Cameron Mitchell pushes herself and prods herself, sits up when all she wants is to lie down and props herself up when all she wants is to fall down. Day after endless day, from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the PT bars, from the days when they have to keep her in the secured wing of the Academy hospital because she's babbling her guts out under morphine to the days when Momma's saying they can fix up a nice room for her right down the hall from theirs and all Cammie can think is that at least the house is already fitted out for a cripple if it winds up that she's lost her legs to the Air Force just like her daddy did.
She pushes herself and drives herself, and if grim determination could have made a difference she'd have been out dancing three months after the crash, but there's no way to tell if she'll walk again even by then, so she pushes herself and drives herself until the blisters on her hands match the sores on her ass and her doctors and her nurses and the whole fucking PT staff all have that look that says that if anybody deserves a stroke of luck it's her, and she wants to scream at them to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up, because if she needs luck, that means the therapy isn't taking, and she is by God and Jesus going to walk again.
And she does. Walks out of the hospital nigh upon a year later on her own two feet (three toes lost to frostbite, the shoe insets still new and rubbing the stumps raw, and she'll never wear pretty red shoes or go dancing again, but she's walking), looks General O'Neill in the eye and on the level as she tells the General she's planning on opting for the handshake and the medical discharge to go along with her Purple Heart and her Medal of Honor. And she goes on home with Momma and Daddy and they've done a little remodeling to the tune of a first-floor on-purpose bedroom with a half bath and Cammie doesn't say a word about it one way or another, just grits her teeth and clamps her fingers hard around her cane and drags her aching ass up to her own goddamned bedroom, the one that's got the same royal-blue with red-and-yellow spaceships wallpaper it's had since she was five years old. And she eases herself down on her bed and says things have to get better now, because at least she's home.
And six months later she's back in Colorado Springs, living in a rathole walkup over a Thai restaurant, and oh God, she doesn't know where to go or where she belongs or who she ought to be but this is the only other place on Earth that feels even remotely like home. At least she can keep up with her twice-weekly therapy appointments without either having someone drive her back and forth or getting into an argument every time she wants to use one of the cars, and the staff at the Academy Hospital is practically like family at this point.
For the first month and a half she was home Momma said 'time enough' and for the next month Momma said there was enough for Cammie to do right there on her own front doorstep and for the last two weeks Cammie was packing.
And now that she's here in her own place -- four walls and her and silence -- she can pull out her soul and take a good long look at it to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life now that she can't do the only thing she really wants to do ever again. She spends three months trying to work up an interest in anything, but inside she's cold and numb and she can barely manage to get out of bed in the morning, much less to call some want ad. The end of her terminal leave clocks right by and she doesn't even think of calling General O'Neill. What could she say? Changed my mind, General? Don't know what else I could be doing? Fuck it, you got me, now figure out something to do with me?
Yeah. Just another crap day in Paradise (and she knows she's fucking drowning and she can't quite care) when there's a knock on the door.
When she gets herself over to the door and hauls it open -- Momma sends care packages like they might be Cammie's sole source of food, and the guys on the route are almost always nice enough to bring them on up the stairs rather than leaving them below or making her go downtown to the USPOD to pick them up -- she stands blinking in surprise. There's a teenaged kid staring back at her. "Mitchell?" the kid asks.
Cammie frowns. Nobody calls her 'Mitchell' any more: it's 'Cammie' or 'Cameron' or 'Miss' or 'Honey' (and oh god she hates that from Yankees) or 'Ms. Mitchell' (even worse, feeling caught between; naked without her rank and not -- quite -- entitled to it either). "Yeah," she says briefly. The kid looks familiar. Sounds familiar.
The kid nods, once. Shoves his hands into the pockets of the leather bomber jacket he's wearing and pushes his way past Cammie into the living room. He looks around himself with what Cammie recognizes as disdain; the cleaning service comes in once a week, but Cammie's out of practice with keeping things neat. (If I'd'a know'd I was having comp'ny today I wouldn't'a given the maid the day off.) The place isn't dirty (that would ping Momma's radar and get her up here faster than a call from an ER doc saying her only daughter was on her deathbed) but it's messy. She spares a brief flash of who the fuck does this kid think he is, before the kid turns back around and pins her with a look that --
"Seems like you and I could help each other out," the kid says.
-- that Cammie last saw looking back at her from the eyes of a one-star General.
It's crazy. It's impossible. Then again, a year before, Cammie spent fifteen frozen hours slowly dying in a downed plane made from scavenged alien technology after having shot down alien ships bound and determined to invade Earth, so who's she to say impossible? The kid's seventeen, eighteen at most, but he walks like General O'Neill and sounds like General O'Neill. And he can't be General O'Neill's son, because the brain living behind those old man's eyes has shaped the face into expressions no teenager should ever know.
