It takes her longer than she'd admit to stop counting the time.

Lt. Col. Cameron Evangeline Mitchell walks into Cheyenne Mountain at 0600 on a grey and dreary Monday morning, eighteen months, two weeks, and one day after they told her that she'd never walk again. (Eighteen months, three weeks, and three days after she spent an unknowable period of time lying in a cracked cockpit on a field of Antarctic ice and snow; those nine days are lost to her forever, in a haze of unconsciousness: surgery after surgery, drugs upon drugs.) She discovers, upon arriving, that she has been promised a pig in a poke and somebody took back the pig.

Her new commanding officer, General Hank Landry, spends twenty-one more minutes welcoming her to Stargate Command after telling her that she's not here to join SG-1, she's here to lead SG-1. Which does not currently exist. Landry smiles at her like she's a pretty little girl (she's used to that) and tells her, by what he says and what he fails to say, that he's an asshole. It's all right. She's used to that, too, and she's got a thousand different ways to deal with it. She stands at perfect parade rest, listening to Landry bluster, and thinks that she will never again take for granted the experience of standing with her spine straight and true, her hips canted just right to bear the weight of her body, her hands clasped gently in the small of her back.

Pick your team, Landry says, and Cammie finds herself thinking: dammit, I already had.

Sgt. Harriman calls her Colonel Mitchell and she gives him a double dose of her very best smile and tells him to call her Cammie. There's a big difference between respect and formality, and she can already tell that Landry's the type who'll stand on formality, with or without respect; she also knows, from what Sam Carter's let slip over the past few years (three years, six months, and twenty-one days since the boys with the briefcases came calling and told her they were going to let her fly), that this is the kind of command where you get the respect from everyone else by not insisting on the formality.

(The Snakeskinners had been like that. By six months in, her callsign had been unanimously chosen for her by the rest of her boys and girls; most of them were calling her Mama Bear full-time, not just on sortie, and they'd sass her on-air 'til she threatened to wash their mouths out with soap, and she misses them, more than she misses that half of her left little toe, more than she would miss breathing. And she misses each and every one of them individually, but more than that, she misses the gestalt they'd built between them, because the sum was greater than its parts. She picked SG-1 because from what Sam had said, from what she knew, it's the only place she'd have a chance in hell of ever finding it again, because commands like the Snakeskinners come along once in a lifetime if you're lucky and Cammie knows she's used up enough luck for another five lives.)

Landry's lucky she was too shocked to say anything more than yes, sir. She's never taken kindly to having the rug yanked out from under her feet, not when she's dared to let herself hope. She is going to skin Sam Carter for a throw-rug when next she sees her; Sam hadn't mentioned any of this.

Sgt. Harriman's first name is Walter. She falls madly in love with his organizational superpowers within the first fifteen minutes; she thinks he might be falling equally in love with her in return. He tells her about his wife (divorced) and his kids (three; his ex has custody, he gets them for summers, since his ex and the kids live in California) and his hobby (model train collecting; she makes a mental note to put him in touch with her cousin Peter, who has every catalog known to man and some that aren't), the entire time he's getting her set up in her new office. She laughs in all the right places and helps him carry in the boxes of files Landry sent her and finally sits on the edge of the desk and works the conversation around to SG-1.

In between describing what her next three weeks of General Training and Orientation is going to look like, Walter's all too happy to share the gossip with her. (She's pretty sure she's identified one of the major gossip hubs, which is good; she always tries to do that on the first day of a new assignment.) Landry already told her, but she wants Walter's impressions. Sam (the fucking weasel) is at Area 51, doing research. Master Teal'c has gone to Dakara, where he is working on building the new Free Jaffa Nation. Dr. Daniel Jackson is leaving for Atlantis on Daedalus in twelve hours, and is packing up the last of his office.

When Walter's left, Cammie lets herself stare at the wall for no more than ten minutes, while she lets her mind tick over everything she knows and every weapon she can conceivably wield.

'Dr. Jackson', to her, is a collection of out-of-this-world gossip trickled down to Nowhere Field (they weren't supposed to have clearance for all of the details from the SGC, but gossip is one thing in this man's Air Force that transcends shoulds and always will), a few stories from Sam (the times they managed to catch up with each other before The Accident, which will always have capital letters), and a dimly-hazed recollection of the obligatory "thank you for saving our asses" hospital visit. The reality turns out to be a distracted man with an industrial-sized vat of coffee to hand, a really good library, and a tendency to stub his toe on the crates that are everywhere in his office. "Colonel Mitchell," he says, after a minute, when she wanders in and leans her hip against the lab bench. It has the aura of someone who's pleased to be able to remember a name.

"Cammie," she corrects, easily. She sticks out a hand; he takes it, after another half-second tape delay. His handshake's strong, not the half-assed version that so many men use when they're shaking hands with a woman, and he doesn't do the thing where he acts silently shocked that she's got that much of a grip on her, which endears him to her immensely. "Glad I got a chance to talk to you before you go, Dr. Jackson."

"Daniel," he corrects her, and she unleashes the second-best-smile (she's saving the best smile as a backup reserve weapon); he looks gratifyingly distracted, although it might just be that he's still caught up in the logistics of getting all this up to Daedalus's holds. "Ah. It's good to see you --"

Up and out of that bed we all thought you were going to die in, it's going to be -- even if those aren't the words he was about to use -- and so she cuts him off, fast, though not roughly. "Thanks," she says. There's another blip of tape delay while it makes its way from his ears to his distracted brain, and then she's rewarded with a sudden rueful understanding blooming in his eyes. It will, she thinks, be the last time she ever hears anything of the like out of his mouth. "Give you a hand with all this?"

He stands in the center of his office, a book in either hand, and studies her face. "As long as you're not going to try to talk me out of going," he says, with a belligerence that's got nothing to do with her and everything (she thinks) with a set of battles she wasn't there for.

She files it in the back of her mind -- living legends, sore subjects, for the avoidance of -- and shakes her head. "Naw," she says, and she's never bothered to try to lose her Carolina drawl the way so many women she knows has, because it's always set people at ease, and she can see it working on him just as much as it works on everyone else. "Wouldn't dream of it. Point me at what needs packin' up, and I'll be your hands for a while, if you'll let me pick your brains in exchange."

It's deliberate bait, dangled in front of him -- she remembers enough of Sam's stories to think that an appeal to his intellectual curiosity is the way to go -- and he swallows it easy as sugar. "Ah, sure, yeah, you can just put these books in this crate -- be careful, though, some of them are worth thousands -- and -- what do you need?"

"Information," she says, as simply as she can. Casual, casual. He frowns at her, puzzled. She turns around and starts packing books, cradling each one as carefully and reverently as she'd hold a newborn cousin. "Well, you might not know, but General O'Neill promised me I could have any assignment I wanted if I made it outta that bed --"

"That sounds like Jack," Daniel says, in an undertone.

She keeps going. "--and, well, I asked for SG-1. Because I wanted the best. An' I got here, an' I met General Landry --" A snort from Daniel tells her all she needs to know about Daniel's opinion of the man; she files that away, too. "An' he let me know that, well, General O'Neill mighta honored the letter, but not the spirit."

She sets the next book in the padded crate, turns around, and spreads her hands. "You're lookin' at the next commander of SG-1. Or so they say."

Daniel's face is a study in careful control, but she can tell that hit a nerve and struck deep. She just can't tell why. "Ah. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, that sounds like Jack, too. Congratulations."

This is the kind of conversation where she totally has to wing it. She hates those. But something tells her that it's all right (more than all right) to let show a little bit of the anger she's been tamping down all morning, and when she does, there's an answering spark in his eyes. "It isn't right," she says. She keeps it calm and flat -- if she starts shouting now, she's going to scare him off -- but the temptation to shout is so huge that some of it must be creeping into her tone. He's staring at her. "It ain't right, and it ain't proper. SG-1 deserves better. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I'm not good; I am. But I ain't the best. And SG-1 deserves the best."

Her words are hitting a nerve; she can tell. She makes herself rein back the anger. (Because it is anger; anger at General O'Neill for not telling her, anger at General Landry for being so callous, anger at the whole goddamn universe for promising her a shot at everything she never thought she could have again and then taking it away before she even got to snatch at the brass ring; but while faint heart ne'er won fair maiden, fucking pissed ne'er won fair archaeologist, so -- get a hold of yourself, Mama Bear, and go punch things in the gym once you've punched out for the day.) "But I'm what SG-1 got," she says, holding his eyes. "An' if I'm not gonna disgrace it, an' I will by God not disgrace it, I need to know what I'm gonna be up against. An' I'd like your help in choosing my team, because General Landry dumped a bunch of file folders on me and told me to have my names in to him by the time I get out of General Training and Orientation and I have no earthly idea what I should be looking for."

The look he's giving her is its own reward. "I," he starts, and then stops himself again. "Well. That's unexpected."

"Yeah," she says, wryly. "Welcome to the SGC, Walter says. They're sendin' me offworld on Friday. Friday."

It's panic, then -- the perpetual peripatetic refrain of not good enough not fast enough not smart enough not strong enough -- and she cuts it off at the knees, because she cannot afford to give it time right now. Later on, she'll go curl up in a ball in the shoebox apartment the SGC's relocation service found her -- she hates it already, but it's a six-month lease -- and shake for a few hours. But not yet. She runs her hands through her hair. Daniel's face is a study in conflicts. "That's standard," he says. "We, uh, figured out really fast that if we don't put people through the Gate as soon as they get here, they build it up in their heads until it's a huge thing, so we send them through on an easy mission as soon as we can."

