looks like she's about to topple over. "For both of us," he says, and stands up carefully around her, making sure he's not going to tip her off-balance. He checks her pupils, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible about it, but by the face she's making, she can tell what he's doing.

But all she says is, "I'll lock up," and he nods and goes to dump the pizza box in the trash and wash out his empty beer bottle for recycling. He can hear the soft beep, beep, beep of the alarm system being armed -- then another, which makes him raise an eyebrow, because she's never been a suspenders-and-belt type. But no matter. She's turning down the bed when he makes his way into the bedroom, and she's stripped down to sports bra and boxer shorts. And he stops in the doorway, because damn, she looks like someone's been using her for target practice; she's a sea of scattered bruises.

"No wonder you're moving like you're eighty years old," he says. She starts, like she hadn't quite realized he was there -- and it's weird; he can see it, the way she flings her hand out towards the nightstand before checking herself and turning it into a reach for the bedside lamp. So. That's where she's got her clutch piece, then, and he files it away as another fragment of information, because she's never been jumpy like that. And it wasn't the twitch of someone who's frightened of her safety; it's the twitch of someone who's picking up reflexes she never had before.

"I told you," she says. "I'm --"

"Fine, yeah, yeah." He flicks off the overhead light at the light-switch by the door, throwing the room into nothing more than the soft glow of the bedside lamp, and crosses the room on soft feet. "You got any hand goop or anything?"

"Huh?" She frowns, and he makes a little hand-waving gesture at the pattern of bruises across her chest and shoulders.

"Hand goop. Lotion or oil or cream or something. You look like you could use a good rub-down."

"Hmm." She pauses, considers. Disappears into the bathroom, comes back with a tube of some cocoa butter stuff. "You don't have to," she starts, but she's handing over the lotion anyway, because she knows damn well he's not going to take it as anything other than the token protest it is.

"You just tell me if I hit anything that hurts too much," he says, and makes the little hand motion that stands in for "you get naked now".

She does, and he strips down too; he leaves his shorts on, but she keeps her house warm and he knows he'll overheat in the middle of the night if he sleeps in the sweats. They've got mutually incompatable thermostats, which is just another one of the thousand reasons they'd never work out as a couple. She pushes the covers out of the way and stretches herself out across the bed until nothing's resting on anything else the wrong way; he waits until she seems settled, then sits cross-legged at her side.

This close up, even by nothing more than the light of the small lamp, the bruises look even worse; he's not sure why she's not in the hospital still, especially if it involved a concussion, since he knows damn well that means she's seriously limited about what painkillers she can take. He squeezes some of the lotion into the palm of his hands, testing it for consistency -- it smells like dark rich chocolate, almost, a little sweeter -- and then smooths it over her shoulders, down her back, trying to avoid the worst of the injuries.

"Mmm," she says, and he can feel some of the tension slipping away just at his touch. He's always been able to make her relax, and that's one of the facts of life he cherishes. "Go lightly, okay? It's not all visible."

Which pretty much contradicts her "looks worse than it is", which says a lot, because this looks pretty damn bad. But all he says is, "you tell me if I'm going too hard," before he starts running his hands over her skin.

He's using the lightest touch he knows how, keeping careful watch on her face for any wince or twinge of pain, but he must have the sense of it, because her eyes slip shut as she pillows her face on crossed arms and looks like she's rapidly approaching bliss. She doesn't let people touch her, he knows; it's not part of the image she tries to project. But everyone needs a little tending every now and then, and she hasn't been here long enough to find someone who can give it to her.

He's tired enough, worn out enough, that the low light and the rich tease of the lotion's scent and the silken promise of her skin can lull him into a sort of meditation. Contemplation, really; the warm comfortable glow of knowing he can bring her some ease. He listens for her noises, the tiny gasps and moans and whimpers, leaning in a little more where they tell him he can and working the knots he finds there. There's a difference between whimpers of pain and of pleasure, and he only hits the bad ones once or twice before he gets the sense of what hurts where and how much he can push on it.