"You have no fucking notion who I am, do you, Mitchell?" the kid asks, and there's irritation and something almost like affection in his tone, and Cammie's torn between the desire to get the hell out of here or come to attention. And she won't do the one and she can't do the other, and there's something here that almost, almost...
She shakes her head slowly. No, sir, I have no fucking clue at all who I just opened the door to, and why don't you tell me? "Whoever the hell you are, I'm pretty sure you don't exist," she says. Best to get the cards on the table straight up.
The kid's lips twist. "Yeah. That's what the old man would tell you. I'm Ja -- Jonathan Nielson. You can call me JD. And yes, I'm exactly who -- and what -- you think I am."
Cammie grips the back of the recliner -- she'd forgotten to grab her cane when she got up, and she can get around for a little while without needing it (keeps trying to pretend to herself that today is going to be the day that she's never going to need it again and today never comes), but the combination of shock and confusion is making her knees a little shaky. "How?" she asks.
"The Asgard. And yeah, I've got his memories, and yeah, it sucks about as much as you might imagine, and yeah, I really don't want to talk about it. And you're another one."
The pit of Cammie's stomach turns over. She knows what the kid is -- knows, down with the part of her subconscious that reacts to the slimy things that crawl free when you turn over a rock. Clone. And the kid's saying -- no, Cammie had been hurt in the crash, hadn't died -- but she'd spent so much of those first few weeks floating in and out of consciousness, would she have even known -- but no, they wouldn't have let her walk away from the Program if she'd been --
The kid -- JD -- sees the panic starting to spread and shakes his head, quickly. "No. Not another clone. Another person who got fucked over and tossed out. And now you're looking for something to do with your life, aren't you?"
She'd like to say 'yes' and have it be the truth. She'd like to say she's looking for anything, and she knows she isn't (waiting to die, that's all, oh thank God her Daddy can't see her now), and his question brings it home like a boot to the stomach, and she grits her teeth and takes a deep breath. "If you're looking for revenge, you've come to the wrong place."
For a moment his face goes completely blank, then he throws back his head and laughs.
She's in the middle of getting angry again -- just about the only thing she feels these days, and it's just about as exhausting as it is painful -- when she realizes there's no mockery in the sound. Surprise, yes. And joy. JD makes a quick slashing motion in midair with both hands. "Revenge is stupid," he says (and isn't that a surprise, because Cammie would've sworn on a stack of Bibles that General O'Neill understood vengeance more thoroughly than anyone else ever could). But JD isn't General O'Neill. He's more vibrant than Cammie's ever seen General O'Neill be: in constant motion, barely-repressed energy thrumming just under his skin. Now he strips off the jacket with a quick motion and tosses it over the arm of the chair. He's got a wifebeater on under it. Cammie catches a quick glimpse of ink stretching blackly up JD's arms, sinuous curves twining up JD's biceps and disappearing into shadow standing out beneath the white of the tank top, before JD is stepping into Cammie's kitchen.
She thinks JD and General O'Neill must have parted ways some good long time back for JD to be that different. She makes her careful way around the recliner, around the coffee table, and sits back down on the couch. All the while she's hearing sounds from her kitchen -- refrigerator door opening, clink, clink of bottles being shifted, rustling of paper takeout bags. "I fucked up when I had them make my ID. I never planned to stay put where they put me -- Christ, like they could even think I'd stick around in high school, for cryin' out loud -- but I hadn't counted on the fact that I'm going to look this fucking young for another five, six years easy. Baby face. I need a partner. This pad thai still good?"
Cammie feels a little bit like a hurricane's breezed into her apartment. Partner? For what? "Leftover from last night," she says, because she doesn't know what else she could say.
"Good. I'm starving." The sound of a drawer, the sound of cutlery; JD's making himself at home and Cammie suppresses a quick flare of irritation -- her space, her privacy, how dare this stranger invade it and use it as if it's his own? He comes back out a minute later with the Styrofoam takeout container in his left hand, already open, fork in the right hand being used to stuff his face. The two opened bottles of beer he's holding between the fingers of his left hand clink together. He puts the fork in his mouth along with another mouthful of pad thai, shifts one beer to the hand it freed up, and passes it over to Cammie. Cammie takes it automatically. (Her goddamned beer, goddammit; how dare he treat her like a guest in her own fucking apartment?) "I need a partner," JD says again, around the fork and the pad thai (manners of a fucking wolverine). "My fake paper doesn't have me legal for another year."