By we, she thinks, he means I; she's pretty sure that's the sort of thing he'd notice. Usually it'd be the job of a command's psych staff, but Sam had been scathing and scatological about the headshrinkers here. "I need your help," she says, quietly, but with conviction. "I know you've probably got fifteen billion balls in the air, and I know you're shipping out in twelve hours or so. It's not fair of me to ask. But I'm hoping you can see fit to cram ten years' worth of lessons into my head in a few hours or so, because they won't let me call it something other than SG-1 -- I tried -- and I will not shame that name."

The silence between them is soft and quiet. She wonders what he's thinking. She can't read him, nothing more than surface impressions, but she thinks there might be approval there, buried deep. "You'll be all right," he says. "If you can see that, you'll be all right."

"Like to be more than 'all right'," she says. "I know the odds as well as you do, Dr. Ja -- Daniel. And honestly, giving SG-1 to someone who's still wet behind the ears and doesn't even know if she's gonna be one of the seventy percent who winds up crazy or dead -- or crazy and dead -- is a slap in the face to every man and woman in this command, an' I tried to say no. But --" She makes a little hand gesture calculated to convey what can you do? Then she plays her last card. "Please. Help me uphold what you spent ten years building."

It's the God's honest, but it's not all of it. Once she'd stopped raving on morphine, once she was self-aware enough to recognize the concept of 'classified', General O'Neill had given her a choice: pack off to Wally Wonderful and forget any of this had ever happened, or stick it out at the Academy hospital -- where they had access to what little bits of offworld medical technology the Program had managed to beg, borrow, or steal, where everyone in Secured Medical had some level of clearance -- and stay with the Program. Hadn't been a tough choice at all. He'd gotten her extra clearance, too, and she'd saved all the tales of SG-1's mission reports, even the stripped-down ones she'd been delivered, as a fairy-tale bedtime-story reward for good behavior. Got her through more than one tough spot, learning all the truth behind the gossip, learning what she and all her boys and girls had flamed out to defend.

It's not hero worship. She knows it's gonna be called that, as time goes on, and she's all right with being misunderstood that way. It's easier to be misunderstood than to explain that she wants, needs, SG-1 to stay standing, to stay the best, because SG-1 might have been lightning in a bottle that can't ever be re-captured, but she needs to know that whatever form the new SG-1 takes, it will be exemplary. Because 'SG-1' is two letters and a number, but it's also a symbol -- the human mind needs to personalize things, needs its banners to rally under -- and anything less than the best will be an insult to the memory of the boys and girls who rallied under that banner and sacrificed their lives to save the world.

Something in Daniel's face says that he might understand all the things she isn't saying. He looks around himself, at the artifacts of a life being packed up and stowed away (again, from what she knows), and just when she thinks that's it, she's failed, he nods, once. Slowly. "All right," he says. "Stop me if I'm going too fast."

He does -- go fast, that is -- but she hangs on tight and listens to his every word. Really listens, fierce and unyielding, and more than once as they pack, she gets the impression that he's expecting her to be trailing miles behind him in his contrails. He's used to being tuned out, she thinks, and that puzzles her -- he's brilliant, both quick and fast, leaping from history to sociology to anecdotes to advice like he's skipping over rocks in the creek behind her momma and daddy's house, and he seems to be constitutionally incapable of finishing the same sentence he started, tangling himself up in asides and parentheticals. It is an effort to keep up with him, and she wishes like blazes that she had a tape recorder or a notebook or something to cram his words into memory forever and eternal. Listening to him isn't easy. But she can tell that he knows what he's talking about. Knows it cold. And the thought of someone not listening to him just baffles her, because she can already tell that what he's saying is going to save her life someday.

She's frantically trying to shunt information from short-term memory into long-term: names, factions, intelligence. It'll all be in her briefing materials, she knows, but he was there, and he lived it, and she knows from reading between the lines of SG-1's mission reports that there are things that just plain old don't get written down. She isn't going to let him walk out of here without grabbing the chance to get every last scrap of information out of him, because once he's gone, he's out of her reach; communication to Pegasus is nigh-impossible. He's up to the point where he's trying to describe the entire sociopolitical makeup of the post-Goa'uld-Empire galaxy when he breaks off and sighs. "This isn't going to work," he says.

"I'm listening," she says, automatically. He hasn't stopped to quiz her on anything he's said so far, but he's been surprised each and every time she's asked a question, pulled together two things he's said to leap ahead to a third he hadn't gotten to yet. "The Lucian Alliance. Gavros is the one that we've been trying to make nice with, behind everyone's back, isn't he?"

She's managed to surprise him again, and there's a little bit of respect dawning in his eyes. "Yes, but that's not what I meant. I meant -- this. There's no way I'm going to be able to teach you everything you're going to need to know in one day. No matter how fast you are at picking it up. And we haven't even gotten to the people available for your team yet."

Cammie ignores the warm soft glow his compliment leaves her with. It's easy; it's counterbalanced by the cold feeling the rest of what he's saying strikes in her stomach. "It's what I've got," she says. "Between what you can give me now, and what I can drag out of Sam -- if she hasn't unplugged her phone by the time I'm done with her -- it'll have to be enough for me to get by."

Daniel looks confused for a second, and then light dawns. "Right, right, Sam told me that you two know each other. But -- Okay, look." He takes a look around him, at all the boxes and crates and debris. "The Daedalus is on a two-and-a-half-month schedule. Three weeks travel, four weeks there, three weeks back." He takes a deep breath; his eyes are distant, and a little bit sad, as he lets it out. She wonders what he's seeing. "I'll go talk to General Landry. I'll take the next trip after this one, and I'll go along as a consultant for you for your first few missions, and in the downtime, I'll tell you everything I can."

Her heart leaps. She hadn't been maneuvering him to this point -- not consciously, at least, and everything she's said had been the absolute truth -- but she won't deny that the rush of relief is sweet indeed. Ten weeks. She can learn a lot in ten weeks. And who knows what else the ten weeks will bring for them. Plenty of things can change in that time. It had only taken ten hours for her world to rain down around her ears.

"I'd appreciate that," she says, quietly. "More than I could say."

"Yeah, well." He smiles, a little ruefully. "It'll give me time to pack up the rest of this stuff without being afraid I'll miss something. UPS doesn't deliver to the Pegasus galaxy."

She laughs, softly. The look on his face when he hears it is soft and contemplative. "Yeah, and Daedalus is a bit more unwieldy than a brown van." She slides off the lab bench -- she had been sitting on it, her feet tucked up underneath her, wrapping artifacts for transport -- and sticks out her hand again. "You got yourself a deal, Daniel. If General Landry gives you any crap, you let me know, and I'll go to bat for you."

"I can take care of it," Daniel says. The look that passes between them, wordless understanding, tells her plain as day that Daniel Jackson has also realized that Landry's an asshole, and has about as much use for the man as he has for tits on a bull. Which is another important piece of information, and it tells her that she's going to have to win the trust of the oldtimers here pretty damn fast, to find out what else isn't being said. Cammie might have only been in the same room as General O'Neill six times and talked to him on the phone another handful more, but she'd be willing to wager a month's paycheck that he wouldn't have picked someone Daniel Jackson disapproves of this much unless there'd been greater issues at play, and the last thing she wants is to put her foot into a pile of steaming political bullshit by accident.

Deliberately, sure, that's another thing. But she's new here still, and she isn't going to go rushing blindly in where angels fear to tread, because she has never before in her entire career been more painfully aware of the honor and privilege she's been accorded. Time enough to start tugging strings later.

"My office is 'round the corner from the control room," she says, seeing him nod (must be that he already knew). "Probably won't be in it today, not for much longer than it takes to drop things off here and there -- Walter promised me a full tour after lunch, and I'd like to take the time and do it up right." By which she means talk to everyone, smile pretty, get to know as many people as she can. It's always the first thing she does when she's stationed somewhere new: get a feel for the ebb and flow of the people, not the process, because process is driven by people, and once she knows the people, she'll be able to figure out the process instinctively enough. "But -- Let me buy you dinner tonight, as a thank-you? You can tell me what restaurants are worth trying, and let me pick your brain a little more. The part we can talk about in public, at least."

She's rewarded with his smile again, sweet and a little shy. "Ah, sure. Come on by around nineteen hundred."

It's a little bit later than she'd been thinking, but she's already painfully aware that twelve-hour work days are going to be the rule, not the exception, for her forseeable future. "Sounds good," she says.

She's whistling as she takes her leave of him. She's still furious, still cold and scared and uncertain. But at least now she has a guide. And she has never, not once in her whole life, shied away from a challenge.

*

Fifty-two hours after Cammie first sets foot in the SGC, she finally manages to get Sam on the phone.

Okay, it's not the phone, not exactly; it's a secured video feed, because Sam (bless her) is currently in orbit, on Prometheus, working (apparently) to integrate some technology the Asgard finally deeded over to Earth. Which is par for the course, because in all the time Cammie's know her, Sam Carter has had her head in the clouds; why should now be any different? And Cammie's gotten over the scared by now, drowned it in papers and records and rules and the juggling the names and faces of fourteen hundred new people, but she's still working off a bit of the mad, so her voice is more than a little snappish as she says, "Forgot to tell me a couple of important things about my new assignment, didn't you?"