By the time he's worked his way down to her feet (the legs aren't as damaged as her top half, and he's glad, more glad than he'd ever admit, to see her hips and her inner thighs unmarked, but her ankles are bruised even worse than her wrists, and in the same patterns; whatever it was, then, whoever it was, had her in four-point, and she was fighting to get free) they've both slipped a little sideways, back into that sweet soft understanding they've had for each other's bodies since nearly the first moment they met. It's what lets him feel how her pain is receding, how her pleasure is taking hold, and it's what tells him the minute she relaxes enough to be aware of his hands as anything more than the thing taking away her pain.

"Mmm," she says again, as he digs his thumbs into the ball of her foot -- he's never met anyone in the service, man or woman, who couldn't use a month of decent footrubs -- and watches her toes curl. He's shifted down so he's sitting at her feet, and he has a perfect line of view: up her miles of legs, over the curve of her beautiful ass, along the shift and pool of her back (profane, almost, to see the markings there, like graffiti on the face of a masterwork of art), up along her neck and to the soft lines of her smile. Easy enough to leave it at this, he knows: nudge her over gently and stretch out beside her, douse the light and pull the covers over them both and stand guard over her dreams. Better for her, maybe. But the noises she's making, the way her body is leaning into him, tells him that she's aware of the potential for more, and is contemplating (drowsily, sleepily) whether to advance or retreat.

Still time to let her decide. "Roll on over, baby," he says, breaking the spell of silence that's descended, and nudges gently at her shin. She makes a small grumble of complaint, but she obeys; one long motion, and she flings one arm over her eyes to block out even the faint light of the room. He takes a moment to let his eyes rove over her, from the perfection of her breasts down to the soft swell of her belly and beyond, before reaching for the lotion again; he can tell she's aware of his appreciation, is enjoying it, in a way that's electric without being demanding at all.

They've had this for a long while, this attraction without urgency, and he thinks sometimes, from what he's heard from other men, that it's nothing short of a miracle; there have been women in his life he's wanted to fuck, women in his life he's needed to fuck, but Sam is the only woman he's ever known where, when they make love -- if they do -- it's nothing more (and never anything less) than a concrete expression of some connection he can't name, can't even define. He runs his hands over her ankles: carefully, oh so carefully; no pressure, no weight, just a wordless wish he could lift away the marks. She murmurs soft understanding and parts her legs, languidly, inviting him to make himself at home.

He settles cross-legged between her shins, inhaling chocolate and the warmth of her, and works his way up each leg in turn, section by section. By the time his thumb settles into the dimple of her knee, he's beginning to sense she's made a decision; by the time his hands are stroking over the tops of her thighs and her hips are beginning to press up against them, he's certain of it.

He's tired, so tired, but he'd have to be half blind or all dead to let this go by, not when she's allowing herself to ask it of him. He rests his hand on the top of her pubic bone, lets his thumb slide through her wet heat, brushing over her clit with the same light touch he's been coaxing her body with; an invitation. She murmurs soft nonsense and lets her legs open wider, welcoming his touch. He can feel the answering pull settling down in his dick, a pleasant pool of warmth and arousal, and he strokes her clit again, more firmly this time. She breathes out through her nose, sharply, and her lips part without sound.

"Before you get too far gone, baby, you wanna tell me where the condoms are?" he asks, softly. Without taking her arm from over her eyes, she breaks out into a smile -- he's not sure why, but the sight of it makes him smile back -- and waves the other hand in the vague direction of her nightstand. He circles her clit once more, soft promise, and slides over her -- carefully, so carefully -- to kneel up and open the drawer. He keeps one hand on her skin, trailing over her belly, not wanting to break that connection; she hums softly, then hisses as he hits one of the spots that tickle.