Even this close, Cammie can't quite tell what JD's ink means, although she can tell it's supposed to mean something. It's stark and almost tribal, but none of the images is quite sharp enough for her to distinguish; she can see what might be a stylized snake, and the curves of script that might be Farsi, and if she unfocusses her eyes a little, the sentences swim into focus, building hieroglyphs Cammie can't read. Below the hollow of JD's throat, right at the center of his collarbone, the lines of script narrow down to a single sentence mirrored on either side, with an upside-down triangle circled by a halo in the direct center as punctuation.
"Partner for what?" Cammie asks at last.
JD smiles. It isn't an unpleasant smile, not at all (and she realizes in the back of her mind, that that's what she was expecting: anger and hostility and mockery and attack); but it's sweet and angelic and -- Cammie thinks -- almost heartfelt. But it sits on his face wrong either way: too old and knowing for the teenager he seems to be, too free and unfettered to have ever come from General O'Neill. "You know computers?" he asks.
Cammie knows a little. The 302 was half bomb, half computer, and then they called it a 'near-space fighter-interceptor' and expected to find pilots for it. She'd been one of the first who stuck; computers had always been a hobby for her, never something she knew to the point of being a marketable skill, but she nods and shrugs. And whatever JD's been doing for the two years since his "birth", he's clearly been boning up. The gossip at the Academy Hospital ran that General O'Neill couldn't program his own cellphone to save his life, so either JD is one damned fast learner, or General O'Neill's reputation was a useful smokescreen.
"Look," JD says, when Cammie hasn't kicked him out after twenty minutes. "I've got the bike parked downstairs on the street. Lemme move it into the alley and get my stuff, then I'll explain."
"You can bring it up into the stairwell," Cammie says. It's not the worst neighborhood, but it's not the best neighborhood either, and bicycles go missing.
JD gives her a 'don't-be-stupid' look. "Motorcycle, not bicycle," he says. Then grins again, one quick flash. "And if they run the plates, they won't even find that it's stolen. Gimme five. You need anything from downstairs?"
"I'm good," Cammie says. And she realizes with grateful surprise that she doesn't need to bite back even one bit of don't you dare treat me like a fucking cripple out of her voice. Daddy lost his legs when she was ten, and Momma brought him home, and she and Momma nursed him when he needed nursing and Momma never, ever catered to him -- she'd told him his military career might be over but his life wasn't, Everett Raymond, that they'd cut off his legs and not his head. And Daddy picked himself up and put himself back together and now he and Uncle Roy and Uncle Bayliss have a crafts business that's the talk of the State, and she'd expected the same thing when she went home, not hovering and too much care and everybody watching their P's and Q's around her like she lost her mind in that crash along with everything else. That's why she chucked it and ran.
JD nods (sharp and quick) and takes off, leaving his jacket behind, and Cammie hears the quick clatter of his boots on the stairs and oh, she will not think that once her own feet would have made the same sound and never again. She grabs her cane and drags herself to her feet and stumps off to the kitchen to count out her afternoon pills and toss them back. Washes them down with a swig of orange juice from the bottle in the fridge and washes that down with a carefully-measured-out shot of whiskey. She's not ever going to the place where a bottle keeps her company on the couch all afternoon; she'll take her liquor in measured shots, in the kitchen, standing up.
JD's back upstairs inside of ten minutes, carrying a battered old duffel that looks about as old as General O'Neill. He lifts out a hard-shelled laptop case and kicks the duffel aside, forgotten, then throws himself down on the couch next to Cammie. The laptop, when he frees it from its case, is state-of-the-art; JD's fingers stroke the keyboard like a lover's curves. "So," he says. "The plan."
It's a good plan. JD's got software half-built already, flexible and extensible and tailored with a career military eye to the gaps in the military-industrial complex they always turn to contractors to fill. Cammie's role will be learning enough to get up to the level of junior programmer (she's pretty sure JD doesn't need a junior programmer; JD just snorts and says 'take me twice as long if I do it myself') and being the one who puts on the fancy dress for face-to-face meetings.
Cammie's respectability, Cammie's resume, Cammie's fetching Southern smile. The powers that be will listen more to someone with a bunch of medals than they would to a teenager (and there are goddamned few living Medal of Honor holders: that counts for one fuck of a lot).
Sixty-forty split on income for the first five years in JD's favor; patents and royalties to be shared equally. Travel costs to come out of the operating fund they'll set up with the money from the first contract. After five years, they'll renegotiate. The one thing JD is adamant about is that they will not go near Stargate Command. Won't even go near the Air Force; he's pitching GPS satcomm software first, intended for Naval carriers. "I don't see us staying in milspec much past that, anyway," JD says. "I've got other plans."
"Which are?" Cammie asks.
And there's that smile again. "We'll see. If it pans out. You in or not?"