To her credit, Sam looks chagrined. "I didn't get the chance," she says, and then makes a face. "Okay. I was too chicken to tell you. I'm sorry. How are things going?"

Cammie's never been able to stay mad at Sam for long. Known each other for fifteen years, they have, and fought like cats and dogs for three-quarters of it -- they disagree on a hundred points of doctrine both major and minor -- but it's always been the kind of fighting that's laced with love; Sam Carter is a sister to her, has been for a long damn time, and you can't hold onto your mad against family. "I'm holding up," she says. "They've got me scheduled for the milk run Friday morning. Delivering a couple of anthropologists to P5N-J43 -- the Myrmiatians." And you can't hold onto your mad against family, but you can take revenge, so Cammie smiles pretty as she adds, "Thank God Daniel agreed to take the next boat, stick around an' babysit me for a few months. I feel so much better knowin' he's got my back."

Sam's always looked like an idiot when she's gaping like a fish. "He what?" she splutters. Then her eyes narrow. "Cameron. What did you say to the poor man?"

Cammie holds up her hands. "Nothin'!" she protests, loudly enough that Walter -- who is studiously not listening in on their conversation -- nearly flinches. "He offered."

"Uh-huh," Sam says. "Well. Don't you even think about trying the same Jedi mind trick on me. I've known you too long for it to work."

"Wasn't gonna," Cammie says. Oh, it's been a long time since she could have fun like this; she's missed it. "Just called you up to bust your balls about not tellin' me we weren't going to get to work together again."

"Uh-huh," Sam repeats. "Well. Try not to get Daniel killed. General O'Neill gets cranky every time it happens."

It says something, Cammie thinks, that there can be an "every time" in that sentence. So many of all the changes she's noticed in Sam in the last ten years, all the little things you can't add up or quantify, can be traced back to that single joking phrase. She wonders what she'll be like, when this job is finished changing her. "Do my best," she says, and she tries to keep it just as light as Sam's comment to her had been, but she can't deny that there's a cold hard knot in the center of her chest whispering worst-case scenarios and Antarctic snow over and over again.

Maybe Sam can see it, because she makes the I've-said-something-incredibly-tactless face. Cammie knows that one really well. "Sorry," Sam says. Cammie's opening her mouth to interrupt -- she really does not want to go there, not right now, not with everyone listening in -- when, on the video feed, Sam's head snaps up as some indistinct Charlie-Brown's-teacher mumble comes faintly through. "Crap, I gotta run. I'll call you later, okay?"

"Wait a sec," Cammie says, before she can stop herself. There's something comforting in having the familiar face there, staring right back at her; it makes her feel a little less like she's fallen through the looking glass. She wants to grab every second she can get. "Called you to ask you if you'd be around to take my calls when I need you to hold my hand a bit. When's the next time you'll be dirtside?"

"Should be back down next week or so," Sam says, as she's getting up. "If all goes well."

"Make you dinner," Cammie offers. She's been bribing Sam with food for years.

Sam grins. "Deal. Good luck with the Myrmiatians. Don't drink anything Chief Satrial offers you, especially if it's the purple stuff. It's not really a mortal insult to decline, no matter what they say; they just like to tease the newbies."

Watching Sam's face blink out as the screen goes to black is more depressing than Cammie wants to think about. She leans back in the chair, pinches at the bridge of her nose. "Hell of a goddamn job it is, Walter," she says, in an undertone.

Walter doesn't even bother to pretend he isn't listening to her now, which kind of makes her love him a little more. "That it is," he says, and hands her a file folder. "Your afternoon schedule, ma'am."

She hasn't managed to get him to call her "Cammie" yet, but they've compromised on "ma'am" as an acceptable alternate to "Colonel". She likes the guy, a whole damn hell of a lot, and she thinks he likes her; he doesn't keep track of appointments for many other team leaders, not that she's been able to tell, at least, and while it might just be that she's new, she hopes it's a sign of affection. Walter is one of Nature's sergeants, and Cammie knows the type. Is related to a bunch of the type, from Great-Uncle George on down, and Great-Uncle George would reach across the country and pin back her ears if she didn't show proper appreciation. So she gives Walter a sunray smile and vows to bake him cookies as soon as she's done unpacking her boxes into her apartment's kitchen. (Which sucks. A lot. But it's where the SGC put her, and she's good at making do.)

"Thanks, honey," she says, already flipping through it. "You're a peach. Peter email you back about those catalogs I was gonna have him send you?"

Walter's eyes light up, and they kill a happy and cheerful five minutes talking about what-all Peter's promised him. Cammie doesn't give a good goddamn about model trains, but Walter does, and she's always loved hearing people talk about the things they're interested in; you never know when it might come useful to know, anyway. She heads to lunch with a light heart. Some good people here, and she'll be happy enough to stay.

If she stays. If she's not one of the seventy percent.

Yeah, she's starting to understand what Daniel had meant about those cold feet.

She'd done her preliminary Offworld quals at Groom Lake before reporting to the SGC for real and true, so she knows all the protocols she's going to have to follow, shoehorned in between meetings and orientations and briefings: to the infirmary for blood draw and preliminary physical on Wednesday, briefing Thursday morning, half an hour with the quartermaster Thursday afternoon to talk about standard gear-up and what other stuff she wants added to her packs. Then it's back to the infirmary Friday morning for some quick followup bloodwork to compare to Wednesday's, check her white blood count, make sure she's not fighting off an infection that's harmless to her but might be deadly to a divergent Earth population. They've never heard tell of an SGC-caused flu epidemic halfway across the galaxy, and they've never had a disaster back home, either, but that don't mean they're going to stop being careful. And then it'll be to the quartermaster's to pick up her gear, to the gear-up room to get changed, and down the rabbit hole and off to see the races.

The nurse who handles the majority of her full Wednesday physical is Robert Hoffenberg, goes by Robbie, twenty-eight years old with dark hair and soulful eyes and the best she's ever had at finding a vein to get a stick on her. She makes sure to say so; she's had a lot of needles pushed through her skin in the past two years, and thank fuck she's never been scared of needles, but Robbie's so good at it she barely notices.

"Aw, you're easy," Robbie says, smiling, when she mentions it. "Some of the guys who've been here for a while, you have to go for the really last-resort sites by now. Too much scarring." He laughs. "Bet that's something they didn't warn you about. If anything, God forbid, ever happens to you and you get taken to a civilian hospital, make sure they call us first thing for a transfer. We've had a couple of people accused of IV drug use, just from all the blood draws."

Huh; that is something she hadn't thought about, and it's just another one of the things she's going to have to accept as a new part of her life. "Thanks," she says. "Good to know."

Robbie nods. "Couple of the scientists tried to keep their civilian GPs at first, but that stopped pretty early on. You start to feel under the weather, you come down to see us. We've even got an OB/GYN on staff. Dr. Miçalewski." His lips twist, thinking of something unpleasant, and she realizes, with a sudden cold chill, what that must be. "And we all wish she didn't have as much work as she does, but --"

"Yeah," Cammie says, quietly. Sam hadn't told her about that part, about the things that can happen to a woman when she's stuck behind enemy lines; Cammie hasn't asked, either. But she's read the reports, and she knows how often Gate teams wind up in a bad situation, and she knows that the level of cultural development common across the planets they visit doesn't exactly reach the realm of enlightened women's lib. She'll burn that bridge when she comes to it. She makes herself smile. "Do I get to pick who I want takin' care of me? Because if I do, put it down that I want you doing all my bloodwork from now on, 'cause I wasn't kidding when I said you're the best bloodsucking vampire I've ever run across."

Robbie laughs. She likes the sound; her smile turns from forced to honest. He pops the stethoscope into his ears and starts listening. "If you show up when I'm on shift, sure. I'm Wednesday through Saturday, oh-four-hundred to sixteen hundred. If you come in when I'm not on, ask for Suzette, she's just as good."

Her cookie-baking mental list is expanding. One thing she's learned in life so far: always, always, get the sergeants and the nurses on your side.

Robbie gives her a clean bill of health, goes over some of the same cautions and warnings her doctors and PTs gave her. She managed to bounce back to about ninety-five percent after The Accident, and ninety-five from where she used to be is still pretty damn good, but there's still some stuff she has to mind; she couldn't escape all the peripheral nerve damage, and they had to take half her baby toe, and she's still adjusting to all the differences that makes. Her body was a stranger to her for a long damn time, full of tubes and pins and temporary fortifications, and a year and change of learning all the new lay of the land isn't enough to overcome thirty-five years of knowing the other way.

And Robbie's good at lecturing; he can do it without getting her back up, which is another miracle. Plus, he's really damn cute. She wonders what the SGC zeitgeist about dating inside the base is. She's been some places where it was okay to play around (with people outside your direct line, of course) and some places where it wasn't; if this is one of the ones where it's okay to date the civilians, she wouldn't mind starting here.