The condoms, when he finds them, are underneath the pistol and its clip; he laughs, because he can't not, and she echoes it a heartbeat behind. "Forgot 'bout that," she says, and lets her arm fall away from her face to give him a sleepy grin as he's wiggling his way out of his shorts. Her smile almost makes the bruises look less painful; she seems to have forgotten them, at least, though he knows injuries like that are too bad to simply fade away in the face of endorphins.

"It's okay," he says, returning the smile, "I know what to do with small arms," and she's laughing again and saying something incoherent about his arms not exactly being small when he takes his weight up on his elbows and slides into her soft and sweet.

And she turns her face into him and presses kisses against his jawline, and he lets his breath feather over her nose and her cheekbone, standing in for all the places he'd like to kiss away the pain, and she twines her fingers together in the small of his back and pulls him close even as he's trying to gauge where he can lean and where he can't. "Mmm," she says, and "Cam", and "yeah", all the half-pieces of sentences he doesn't really need. It takes him a minute to find their rhythm again, it usually does, but then something clicks and he's rocking into her, slow and gentle and suddenly urgent all at once, and she's sliding up to meet him and her fingers are beating a tattoo along his spine.

They've had good sex, and they've had great sex; they've had messy sex and frantic sex and they've taken the time to explore every inch of each other. But the times like these, the times when he might have to take care but he's doing so to give care -- well, he thinks those might be his favorite.

And he can feel her soaking it up, through her skin, that glorious and fragile skin wrapped around him and against him, and his arms are trembling with the effort of keeping his weight from adding to her burden but it's all caught up with the way her gifts to him, her trust in him, always makes him tremble. He breathes promises over her, says with his touch and with his body all the things they've never said with their lips, and she shudders and sighs beneath him, and it's all so slow and perfect and beautiful that when it builds too far, when it becomes too much, it's perhaps the first time in his life he's ever regretted coming, because he thinks he might like to stay like this forever.

But nothing perfect lasts, and so he slides away from her before he needs to collapse across her chest, but he keeps his one arm tucked beneath her breasts as he drops to her side, and she sighs with satisfaction, with satiation, and turns her face to meet his eyes. She's smiling, still, and something in her expression has unfolded; it makes his heart glad to see it, and he leans forward to brush her lips with his own. "You okay, baby?" he asks, out of habit if nothing more; he knows she is. She's aching, he can tell, but something inside of her has eased.

"Yeah," she says, blissed out, replete, and gives the ritual answer, "such a damn shame," and he laughs and rolls over to douse the light before fitting himself back against her, because the full sentence is "such a damn shame we'd kill each other the minute we tried to date each other." They're both thankful to high heaven they figured that out about ten minutes after they met; if they hadn't, they wouldn't have this. And he spreads his open palm out over her breastbone, cradling his hand against the beat of her heart.

He is thinking, as he closes his eyes and breathes in the scent of her hair, of how he will convince her to call her commander tomorrow morning and tell him she will follow orders and take the day off after all, and how he will borrow her car (which is, of course, perfectly fine and not wrecked at all; he knows this) and fill her pantry shelves and cook her the first real meal she's had in probably months, and how she will protest it all but her eyes will be laughing at him and she'll brush her fingertips over his lips in lieu of a kiss. And he'll make a nuisance of himself while she's trying to read, and she'll shoo him away and throw a couch pillow at him, and he'll take apart her kitchen and try to make sense of whatever non-organizational scheme she's allowed to build up in there.

And when they come to the close of the day and climb back into bed, maybe she'll roll towards him and maybe she'll roll away and pull him up against her to spoon, but either way, she'll be pulling him close, and that's comfort enough for him. Whatever it is that happens, whatever dangers she's committed herself to and whatever duty she's accepted, he hopes she understands that even if they aren't together, they're still not apart, and all she ever has to do is reach out a hand and he'll be there.

"Sleep well, baby," he says, into the dark, and he can just catch the edge of her answering smile.

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