This crazy freak of nature has walked in out of nowhere and is offering her a ticket back to life. A job and maybe even a future and Sweet Jesus, at least some reason to get up tomorrow morning. If she says yes. "Why me?" Cammie asks. "You could pretty much have your pick of partners."
JD laces his fingers together, turns his palms inside-out, stretches them high over his head. The hem of his tank top rides up over the frayed waistband of his jeans, displaying a stomach Cammie could probably bounce a quarter off of. (And she thinks about things she's never going to get to do again, and fucking pretty boys like JD is high on the list. Yeah, that and square dancing.)
"Yeah," JD says. "But you got fucked over too."
"Dumb reason," Cammie says.
"Maybe." JD shrugs and lets his arms drop. "Still why I picked you."
Cammie won't argue. Stupid or not, insane or not -- and this is plenty insane -- she's actually starting to get interested. JD's plan is solid; he's got projections, facts and figures, charts that show them with a living wage inside of six months and a comfortable living wage within a year. Cammie's no computer genius, but her degree's in electrical engineering, and it shouldn't take her too long to catch up. (She wonders, for just a second, what General O'Neill's degree is in, but her Momma didn't raise no fools and she's already realizing it's best if she doesn't make reference to JD's former life.) It's double-damned clear JD's thought this through, though. Probably been thinking it through for a while.
"I'm in," she says (faint thrill of beginning). "You can sleep on the couch, you got no place else to go."
He leans back and stretches again. "I got no place else to be," he answers.
#
It's easier than Cammie thought it would be, having a stranger (intruder, interloper, boy-not-boy) in her space. That first night, she shuffle-thumps into the bathroom to take her nightly shower, strips off the sweatshirt and sweatpants and socks and shoes she uses to keep herself from having to look at the ruin of what her body used to be, and she forgets until she's already made her painstaking way through her evening routine that she's given up the last place she has where she doesn't have to pretend she's all right, pretend she's normal and capable and doesn't need help at all. She's already halfway to her bedroom, wrapped in her big pink terrycloth robe (only goes down to mid-thigh because she did some angry surgery with a pair of pinking shears on the fucking Agent of Satan after the first and fucking cunt last time it fouled her cane), thumping the cane -- with the weakness in her legs, without the shoes and their inserts, she needs it; the physical therapists tell her it might take years before she can walk barefoot and unassisted again (if ever). And she's forgotten JD's there.
But JD only looks up from where he's settled on the couch, taking in all the scars he can see (red line from throat-hollow down where they cracked her chest, and her legs, oh, her legs are a ruin) without so much as blinking, and says, "You need me to move my shit?"
Cammie's searching his face for any sign of pity, any sign of sympathy, and there's nothing there, any more than there was earlier. It eases something. She's been playing "able-bodied" for her doctors and nurses and physical therapists and especially for Momma and the rest of her family; for the random people she passes on the street and everyone who sees her and doesn't see a pretty girl or a strong beautiful woman (because Cameron Evangeline Mitchell, the hottest piece of ass in Buncombe County, died on the Antarctic ice) just a neutered piece of ruined meat with a limp and a cane. But abruptly she realizes that she doesn't have to play able-bodied for JD. Not at all. It's too easy to look at that angel face and forget she's not dealing with a kid after all, but Jack O'Neill, she remembers, looked at her the same way. "No," she says. "You're fine where you are."
JD nods. "I get in your way, you whack me," he says, nodding again to the cane, and then turns half his attention back to the laptop's screen. With the other half, he says, absently, "Looks like that sucked a hell of a lot."
It surprises Cammie how easy it is to say: "Yeah. Yeah, it kinda did," and she's feeling a little bit lighter when she gets herself settled into bed.
Mrs. Chaisorn from the restaurant downstairs starts doubling her takeout portions, and drops hints about how nice it is that Cammie's brother came to help her out. Cammie doesn't correct her. They look enough alike -- if you squint -- that it's plausible, and it's an easy enough explanation for why she's got a seventeen-year-old kid crashing on her couch. JD would actually fit in pretty well with Clan Mitchell, Cammie thinks, and stifles a laugh at the thought of Momma and JD going toe to toe.
Over the next week, JD eats her out of house and home (faintly apologetic about it the whole time, but Cammie remembers Ash barely taking time to stand up from the dinner table and inhale before heading off to the kitchen for a snack to keep starvation away; she'd had a damned healthy appetite of her own at that age, too, and from the few things JD lets slip, Cammie thinks he hasn't exactly been getting regular meals for a while) and falls upon Cammie's beer like it's water and he's dying of dehydration. (She hasn't been drinking it regular -- fucking metabolism, fucking weight gain, and her physical therapists are watching every goddamned ounce because of the ticking time-bomb of scar-tissue at the base of her spine -- but she can buy it. And she does.)