She doesn't manage to talk Daniel into lunch Wednesday afternoon or dinner again on Wednesday night, but she thinks it has nothing to do with his not having had fun on Monday, because they had; he'd taken her to a hole-in-the-wall Lebanese cafe for dinner, amused her by ordering one of everything on the menu, mezza-sized, and spoken to all the waitstaff (in Arabic) as though he's a frequent customer, which she suspects he is. It had only taken them a little while to realize that there was just no way of conducting a conversation about history or politics or culture without accidentally disclosing things they shouldn't say in public, and Daniel had, instead, given her a rundown of everyone he could think of who might be available for her team. His observations had been irreverent and slightly wicked, and it had taken her a while to realize that "he's mostly not stupid" is perhaps the highest compliment the man can give, but they'd had a good, productive talk, and she'd walked away with a lot of information.

He'd managed to lure her into talking about herself, too, more than she'd intended to. Testing out the waters, she thinks. Seeing if she's the kind of person he'll be willing to leave SG-1 in the hands of. Because any fool could see that Dr. Daniel Jackson views SG-1, the concept of SG-1, as his personal property; not much of a surprise, really. But she is bone-deep certain that if Daniel decides that she's wrong for the job, it won't be an issue for long, and she'd indulged him by giving him bits and pieces. Not too many. He's going to be leaving, soon enough; he doesn't need to know it all.

No, Daniel's reticence has nothing to do with not wanting to spend time with her -- they'd been laughing like old friends by the end of dinner, after all, and she'd seen him here and there Tuesday and Wednesday both and he'd had nothing but friendly words. He's just busy, undoing all the things he'd done to put his life on pause for however long he'd been planning to spend on Atlantis: mail forwarding, credit card freezes, storage, auto-bill-payment. Unpacking and rearranging. It's a hell of a lot of work. She's not stupid enough to think he's doing it for her; he's doing it for SG-1. The ideal. The concept.

She's starting to understand, just from the way people talk about the stories -- the hushed whispers, the sideways looks she keeps getting, the way everyone she meets keeps telling her hoo-boy, you're in for a ride -- that this isn't going to be just a job. This is going to be a lifestyle. It makes her doubly, triply sure that she will not let herself fuck this up.

Thursday morning's briefing is nothing exciting, and it's mostly for her benefit. P5N-J43 is on the safe list: Greek-derived culture, and the SGC's been working with them for years to catalog and copy the thousands of books and scrolls, some of which have been authenticated as things Earth thought long-lost, brought along with the people the Goa'uld had transplanted. The usual team they send is two soft science, two military; drop the scientists, pick up the ones that'd been stationed there. Cammie had originally been assigned someone named Captain Acevedo as her other half, but Daniel's presence, apparently, changes things. She's pretty sure he doesn't count as military, but everyone talks as though he'll be taking point on this one. Well, she supposes ten years on the front lines would make a soldier out of anyone. She doesn't plan on letting him take over, though, no matter what he might think.

He does the briefing, and she absorbs the cultural details and warnings as she looks over the other two members of the party. They, too, are old hats; both Dr. Brian Hendrickson (anthropology, archaeology) and Dr. Maria Rafferty (history, linguistics, and a side helping of literature) are old friends of the Myrmiatians. She'll be the only new hand on the team, and the mission goal's easy: escort Brian and Maria to the major settlement, pick up Dr. Ellen Lahoud and Dr. Ralph Perry, make nice with the natives for a day or so, sit through the banquet -- Daniel doesn't mention the purple stuff -- in their honor, and head on back home.

Everyone involved seems to be treating this like business as usual, and Cammie hopes the prickling feeling she's getting at the nape of her neck is nothing more than first-time jitters, because the SGC's had an academic embassy there for the past three years and nothing's ever gone wrong before.

The SGC quartermaster is Master Sergeant Castillo, a hawk-faced woman with silvering hair and a faint limp that Cammie thinks most people probably don't notice. They're Cammie and Ángela to each other in under five minutes. Ángela lays out the standard mission gear for an overnight in friendly territory, along with all the stories of why it's there (Cammie wouldn't have thought to bring that much ammo, for instance, and she'd thought the chocolate bars were for midnight snack, but Ángela explains the SGC's found them useful currency over the years).

Cammie wins Ángela's respect pretty quick by picking up everything, poking through it and checking everything here and there to make sure she's familiar with it. Then she grins at Ángela, and Ángela unwinds a bit to smile back. "Now, the million-dollar question," Cammie says. "What do most people ask you to throw in that isn't on the packing list?"

Half an hour later, after story after story about the times that one thing that someone threw into their packs at the last minute saved everyone's asses, Cammie's got a gear manifesto that includes items mundane and esoteric, and Ángela's talked her out of Momma's secret mac'n'cheese recipe.

Friday morning dawns, bright and early after absolutely no sleep at all, and Robbie pats her on the shoulder when he pronounces her bloodwork clean. "You'll do fine," he says. "Promise. Buy you a drink when you get back tomorrow, to celebrate?"

Cammie grins at him. "Deal," she promises. That's enough of an answer for her about the culture of the SGC as relates to dating, and she's been off that horse for a while; it'd be nice to get back on it.

*

Five hours after stepping through the Stargate for the first time, Cammie's racked up a few other firsts. First alien beating. First blood spilled on a mission. First alien jail cell seen from the inside.

Daniel calls it a "SG-1 Special". They're sitting on the floor of the cell, just the two of them. Cammie doesn't know where Brian and Maria are, but Dr. Lahoud and Dr. Perry are already dead; she's seen the bodies in the town square, hung up and decorated as sacrifice, all the blood drained and gone. Hell of a welcoming committee.

("Oh, hell," Daniel had said, wearily, the minute he'd seen them. "Why don't they ever hang the bodies on the city walls, where we could see them and leave?" She'd turned to him, shocked, to find that he'd locked his hands behind his head and was staring past her, and that had been when she'd noticed the fifty archers stepping out of various hiding places here and there, and, well, next time she's going to listen to that little creeping feeling.)

They'd been searched, roughly and thoroughly, and all their gear had been taken. There'd been a minute, just a minute, when Cammie could have gotten the drop on their guards; that had been before Brian and Maria had been taken away, and she's still kicking herself for not taking it. But they would have had to fight their way out of the palace-or-police-station-or-temple they'd been taken to, which is pretty heavily guarded, and then run their way back to the Gate. And she's not opposed to doing that, and it might have been a better choice than what they've got, which is looking like it's going to be following Dr. Lahoud and Dr. Perry sooner or later.

Daniel had seen her watching the lines of escape, though, and he'd reached out two fingers to touch the back of her wrist, quickly and carefully. "Not yet," he'd said. "Let me." He'd tried to get their captors talking, and he'd succeeded, to an extent. He'd been the one to figure out that the Lucian Alliance had been there a few weeks back, and offered the Myrmiatians a hell of a lot of technological advancement in exchange for SG-1, the Milky Way's Most Wanted. That, combined with a change in the Myrmiatian priesthood-government, had led to this particular clusterfuck.

She's still kicking herself for listening to Daniel when he'd held her back, too, because apparently she and Daniel are going to be sold for ransom (they think she's Sam; she doesn't disabuse them of the notion) and Maria and Brian are going to be sacrificed to the Myrmiatian gods ("we killed Ares already, dammit," Daniel mutters; she's not amused), and fighting their way out instead of listening to Daniel might have worked out better after all.

Cammie's got a split lip and a little bit of swelling here and there; Daniel, who is apparently incapable of keeping his damn mouth shut (and that's a useful thing to know, and something she wishes she'd known already, and she should have been smart enough to piece it together from the reports) is still bleeding sluggishly from cuts all over and covered in rising bruises. She paces the confines of the cell (eight paces one way, fourteen the other) and tries to think of what to do next. Her training hadn't covered this. What to do when a mission goes pear-shaped is week two of GTO, and this is why they send a babysitter along, and her babysitter apparently takes hitting as permission to mouth off instead of as a motive for escape.

The cell is more of a cage, really. Bars with gaps just big enough to get her hands through. They're locked in, and the cage is inside another room; that door's closed, too. She thinks that's a good thing; there are guards outside, but nobody's watching. One window, outside the cell, barred, high enough that they won't be able to reach. She has a mental map of the route they took to get here, and she thinks she can probably get them out to the main plaza again. No clue where they might have taken the gear, or Maria and Brian.

"I am so sick of this," Daniel mutters. He's sitting on the packed-dirt floor, his knees up, his back to the door, his head tilted back against the bars. "Atlantis. Supposed to be on Atlantis right now."

It doesn't have the sound of something she's supposed to overhear -- she wouldn't be surprised to find out that he doesn't know he's even talking -- but it combines with Sam's warning ("try not to get Daniel killed", and sold to the Lucians isn't killed up front, but Cammie's certain it'll all end the same way in the end) and leaves Cammie cold. The universe has been trying to kill Daniel Jackson for ten years and more, and it's succeeded a few times but it never stuck, but this isn't fate-of-the-world type peril. This is just bullshit, and she's pissed as hell, and right now Daniel Fucking Jackson is taking the brunt of her temper, because he's here.

"Well, you're not on Atlantis," she snaps, and kneels in front of the cell's door to inspect the hinges. They took her gear, and they took her tac vest, which has a set of tiny screwdrivers in it -- bless you, Ángela -- and the bedding in here is just straw-stuffed mattresses thrown on the floor, no metal in sight. But if the hinges are primitive enough, she thinks she might be able to ease them out and get the door off. "So, a little less griping, a little more in the way of constructive suggestions on how to get out of here."

"Just taking a few moments to appreciate the fine accomodations," Daniel says. She tosses a glance over her shoulder. He's in the process of unlacing his boots, and she has to blink, because he looks like he's getting ready to curl up for a fucking nap, and that's a little too blasé for her. "Really, as jail cells go, this one isn't bad. They left us water, at least. I hate it when they don't leave us water." He looks up to see her gaping at him. "Relax. The Myrmiatian ecclesiastical calendar only permits sacrifice on certain days, and Dr. Lahoud and Dr. Perry have been dead for less than two days. Dr. Hendrickson and Dr. Rafferty will be fine for at least two more. They're probably being feasted right now, actually; it's customary for the sacrificial victim to be king-for-a-day before the ceremony. Right now, the biggest concern is how fast the Lucians are going to get here to pick us up, not how fast we have to rescue Dr. Hendrickson and Dr. Rafferty."

Cammie curls her hands into fists. "You couldn't have mentioned the human sacrifice thing at the briefing, maybe?" she suggests, as gently as possible.

Daniel shrugs. She gets the feeling that his flippancy is layered over a deep and abiding anger, and she shies away from looking too deeply at it, because it frightens her. "We don't talk about it. They don't talk about it. We don't like it --" and that's an understatement if she's ever heard one -- "but -- we tried to convince them it's wrong, but in the end, the decision was made that the knowledge available here was worth trading with them. And no, I don't like it. But I wasn't exactly around to protest when the arrangement was made."

She adds up time and timing, and realizes that the alliance with the Myrmiatians must have been made during the year he was spending dead (for tax purposes, the smartass section of her brain provides, and she stuffs a fucking sock in it). And by now she's heard enough gossip, listened to sufficent of the stories, to piece together bits of it. Daniel had spent years pushing for the program to spend more time concentrating on knowledge and less on blowing things up, and then he'd gone and died, and the SGC had found this civilization, and he must have been horrified when he got back to find that they'd made a deal with the devil and expected him to be happy about the discovery. It's speculation, but it makes sense.

Still don't change the fact they're stuck in a jail cell halfway across the galaxy. It's a two-hour hike back to the Gate, and that's a bit far to go for checking in on what's supposed to be a friendly world, so nobody's sitting up by the phone for the safe-call; nobody's going to send out a rescue party until they're at least four hours overdue for return. She's memorized all the timetables by now, for friendly missions and hostile ones alike. They've got at least a day before anyone comes checking.

"How long you think we got until the bad guys show up?" she asks, still concentrating on the hinges. They're not all that great. Enough time and she might be able to pry them off, especially if she peels the silencers off her dog tags, doubles them up, and uses the edge for leverage.

"Let's just say that it's safe to assume the bad guys are going to beat the cavalry," Daniel says, dryly. "They always do."

Cammie tosses a look over her shoulder -- ready to snap at him and tell him to start taking this seriously, because he might have been there, done that, got the fucking t-shirt, but this is her first time around the block, and it makes her wonder what else he hasn't told her. And maybe it would have been better if she had taken Captain Acevedo, left Daniel back at the SGC, because he's acting like he's the one in command of this mission, just as she feared, and a team can't have two masters, not and work out. But she stops, because Daniel's got his boot off and is prying at the heel of it with his fingernails, and as she watches, fascinated, he peels it back and extracts two stiff pieces of wire.

He holds the wires between his teeth, replaces the bootheel, replaces the boot, and does up the laces quick and practiced. When he looks up, he catches her watching. "You really wouldn't be surprised at how often this happens," he tells her, still dry like deserts. "I recommend lockpicking lessons. In fact, I've been recommending lockpicking lessons be added to GTO for ten years now, but you know, it's somehow only SG-1 who keeps winding up in jail."

"Commentary on your winning personality, I bet," she shoots right back, and is rewarded with a quick flash of grin, there and gone like summer lightning. She gets the hell out of his way while he takes her place kneeling in front of the door and worms his hands through the gaps in the bars to work the lock backwards. She can't see what he's doing, but he's muttering to himself, and it sounds annoyed even though she can't place the language. Or even the language family. It's fascinating to watch, and more fascinating to listen to, and after ten minutes of mutter-mutter-snarl, the lock gives up with nothing more than a tiny click.

And he looks back at her over his shoulder, and one edge of his mouth quirks up in a little-boy grin that looks just damn like her cousin Skipper when he's just pulled a fast one, and her heart skips and stutters in her chest and bam.

It is fascinating; she can actually feel herself tumbling head-over-heels in love.

Oh, no, she thinks, no, no, because she's thirty-six years old and she's loved a lot of people, family and friends and a whole string of cheerful lovers, and she's always known, the whole damn time, that she's one of those people who's made for one person always and forevermore. Always known she'd meet him someday (or 'her' -- she's kissed more than a few girls in her time, too, and none of them ever made her heart go pitter-pat either, but she doesn't believe in shutting doors before you know if you're going to have to walk through them) and that would be it. It's how Momma fell for Daddy, and she grew up hearing the stories. But she's thirty-six years old and it hasn't happened up until now, and she'd been beginning to think it wouldn't, and she'd done enough soul-searching to decide she was okay with that fact. She likes her independence. And for the love of little green apples, the man is heading to another galaxy in nine and a half weeks, and she might never see him again.

She still doesn't even know if she likes him.

And he's forty years old and a widower (she's heard the stories; even years later, they're still trotted out for the newcomers) and he's a bit of a jackass from time to time, apparently, and from everything that everyone's told her, he's decided to live out the rest of his life in complete emotional isolation from the rest of the human race.

(And he's smiling at her, trickle of blood smudged down the corner of his mouth, triumphant like he's just broken them out of jail. Which he has. And he's smart, and he's funny, and he's got a whole heart full of love for humanity even if he doesn't always like people, and he's fucking brilliant and life with him would never be boring.)

She wants to bend over and put her head between her knees and just breathe. Take a few minutes and get control of herself again. But he's looking at her, and his eyebrows are raised in concern. "Are you all right?" he asks. "They didn't hurt you too badly, did they?"

Cammie's still blinking, and it takes her a second to process his words. "What? Oh. No. No, I'm fine. Just -- watching what you're doing, in case I gotta do it myself someday."

"Get Sam to teach you," he says, rocking back on his heels and dusting off his hands on his BDUs. He lifts one of the mattresses, stows the lockpick underneath -- smart, she thinks; if they get recaptured, they'll be searched more thoroughly this time, but it's not necessarily a given that they'll toss the cell. And hey, if they get out, maybe some other poor bastard will find it useful someday. "She's better at it than I am. Come on, I think I remember how to get us out of here."

"Oh no you don't," someone says, and it takes a second for Cammie to realize it was her. But she's up and she's moving, and he's giving her the puzzled look, and there's nothing for it but to muddle on through. She will deal with this later. Jailbreak first, love life second. Or last. "If we go charging out there, we'll just get ourselves shot full of arrows. Pretty sure they've got this building on watch, and I didn't get a long enough look at the guard detail to be able to guess at how long their patrol frequencies are."

There's nothing wrong with her autopilot. In fact, her autopilot might be smarter than she is. Daniel's brows draw together, and he watches her, startled, as she picks up the torn strips of bedding he was using to staunch his cuts. She spits on the bloody fabric, once, twice, and then rubs the mix of spit and blood into the hinges of the door. It squeaked when they'd been thrown in here -- she'd noted it at the time, filed it away -- and the last thing she wants is to have guards come running. She'd prefer oil (there'd been a vial of it in her tac vest -- bless you, Ángela) but this will have to do.

"Ah," Daniel says, sounding befuddled for a second. Then something seems to click inside his head. "Okay. What's your plan?"

"Don't got one, really," Cammie says. She eases the door open, inch by painstaking inch, so slowly it takes a good two minutes to get it wide enough to slip through. "You got any more surprise gear you're holding out on me?"

And there's another click -- it's weird, Cammie thinks, how she suddenly feels like she can read through his bullshit a hell of a lot better, which is either a case of her having spent enough time around him to catch his rhythms (which is standard for her, though it usually takes longer with someone new) or a case of her being struck blind, stupid, and self-delusional, which is not off the table. She's going to have to watch her read on him carefully, make sure she's not talking herself into seeing things just because she wants them to be there, and that's going to be a pain in the fucking ass. Just because her hormones and her emotions have apparently won out over her common sense is no excuse to be stupid.

He's staring at her now, and the look he's giving her is different than the look he was giving her a few minutes ago. Different even than the look he was giving her back in his office on Monday, when he'd listened to her make her plea and (she thinks) decided whether she was going to get SG-1 or not. There's respect in his eyes, now, and a realignment of perception and expectations. She thinks, watching him watching her, that -- for the first time since she met him -- he is actually there with her, physically and mentally present, in a way he hasn't been up until this very moment.

She's pretty sure he was expecting her to let him walk all over her, too, along with everyone else, and it's a little surprising to him that she isn't. Surprising, and (she thinks) encouraging. Because, yeah, right up until now, he was probably looking at her and seeing the same pretty little girl everyone else sees, the same pretty little girl she shows people, and now he's seeing Mama Bear in all her glory, and she thinks he might like what he sees.