The laptop stays glued to his side; Cammie even catches JD balancing it on one palm, eyes fixed on the screen, as he heads for the pisser. Cammie drops a grand on technical books at the Barnes & Noble and chews her way through C++ and Assembler, cursing the whole damn way. Doesn't say, won't think, about how close she was to just slipping under. It's the thing the Family never talks about, but oh, everybody knows. They're a military family, large and far-flung, and making it home isn't the same thing as making it all the way home. No, not at all.
And it's almost comfortable, having him here, even if her place isn't big enough to swing a dead cat in. Cammie's used to bunking in two or more, and -- despite all the simmering energy -- JD doesn't take up much space in a room, like he can make himself so small and still he doesn't even register on the radar. It takes Cammie a few days to put her finger on what's so familiar about it. Back in Kosovo, they'd had a few guys drifting in and out, the guys who did the things that even Special Ops wouldn't touch. JD's got the same feel to him: when he's there, he's there, present and vibrant and alive. And when he's concentrating on something, it's like he just -- shuts it down. Ceases to exist as anything other than whatever he's concentrating on.
Cammie realizes, after about five days in, that she's doing JD a favor, too. JD doesn't treat her like a cripple, but she's learned not to treat JD like a kid. One too many times of looking at a teenager's body and seeing the six decades of life living inside it and she got past the frogspawn squick feeling by the second day and now she barely even notices the packaging anymore. Her life, Cammie thinks, has gotten steadily weirder since the day she said "yes" when the Groom Lake boys came calling.
JD's up every morning with the sunrise. They both are; old habits run deep. But JD doesn't specifically call attention to the fact that he disappears for an hour before breakfast and comes back sweaty. Ten mile run every morning, Cammie figures, from how JD's dropped hints about his route: down Pikes Peak, up the railroad tracks, around Monument Valley Park, all the way up past the hospital and back again down Cascade, and he's back up the stairs and not even breathing too hard while Cammie fusses in the kitchen to feed them both. Cammie does her own exercises while JD's out. They aren't as sweeping as JD's, but they probably hurt a hell of a lot more.
It's nice, in some ways, to have someone else around (actually nice, not just tolerable, not just something that's saved her life, a thing she won't deny and doesn't want to discuss). For one thing, Cammie can start cooking again; never saw the point when it was just her own self to feed, and while JD will eat just about anything Cammie puts in front of him, it's a matter of pride to be able to feed her guest heartily and well. For another, JD's damn handy to have around. He never makes it obvious, never calls Cammie's attention to it, but suddenly the leaky faucets aren't leaking anymore and the kitchen cabinets have had their contents redistributed so the stuff Cammie uses most is within easy reach and the living room's been rearranged so Cammie doesn't catch her cane on the table every time she walks by.
All things Cammie would have done herself, if she'd been able to. But JD doesn't mention shower bars, and he doesn't suggest moving to a place with an elevator, and when they go up and down the stairs to grab dinner, or when JD tags along when Cammie's running errands, JD always manages to stay one step behind on Cammie's off side, running crowd interference and letting Cammie set the pace, without ever making it feel like Cammie's holding him up.
And then, two weeks into their little arrangement, Cammie hits one of the bad days, when a combination of physical therapy and a pressure system coming in over the Front Range and being on the rag have filled her bones with napalm and torched them; every single scar and distorted muscle is screaming at her, and PT means she's had to look at every blotched discolored mutilation and twisted gouge where muscle used to be and deal with her useless goddamned reproductive system on top of it, because since The Accident she's never been regular, so waking up to her so-called monthly was a charming surprise and the doctors have told her she can't risk a pregnancy anyway because she can't afford to put that much extra weight on her spine and she was getting to the age where she was going to have to decide pretty soon kids or no kids but it really fucking bites to not get to make the decision herself, to feel the cramps on their own merry schedule and look at her fucked-over body and listen to the whisper in her mind that goes: never, never, never. She only manages to float through it all on two oxycodone and her own damn stubborn pride, and when she makes it back to the apartment stairs she's tempted for just a minute to sit down on the bottom step and wait right there until it all goes away. But she took this place to prove something to herself, and so she goes up one step at a time -- leaning on the handrail, leaning on her cane, every tread a mountain to climb and a cross to bear -- and all she wants to do when she unlocks the door is fall onto the couch for a week and not get up again.
JD's on the couch, though. On the couch with his legs twisted thoughtlessly up underneath him, feet tucked under each opposite thigh and his laptop balanced on his knees, and for just a minute, Cammie hates him. She leans back against the door as she gets it closed, the thought of the twenty feet to her bed suddenly more than she can bear. Something about the sound of it penetrates JD's concentration, and JD looks up. Then winces.