And oh, she misses her kids, all of her cubs -- Brian with his ridiculous poker stories, Kate and her merry laugh, John who could fly anything mankind ever built -- but she's still standing and holding the line, and as long as she's still standing, she is not going to let Daniel Jackson push her around. Hero or no.

"No," Daniel says. "I used to carry a few other things, but I didn't think I'd need them for this one. It was only good luck that had me in these boots today, instead of the other pair." He gives her a little rueful smile, and her heart goes thump again. She squashes it, ruthlessly. "Caught off-guard. It won't happen again."

Cammie nods, holding his eyes. "We'll make sure it doesn't," she says, an order and a promise, and goes to listen at the door for footsteps.

*

They'd left Earth at 0900, stepped through the wormhole, arrived on P5N-J43 at midafternoon, local. Between the jailbreak, the skulking, the raiding of storerooms for local clothing to blend in (can't find their gear, though, and that's going to be a pain), the further skulking, the Daring Rescue (Maria and Brian are just fine, if a bit loopy -- drugged, Cammie thinks, and adjusts her plans accordingly) and the inevitable necessity to knock out a guard to break the line so they can get through, it's coming up past midnight, local, when they finally arrive at the edge of town.

"Come on," Daniel says, near-soundlessly, as they pause right before the gates of the city walls. "We can make it through without being noticed if we go quickly."

It's become second-nature over the past few hours to rein him in, and Cammie's learned (quickly, and out of need) how to do it so deftly that he doesn't notice. But the part of her brain that solves problems without her paying attention to it has presented her with an idea. She holds up a hand in the signal for "wait", then rolls her eyes at herself and says, "Hang on."

"I do know the signals by now," Daniel says, back to being sarcastic again. "What are you thinking?"

"Diversion," she says. She hefts the bow-and-arrows she looted from the guard they knocked out -- Daniel had eyed her curiously, but archery and shooting had been two time-honored and Gran'ma-approved ways of keeping busy during summers as a kid, and running around here without a weapon would have been stupid -- and thinks. "They've got a fire taboo, don't they."

Daniel blinks at her. The shadows from the street-lamps play across his face. "Yeah. They do. How'd you tell?"

Cammie gestures a little, impatient. She couldn't say, except -- "The way they've got all their lamps penned up and contained, the way they didn't light the cell, the way nobody's looking at the lamps, all the motifs on the walls, I don't know." It had been a flash of realization. She resolves, right then and there, that she will never again, in her entire tenure at the SGC -- however long or short it might be -- step through the Gate without reading up on everything she has time for and can get her fucking hands on about what they know about the culture and people on the other side. She figured it out this time, thanks to luck and intuition, but Gran'ma always said that the Lord helps those who help themselves. "Okay," she says, her mind working. "I can use that."

Daniel's eyes are darting around him. They're tucked back in an alleyway, with a view of the city walls and a line of sight on the main street in front of them. It's late enough that there's nobody around, but Cammie knows they can't count on that staying true forever. By her count, the next guard will be by on top of the walls in another five minutes, and that's cutting it mighty close. "What are you thinking?" he asks.

"Wait here a second," she says, and -- careful to make sure nobody's watching, though she can't be sure there isn't anyone in one of the nearby houses -- darts out of the alley to unhook the lamp from the pole and bring it back with her.

"Keep watch," she says, setting the lamp on the ground and shielding it as well as she can with her body, so anyone watching has a chance of missing the light. The Myrmiatian female clothing she'd stolen is a two-piece deal, something like a chiton. The top of it is tight-fitting, low-cut, sleeveless, and ends just over her breasts; she'd had to ditch her T-shirt to wear it, and the T-shirt is long gone, back in the temple. The skirt, at least, is long and flowing enough to give her enough material, and she's still got her pants on under it, so if she tears too much, at least she'll be decent. She worries at it with her teeth, finally managing to tear off a nice long strip, which she wraps around the head of one of the arrows.

Daniel divides his attention between the street and her as she tests the weight and balance of it, adjusts it a bit, and finally pronounces it sufficient. She dips the bundle into the oil of the lamp with a steady, careful hand, even as her mind's ticking off time, far too close to negative numbers. But it wouldn't do to ignite it yet by catching it accidentally against the flame. "Okay," she says, low and quiet. "Take Brian and Maria, get them into the archway of the wall, and wait."

"What are you doing?" Daniel demands.

She doesn't look up. "Plenty of houses around here that aren't stone. Guards come running when they see a fire. They don't look at the people in the bright white clothes who are skulking over the big open plain right outside." If she'd been thinking, she would have said hell with being able to blend in, they'd keep their own clothes on, but Daniel had said he'd be able to pass them for Myrmiatian in a casual conversation if they got stopped, and at the time it had seemed like a better plan.

He blinks, once, startled, and then nods. "Come on," he says, to the two drugged scientists who are leaning against the alley wall, and leads them across the street to disappear into the shadows of the gate's archway.

One chance at this, and she'll have to do it right and quickly. Never done this particular shot before, but she used to be pretty damn good at killing trees, back in the day. She holds the fire-arrow against the flame of the lamp, waits for it to catch, and then steps out of the alley, nocks the arrow, sights her target, and fires, all in a single motion.

The bowstring slams against her right breast -- ow -- but the arrow goes sailing straight into the thatching of the roof she was aiming at, far down the street. She doesn't wait to see how fast it'll catch, just dashes across the street and catches up with the rest of the party. "Brian, Maria," she says, hard and fast, "how long can you guys run?"

Not can you guys run, because the entire time they've been skulking, both of them -- Gate team veterans, and this is far from being their first barbecue -- have been dazedly insisting they can keep up, and if they say they can keep up, Cammie will by God make sure they do. "Um," Brian says. "Good for a mile or two? Maybe?"

Cammie nods. Behind them, she can hear the first shouts, and guards rushing over the top of the city walls to peer at the fire that's starting to take root, a couple of hundred feet down the street. "Okay," she says. "Holler if and when you gotta stop and catch your breath. That goes for you, too, Maria. Until then, run like the hounds of hell are at your heels. Daniel, point. You guys follow. I'll take rear."

Daniel's staring at her, like he wants to protest, but just as she's getting ready to repeat herself, he nods, once, and runs.

From there, it's almost an anticlimax. Twelve klicks to the Gate, and they manage to run the first three, by which point there's pretty much no chance of anyone spotting them; they alternate double-time hike and jog for the rest of it. They've lost their GDOs, but Daniel's already stepping up and dialing when she gets to the DHD, and she catches a glimpse of the symbols for the Alpha Site before it's through the wormhole again. The armed guards who meet them are suspicious until they recognize Daniel -- that's the problem with native clothing -- and after that it's only a few minutes before she's stepping (sweaty and still bloody and exhausted and battered, but unbowed) through the wormhole back home.

The imp of the perverse seizes her as her bootheels hit the ramp, and she calls out, "Honey! We're home!"

Beside her, she catches Daniel snickering softly. She holds the sound of it with her as they go through medical and debrief; it's a surprisingly pleasant sound.

*

The stitching-up and the paperwork and the explaining takes a while. Cammie makes a mental note to find out who's going to be making the call on next-of-kin for Drs. Lahoud and Perry. She didn't know them, and she couldn't bring their bodies home -- the rescue op is slated for tomorrow, and she won't be on it, since she's not cleared for SAR yet -- but she'd like to come along and pay her respects anyway. Robbie's not on duty in the infirmary, but Suzette turns out to be just as good at blood draw as promised; the infirmary staff even brings her a new uniform without having to ask.

"Well, that could have gone better," Daniel says, sitting on the bed with his head tilted back so Dr. Tadeuszowska (night shift doctor; "call me Taddy, it's easier") can put a few stitches in the cut in his lip.

"Coulda gone worse, too," Cammie says. She's not sure why she's sitting and waiting for Daniel to be done, except he was injured under her comand, and she always tries to see it through when that happens.

Daniel groans. "Oh, God, don't say that," he says. "If you do, next time it will."

She laughs. "Yeah, okay. Point. I take it back. You gonna be okay?"

Daniel rolls his eyes. "I'm fine. I don't even need these stitches, really."

"Yes, you do," Taddy says, and grabs Daniel's chin to hold him steady. "Stop talking."

Cammie carefully hides her smile as Daniel gives Taddy a look that could probably light the man on fire if Daniel weren't so damn tired. She waits as Taddy puts in the stitches -- just two, but yeah, Daniel did need them; the cut's nasty, and it'll probably leave a tiny scar, just under his mouth. Once Taddy's done, she says, "I mean, you got someone to drive you home after you take the painkillers for that, or you just gonna spend tonight on-base?"

"Oh, please," Taddy says, with the aura of one who's fought these battles many times before. "Dr. Jackson wouldn't take painkillers if someone amputated his arm." He strips off his gloves, gives Daniel a look. "If you take these out on your own again this time, I'm going to set your library on fire." Then, in an aside to Cammie, "It's the only threat that actually works on him. Go on, both of you, get out of my infirmary."

Cammie snorts and gets herself out of the chair she'd collapsed in. "A'ight, a'ight," she says. "Thanks."

"I'd say 'my pleasure', except it'd just encourage you to do it again," Taddy says, and makes shooing motions with both his hands.

She's not expecting Daniel to fall into step beside her as they walk down the hallway; it's 2330 by now and she's had a long fucking day, but she's bound for her office, to get her report started while the details are fresh in her mind. They'd debriefed Landry quickly, but Cammie's just certain he's going to want a full report on his desk first thing, and hell to pay if he don't get it. "You should go home," Cammie says. "Get some sleep. It's been a hell of a day."

"Yeah, it has," Daniel says. "But you did a pretty good job out there." It startles her, and she casts a quick look over at him; he's smiling again, just a little one, and with the stitches it makes him look rakish. "Not the way I would have done it. But it worked. Good job."

She ignores the way it makes her want to jump up and down, and limits herself to just smiling back at him. "Thanks. Means a lot."

His tone turns contemplative. "Of course," he says, "that doesn't mean that it wasn't completely insane."

She stops in her tracks and turns to look at him. He's still smiling. It makes her have to laugh. "Well," she says, "they keep telling me that you don't have to be crazy to work here, 'cause the job'll make you crazy fast enough."

Her heart goes thump-thump as his laughter rings out across the corridor. "Yeah, good point," he says. "Followup debrief Monday at oh-nine-hundred. Bit of advice, come prepared with at least three other ways you could have gotten us out of there. They like it when you sound like you know what you're doing."

It's good, solid advice, and she's grateful for it. "Thanks," she says. "You go take care of yourself, okay? Spend the weekend on the couch with nothing more than the TV and some soup, or something."

Daniel's smile settles in, and oh God he is suddenly just too beautiful for words. "I don't have a TV," he says. "And I burn soup. But I'll take it easy, I promise."

"You don't have a TV?" Cammie says, shocked. "And you can't even heat soup?" Oh, that is just not right. "Hell. Gimme your address. I'll bring over some of Momma's chicken noodle." It'll take her a while to unpack all the pots and pans, and she still hasn't had a chance to go scouting out all the best markets, but the chicken soup is easy enough, and she'd been meaning to do some kitchen work this weekend anyway.

Daniel shakes his head. "I'll be fine, I promise. It's okay. I'll see you on Monday, all right?"

Something tells her not to push. "Sure," she says. "Bright 'n early."

But she'll be bringing some of the chicken soup with her, dammit, because he is her people now, and she takes care of her own.

*

Cammie doesn't get back to her apartment until 0230, and she stands in the middle of the sea of boxes and all the furniture that's in the wrong place, debating the merits of falling into bed versus showering off all the grime and then falling into bed. The shower wins, but she makes it quick. Then it's into the bed and asleep before her head hits the pillow, and it's the weekend and her subconscious knows she's on stand-down, so she actually manages to sleep to 0730 before her body clock has her up and at 'em.

She makes herself breakfast -- nothing fancy, just eggs and toast; her fridge is mostly empty and she's been living on takeout, and she'd earmarked today for getting the kitchen set to rights and tromping around all the markets she's made lists of until she finds the one that'll be hers. Then she checks her voicemail, the automatic impulse. Momma knows not to expect phone calls daily or even weekly (the whole family can tell her cover story's a cover story; the SGC's cover stories suck rocks), but while Cammie had been at Nowhere Field, they'd fallen into a pattern. Momma calls up her civilian cellphone and leaves all the family gossip on the voicemail, and Cammie calls back when and if she can.

Today's message is actually yesterday's message -- left at about the time Cammie was breaking out of jail, actually, and oh she wishes she could tell that story to Momma, because she'd been one of the only ones of her generation of Family who'd never wound up cooling his or her heels in the town lockup overnight after an adolescent prank had gotten out of hand, and Momma had always been proud of "her daughter, the good child". Cammie listens through it, laughing in all the right places, as she opens all the cabinet doors, assesses the space -- infinitesimal -- and triages which boxes of kitchen equipment she can unpack and which she'll have to leave stacked up in the corner and root through when she needs something inside.

That done, she has just enough room in the kitchen to turn around in, if she doesn't gain any weight. All right, it's an exaggeration -- there's just enough for her to haul in her ironing board when she's doing something complicated, since there's about twelve inches of counter space, total. This place sucks. She'll probably buy once her six-month lease is up, if the real estate market around here doesn't suck as badly as this apartment does. She entertains herself with happy thoughts of a stainless-steel chef's station and space to hang all her pots and pans -- some people look at porn, Cammie looks at restaurant supply catalogs -- as she works.

She's got a game plan for how she'll arrange the living room. It's good to see her furniture again. The SGC sent people to pack up her Nevada apartment when it came clear that she wouldn't be needing it for a while, and when she got out of the hospital, she'd been too battered to even think about wrestling all of it. She'd kept the automatic debit for the storage unit going, and rented furnished while she struggled through rehab. (Ground floor, no steps, wide doors for the wheelchair; she is so glad to be out of that fucking thing, and so painfully aware, now, how little it would take to wind back up in it.) But she's too battered today to deal with it, either -- although nowhere near the way she'd been then; for one thing, she's not partially paralyzed from the waist down, praise the Lord -- so she just walks past it all and into the bedroom to change.

In the mirror, she sees a walking anti-domestic-violence poster-woman staring back at her, and she makes a face at the rising black eye and the scabbed-over lip. Gonna get some looks while she's out and about, dammit. Can't be helped.

T-shirt and shorts -- she runs five miles a day, hell or high water, whether it's when she first wakes up or before she goes to bed. She laughs at herself when she catches herself trying to bargain her way out of it with herself, since she'd done yesterday's run in the morning before heading into work, and then there'd been the walk to the Myrmiatian city and the run back from the Myrmiatian city. "Doesn't count," she says, firmly. "Come on, Mama Bear. Time's a-wastin'."

She's got a regular trail by now, around and about the suburban apartment-farm they put her in, and she waves at a few of the neighbors as she goes by. They're starting to become familiar faces, and she thinks it goes both ways; they wave back. It's a nice enough day, though fall's settled in with a vengeance by now. She's almost cold, so she turns it from jog to run, to keep her blood moving. Then it's back to the apartment complex, half an hour in the weight room, and back upstairs to her apartment to shower and change.

The bruises haven't magically subsided while she was out and about -- woulda been nice if they had -- so she does her makeup with an eye to minimizing them, then selects her lowest-cut tank top and puts it on as distraction. Men always talk to the tits anyway (and they are nice tits, even if she does say so herself), so she might as well work it. She's just pulling on her jeans and socks when her cellphone rings. It's an unfamiliar number, but it's a Colorado Springs area code, so she answers it; she gave that number to the SGC with all her paperwork, and she doesn't have her official secured cell yet, and something might have come up.

It's only Sam, though. "You're supposed to tell me when you get thrown in jail," Sam says, and there's laughter in her voice. "There's a club. We have T-shirts."

Cammie throws herself back on the bed. (Feels good. She's aching all over, dammit, and she can already tell that she's not in the shape she's going to need to be in, which means that the daily five miles is going to have to turn into the daily ten. Dammit.) "What," she says, "'I got thrown in an al -- in a foreign prison, an' all I got were fleas an' this lousy T-shirt'?"

Sam laughs louder. "Yeah, something like that. Are you okay? Daniel said you were just fine, but for Daniel, 'just fine' can cover anything from a papercut to a sucking chest wound."

"You talked to Daniel?" Cammie asks, before she can stop herself. "What'd he say?" Belatedly, she catches herself; she sounds like she's back in middle school. What'd he say about me? Does he like me? Does he want to pull my pigtails? Get a fucking grip, Mama Bear, you're not twelve anymore. "And yeah, I really am fine. Bit bruised, bit achey. He got the worst of it."

"Yeah, they always either beat up on the men and ignore you, or -- well, you know," Sam says, and Cammie remembers her thoughts from earlier in the week, and tries not to think about it any further. "But he told me the whole story. And, you know, I am still in awe of the Jedi Mind Trick, because you managed to really impress him."

"Really?" And Cammie would like to sew her own mouth shut, because she catches herself blurting out, "Why didn't you tell me he was so -- so --"

And she could pass it off as wanting to finish the sentence with something like 'infuriating' or 'annoying' or 'hard to deal with' -- all of which could be true -- but Sam's known her for years, and Sam's bad at people (always has been), but she's good enough at Cammie by now. There's a splutter on the other end of the line. "Daniel?" Sam asks. "You -- Cammie, you can't want Daniel!"

Cammie grabs for some control over what's coming out of her own mouth. Sam's tone sounds more "shocked that someone could possibly think it" and less "jealous inamorata", but Cammie's known for years that Sam's got a thing for someone she was stationed with -- which means, at the SGC -- and can't do anything about it. Cammie's pretty sure now it was someone on the team. She's figured out by now that the SGC is terminally laid-back about the frat guidelines, although romance in the direct chain of command, or among specific team members, is still right out. It's the only reason Sam would have hedged for so long.

And if Daniel's the one for Sam, well, Cammie's lived this long without a steady partner, it won't kill her to live out the rest of her time the same way. Sam's never been lucky at love, and Cammie always has been. She loves Sam Carter like family, and family don't step on family's heels. But oh, God, it would kill her to have to be the one to set up Sam and Daniel now that they're not on the same team anymore, because she knows Sam through and through and she's starting to know Daniel, and she's positive neither of them would ever make the first move. She'd do it, too. She owes Sam one hell of a lot, after the dirty trick Cammie had to pull to make sure Fucking Jonas Hansen didn't get his scummy claws into Sam, and that debt's been hanging over her head for a while.