It's the first time Cammie's seen sympathy on that face. Still no pity, but it doesn't matter. Sympathy's bad enough. She doesn't know what her expression must look like in return (feels the prickle of tears -- fucking cunt hormones -- and if she cries in front of him she doesn't care what she has to do they will never find his body), but JD's up off the couch in a minute, setting his laptop down on the table, and disappears into the bathroom like a shot. Cammie hears the clink, clank, wheeze of the pipes as the water starts running. A minute goes by, then another, and then JD's back in front of her. He reaches out and takes the cane, props it up by the door, and Cammie almost protests. But JD's holding out both his hands, his intentions clear, and Cammie snarls (oh God, thank God, rage is better than tears) "You're not my fucking physical therapist."
"Nope," JD says, his voice somehow a mixture of understanding and command. It makes Cammie want to straighten up her spine. General's voice, and he isn't seventeen and isn't sorry for her and he can put enough whipcrack in his voice to make Cammie do just what he wants her to. "But I know that if you don't get your ass into a hot tub damn soon, you're going to be out of commission all week. I'll steer. You lean."
Cammie grits her teeth (vowing death and red murder upon JD and everyone in the universe) and wraps her hands around JD's elbows, and leans. She expects JD to fold under her weight, but he's stronger than Cammie expected. Perfectly capable of walking backwards without looking, too. Cammie gets the sense that JD carries a mental map of where everything around him is in relation to him.
Cammie gets the sense that she, herself, is part of JD's mental map. Mental, physical, emotional. JD's been watching her, and now JD is walking her into the bathroom and dropping easily to his knees to unlace her shoes and pull down her sweats and sit her down on the side of the tub (one hand there to brace her, to keep her from falling over, like she wants to, like her body wants her to), and JD is stripping her down to skin and scars, and he's completely matter-of-fact about the whole fucking thing but it's still too damn much. He's a stranger, he's not a stranger, he's a man, he's not somebody who's paid to have to look at her, and she's spent the whole fucking day having her nose rubbed in the fact that she's a thing, a piece of shit, a piece of meat...
"Lay off!" she barks (hearing her voice crack; it only fuels her shame and rage), pushing JD away -- her arms still work at least. She shoves him away with all her strength.
JD goes over backwards, toppling out of his crouch to land sprawled on the floor, and Cammie grits her teeth and -- because JD's right, god damn him -- grips the sides of the tub and levers her nigh-useless damn legs into the water.
She wants JD out. Naked in her own fucking bathroom being stared at by a man -- Naked with anyone standing fully clothed over her is too much like the days when she was dependent on nurses and tubes and bags and sponges to even fucking exist. But JD cocks his head and narrows his eyes, like he's taking Cammie's measure, and then he strips off his t-shirt and tosses it on top of the discarded pile of Cammie's clothing.
For a second, Cammie thinks JD might be intending to climb in with her. But JD stays kneeling on the tile, next to the tub, and stares Cammie down. They've done their best not to see skin and they've pretty much succeeded, but the apartment's small and you can't make a fetish of it. He walked in on her in bra and panties one morning when he was on his way to the bathroom (it's through the bedroom, no help for that); and those perky little jogging ensembles of his don't cover all that much. This is different. He's displaying himself. When he's wearing a t-shirt, his ink disappears under it, and he looks like any one of the teenagers that go zooming by on the streets below. When JD's bare-chested (like now), Cammie can see it all: elbows to shoulders, along the clavicle, dark contrast twining against pale skin (not just for-pretty; there's a story there, and Cammie knows that all stories aren't happy ones).
JD keeps his eyes trained on Cammie's face. His eyes are steady, matter-of-fact. He holds out both of his arms, like he's presenting them for inspection, and then turns around so Cammie can see his back. The ink spreads down to his waist like a phoenix, like a story, like a map nobody can read.
JD lets Cammie look her fill, then turns back around and settles himself cross-legged. Looks Cammie up and down: surgical scars scrawled across her chest (tits still good as they ever were, one of Life's little fucking ironies), scars from broken metal scraped against the small of her back, her tailbone, her thighs. The place where three toes used to be. All the places where bone broke skin, where pins put bone back together. JD's eyes don't linger, but they don't shy away, either; there's nothing either erotic or invasive in his inspection. He simply catalogues. Assesses.
"You're not the only one who's got scars," JD finally says. Hint of challenge, hint of impatience, hint of something Cammie can't identify. "Just so happens you didn't have yours magically taken away."
And suddenly, just like that, Cammie feels ashamed of herself. JD's right; she doesn't have any sort of monopoly on pain, or damage, or even on not looking right. The counselors warned her about this, about lashing out, about letting her identity as a person get subsumed in her identity as a set of limitations.