"Am I stepping on your toes if I do?" Cammie asks, careful and neutral, and she's rewarded with another burst of laughter and a rush of relief that goes all the way down to her knees.

"No, no, not at all, it's just -- He's Daniel. He's --" The laughter cuts off, and she can hear Sam clearing her throat. "Ah, you do know about his wife --"

"Yeah," Cammie says. She closes her eyes and resists the urge to drag the pillow over her face. "I know. And about Hathor --" she's read the reports there, and more than that, read between the lines of the reports -- "and about Sarah Gardner and yeah, Sam, I know that he's about as likely to want to carry on a mad passionate nine-week love affair until he hares off on Daedalus about as much as he wants to gargle broken glass an' it don't matter, because I wouldn't want that anyway. He's the one, Sam." And she's going to have to re-do her makeup, because she's crying, now; not out of sorrow, just because of the sheer depth of emotion welling up in her, overflowing as tears trembling over her eyelashes. She lets them fall. "He's the one. And I have no fucking clue what to do about it."

Sam knows Cammie's theory about love and relationships. Doesn't understand it, but takes it as truth for Cammie, even if it wouldn't be truth for herself. There's a long silence. "God," Sam finally says. "Cammie, I --"

It's going to be something to discourage her, Cammie just knows it is. She doesn't want to hear it. She scrubs the back of her hand under her eyes to wipe away the tears, and winces when she accidentally pokes the bruise. "I know," she says. "It's all right. I'll get over it. I know how stupid it is. Believe me, I've told myself how stupid it is. But I can work with him for the next nine weeks, and then he'll be off to Pegasus, and I can get myself settled here and forget about the whole damnfool notion."

Another long silence, and Cammie can tell by the sound of it that there's something Sam isn't telling her. "I think," Sam says, finally, carefully, "that you would be very, very good for Daniel. Hypothetically. And he would be very good for you. But you're right, he's not looking for a short-term love affair. He's not looking for anything, really. He's been hurt one too many times. Way more than one too many times. You'll have to be so very careful."

You'll, not you'd. "You're not telling me something," Cammie says. "What ain't you telling me?"

"It's not my news to give," Sam hedges. "But. I think you'll probably have more time than you think you will."

Suspicion dawns. "He's staying, isn't he," Cammie says, feeling weak and overwhelmed. "With --" Me. "SG-1. He's staying on."

Sam clears her throat. "It's not my news to give," she repeats, which is a 'yes' if Cammie's ever heard it, and Cammie's warring between relief and terror. "But I'm serious, Cammie. If you so much as let him think you're thinking --"

Cammie sits up. Things are zinging around in the back of her head, hopes and plans and ideas and suspicions, and the only thing she can think is that she is going to have to call her Momma and dump all of this on her shoulders, get some perspective, because she knows Momma chased Daddy for years until he caught her. "I can be patient," she says. Sam makes a rude noise. "I can. You ain't never seen me be patient, 'cause I never had to around you. But if you think -- if you think there's --" She fumbles for words, gives up, pounds a fist against the pillow in frustration.

"Daniel's very lonely," Sam says, slowly. "And really -- he wants company. Wants it badly. But he'd never bring himself to ask, and he does his best to push people away, because he's really kind of bad at dealing with his emotions." It's Cammie's turn to make a rude noise, and Sam returns it with a frustrated yeah, yeah, I know sound. "Pot, kettle, I know, I know, but if you think I'm bad? You haven't seen anything yet."

Momma chased Daddy for years and years, all through nothing but being there for him, strong and solid and companionable, until Daddy woke up to what he'd been feeling for a while and made it official. And Cammie loves her Daddy, but she knows that all her skill at learning people might come from both sides, but all her skill at learning herself comes from Momma. It took Daddy the loss of both his legs and a hell of a lot of therapy before he started being able to reliably hear that still small voice; he's wise with others, but looking back as an adult, Cammie can see that he's stupid with himself. She isn't sure if Daniel Jackson is better or worse than her daddy, but either way, what worked for Momma will stand a chance of working for her. Her Momma's a damn smart woman.

"Three years," Cammie says, and oh, that's steel and determination in her voice. "You'll be standing up at our wedding in three years."

"Cammie --"

Cammie shakes her head. "He's the one, Sam," she repeats, quietly. "An' I ain't gonna fuck this up. If he's stayin', an' you think we'd be good for each other, I'll do the work. An' I'll do it gladly."

Sam sighs. "How about we talk about this later," she temporizes. "I'm back -- at base for the weekend, and it's a bit of a hike from you to Vegas, but I think I'll be taking the express to the Mountain sometime this week, if you know what I mean." And Cammie does. Sam means that she managed to integrate the Asgard transporter technology with Prometheus, part of what she was working on, and she's probably beaming down to her apartment every night and then back up the next morning. Sam means that something's come up to require her back at the SGC for a day or two, so she'll beam up to orbit and then straight back down and avoid all that pesky travel time. It makes Cammie's head spin. She's living science fiction, and it is so damn fucking cool. "You promised me dinner. I'll hold you to it."

"Hell," Cammie says, feeling giddy and reckless. "I'll invite Daniel, too. I'll call Dakara and invite Teal'c over. I want to meet him anyway. I have a shitload of questions I wanna ask him."

Sam laughs. "Yeah, good luck with that." She sounds like she's about to say something, but stops and groans. "My pager just went off. I have to go report up to fix something. Look, I'll call you when I know what day I'll be in town, okay?"

"Sure thing," Cammie says. There are a thousand impulses zooming around her, and she feels like she could run another ten miles. Hell, run a marathon. Then come home and drag all her furniture into the right places and bake all the cookies she needs to bake and do the chicken soup, besides. She feels alive, for the first time in a long damn time, and if she's a little disgusted with herself for the proximate cause being something so soppy, well, it is what it is. "You go be Superwoman. I've got cookies to bake for people, anyway."

"Oh, Cammie," Sam sighs. That's another variation on their own personal Alamo; Sam thinks it's demeaning, Cammie thinks it's just good neighbors. "All right. Talk to you later. Say hi to everyone for me."

"Will do," Cammie promises, and hangs up.

She checks her makeup -- don't need much repairing -- and gets her shoes on her feet and gets herself out the door, all by rote, because there is just so much rattling around in her brain that she doesn't even know where to start. Daniel's staying. Sam didn't confirm it explicitly, but Sam's never been able to lie to her or to hold anything back, and Sam told her without actually telling her and breaking a confidence, and that's good enough. Daniel's staying. Daniel went out on a mission with her, with her SG-1, and came back home and said good job and told Sam he was staying.

And he could be staying to keep an eye on her, to make sure that she won't fuck things up -- out of duty, out of service, out of obligation -- but he'd said good job and told her how to handle the aftermath, and she's certain -- certain -- that Daniel Jackson is the kind of man who doesn't have a lick of problem freezing someone out if they're not worth his time. And he'd smiled at her (oh, so pretty) and promised to take care of himself (and she's already itching to take care of him -- but no, slowly, slowly) and Sam said he'd been impressed and that means Daniel Jackson thinks she's gonna work out. That Daniel Jackson feels called to help her make things work out.

Which makes her realize: General O'Neill thought she was going to work out, too. Because she will eat her fucking cardboard boxes if General O'Neill didn't know SG-1 was scattering to the winds, and she's spent enough time with the man to know that he wouldn't have handed her the keys to the Porsche if he didn't think she was capable of taking it out and back and not dinging it up on the way.

Daniel's staying.

The smile spreads across her face as she buckles herself into the car. (1966 T-bird convertible, cherry red, babied around with her from posting to posting and garaged back home in the second barn when she couldn't mind it, and she's going to have to find a place for it to winter over and buy herself some practical SUV for the Colorado weather, but she couldn't resist getting a chance to drive it again for a while now that she can.) Daniel's staying. And if Daniel's staying, well, she's got a chance with him. Personal and professional.

Sam will be easy as hell to lure back; Cammie knows all her buttons, and could write the book on how to push them. And she doesn't know anything about Master Teal'c of Chulak, except that he goes where his loyalty's given, and she's got a sneaking suspicion that if Daniel and Sam say yes, she'll be fifty percent of the way to getting a yes from him, too. She'll know more when she meets him.

General Training and Orientation runs four weeks. She's made it through one of them, and she's a third of the way to getting her team back together. She can get to the rest of the goal; might not be easy, but she's used to making the world do what she wants it to. Sam calls it the Jedi Mind Trick. Cammie calls it being persuasive, because most people think 'manipulative' is a dirty word. But she's not above a hell of a lot of manipulation when it's necessary.

So. Get SG-1 settled. Then she can start counting time for the other goal Sam's shown her. She won't take Sam's word for it, and three years might turn out to be slow or fast, but she's already starting to see the shape of the plan.

Cammie grins at herself in the rearview mirror, turns up the Boss on the tape deck she installed in the dashboard, and drums on the steering wheel and sings along at the top of her lungs the whole way to market. She's got a plan, and she's always cheerful when she has a plan. I want to know if love is wild, girl, I want to know if love is real, Bruce sings, and she blows a kiss to the teenage boys who are staring at her at the red light and sings along. Tramps like us, baby. We were born to run.

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