JD doesn't let her apologize, though. Cammie opens her mouth to say something, and JD's eyes flash a warning and he says, "I'm having a bitch of a time with the extensions to the runtime libraries refusing to cross-compile. You wanna take a look at it now, or later?"
Cammie recognizes it for what it is: the acceptance of the apology she was thinking about making. The hot water is helping. Not completely, but enough. "Later's probably better," she says. "Little tough to think right about now." And if she could get her hands on the man who invented the human reproductive system, she'd shoot the son of a bitch.
JD nods and rocks up to his feet. He doesn't pick up his t-shirt, doesn't seem to even register that he's still half-naked. "You need another Tylox?" he asks.
Cammie can hear it, now. The echo of a thousand other injuries, a hundred rehabilitations, all lurking under the edges of JD's voice. The ones he went through, and the ones he helped with, and the ones he gritted his teeth and bore on his own. And she thinks, suddenly: it's not sympathy. It's empathy.
"Yeah," she says. "Could probably stand to take the edge off."
JD nods and slides out of the bathroom on cat feet. He never makes noise when he's moving around. Cammie can hear the soft rattling of pill bottles on the kitchen counter -- there isn't enough room in her bathroom cabinet for all the stuff she's taking -- and JD comes back a minute later with a pill, a glass of water. Cammie takes them both.
"Don't try to get out of here on your own," JD says. "Give me a holler when you're ready." There's no 'or else' lingering beneath; it's simply an order, from a man used to giving orders, from a man used to having those orders obeyed.
Cammie closes her eyes and waits for the familiar light-headed rush of the drugs to creep over her. The water's cooling off, but not completely; when it does, she'll let a bit out, run some more hot water in. She always forgets how much a hot soak helps. She can hear JD leaving the bathroom, feels the soft draft of the door being shut behind. Then silence outside. JD's back on the couch, she thinks, head down and concentrating.
She keeps her eyes shut, and she lets herself drift, and the pain recedes just enough that she doesn't quite register when she slips over the edge into sleep. And she's always been jumpy with people moving around when she's sleeping, even when she's drugged to the eyeballs -- it's one of the endless things that made those months in the hospital such a torment -- but JD's noticed it and has the gift of moving without tripping those alarms. It isn't until JD's hand touches her shoulder, lightly, that Cammie struggles back awake and finds that JD's drained the water and is kneeling next to the tub with a towel.
"C'mon," JD says, and Cammie flexes the muscles in her thighs experimentally. The pain's back to bearable levels. She always forgets how bad it can really get until a bad day comes along. Normal days are bad, but they could get so much worse.
JD doesn't move to help her as she gets herself up to standing, but Cammie knows that one slip, one stumble, and JD would be right under her arm to take her full weight. It's unobtrusive enough that she's actually willing to hold out a hand, grip onto JD's arm, as she steps out. Her cane's already leaning against the sink, and she drags on her robe and then reaches for it. "Thanks," she says. Tentatively, trying for a level of offhandedness to match JD's ease.
"Welcome," JD says, just as casual, and steps back to let her get by.
She's expecting JD to go back to his work, but no; JD trails along behind her as Cammie thump-shuffles into the bedroom. It surprises her. JD's been fastidious about respecting Cammie's space. Cammie's too hazy to argue, though, but because he's there she leaves the robe on as she stretches out face-down on the bed (and yeah, the tits get in the way, but it's a trade-off, and it just feels so goddamed good to stretch out her back). JD clicks off the lights, draws the blinds. Then -- just as Cammie's about to tip back over into sleep -- comes back and sits on the edge of the bed.
She never did get the damned thing tied in the first place, and she can't quite get organized as he's folding the edges back and working her arms out of the wide kimono sleeves and then peeling it off until she's naked. "Don't move," JD says, and Cammie's trying to figure out how to say wait what when JD's thumbs come to rest in the small of her back, right where the worst of the scar tissue is jutting up against her spine, right where the doctors had to cut and slice and shift things in order for her to have a chance to feel her legs again.
"Wait --" Cammie says (thread of panic cutting through the Tylox-haze) -- because that's where it's worst, that's where they're watching it, that's where she'll have to always be careful of for the rest of her life and one more fucking accident, one bad impact or injury and that's it, she's back in the fucking chair for good this time (independence gone and her family around her forever, smothering her with too much love, the wrong kind of love).
But --
"I know," JD says, sounding distant, and his thumbs are only stroking over Cammie's skin, lightly, feeling out the shape and the placement of everything under Cammie's skin with the barest of feather-touches. "Just seeing what I have to avoid. Relax, Mitchell, I know what I'm doing." He sweeps his thumbs up past the worst of the scarring, finds something that makes him stop and poke. Cammie hisses. "Breathe," JD says, and then there's a short sharp shock of pain and Cammie can feel her muscles shifting.
JD's barely using any weight at all. Cammie can tell. It's just that everything in her back is so tight -- the things that don't work anymore, the things that are overcompensating -- that even her physical therapist despairs of it ever unknotting. JD straddles one of Cammie's thighs, the insides of his thighs barely glancing Cammie's naked skin, and makes a little noise of determination. Cammie wants to protest -- you don't have to do this, I don't want you to do this, I don't want you touching me, I don't want anyone touching me -- but while some of those things are true, so many others aren't. It's been so long since anybody touched her at all when she couldn't feel their thoughts ticking over behind their hands, bad thoughts, always the same thought: wonder how long before she's in a chair? and JD's touch is just the right mix of compassion and dispassion. She closes her eyes, and she lets JD touch her anywhere he wants to (not afraid, not worried, not even thinking about him wanting something from her she doesn't want to give). And without even knowing it, without consciously choosing to, she drifts off to sleep.
In the morning, when Cammie wakes up and does her stretches, her feet are tingling and they ache, deep-down. But she'll take tingling and ache over numbness any day.
"You can be seventeen all you're a mind to," she says that morning as she's setting his plate in front of him (bacon and eggs and toast and home fries and it isn't much work, really, because she can do most of the prep for the home fries in a batch that will do them for two or three days sitting down at the kitchen table and breakfast for JD is six eggs and half a pound of bacon and if there weren't potatoes on top of it he might starve to death before he got up from the breakfast table) "but I don't reckon that couch is any too comfortable. Bed's big enough, and it'll cut down the laundry, only one set a' sheets. Bed's all I'm offerin'." She doesn't think he'd want anything more (not from her), but it never hurts to be stone-clear. Better laughter now than tears later, Momma always said.
"I snore," JD says instantly.
"Good for you," Cammie says. "So do I."
He studies her face for a moment, and she wonders what he's seeing, or looking for. But he nods. "Fine," he says.
That night he moves into her bedroom, and she spends two days sleeping in a t-shirt and boxers (with the goddamned elastic rasping along the tender band of scars at the base of her spine and why the hell something without any sensation in it at all can hurt she doesn't fucking know) before she says 'screw it' and strips off raw and that night JD does too. Neither of them goes back to sleeping in clothes. JD stops wearing shirts around the apartment, either. That's about the only change.
And that's how it is for a while.
They go through days where they argue about everything, from who used the last of the toothpaste (Cammie) to who forgot they were out of orange juice (JD) to who broke the spine of the squirrel book (JD, and Cammie's annoyed, because she's bitched at JD's habit of leaving books open spine-up to no end.) Cammie gets frustrated at herself for how slowly she's re-learning integrated systems engineering and JD gets annoyed at himself every time he re-invents the wheel. They go through a lot of Pop-Tarts, a lot of coffee, and at least a few days where they communicate entirely by IM because they both know that if they say a word out loud, someone's gonna get shot.
But there are good days, too. The days when Cammie actually forgets that she's crippled, because every time she's about to do something that would remind her, JD's right at her elbow taking care of it instead, always with that studied nonchalance intended to communicate that JD had been just about to get to it. The days when a problem they'd been working on just clicks, and one or both of them winds up awake all night working out subroutines and banging out code. The days when Momma calls, and can hear Cammie feeling happy again, feeling useful again. The days when Cammie forgets how strange this would look to anyone who wasn't them.
It's odd. JD touches her now -- a hand on her elbow to indicate behind-you, a brush on the shoulder when Cammie's sitting down and JD walks behind, a head leaned carefully against Cammie's thigh when JD's sitting on the floor and Cammie's up in the chair. Cammie wouldn't know how to read it, except General O'Neill came to visit her in the hospital a few times, alone and with SG-1, and when he'd been there with his team, he'd been the same way with them (even Sam; not touching her any more or any less than he touched the other two). It's like touch functions -- for General O'Neill, for JD -- as touchstone, as his way of reading the lay of the land and reassuring himself that the people around him are still present and accounted for.
And a few times a week, on the nights when Cammie's bones are aching the worst -- even when she's trying to hide it the hardest, even when they're arguing the most -- JD smacks her on the hip once they've gotten into bed so she'll roll flat onto her stomach (all of her doctors and therapists scream like banshees about her sleeping in this position, and all of her doctors and therapists can blow her) and works his thumbs and his palms into Cammie's muscles until Cammie almost feels like sobbing from the relief. It's not sexual. It's not erotic. But it feels so damn good to be touched.
He isn't going to touch her any other way, though. It isn't her, either.
About a month after they started in living together, JD got himself dressed up like an invitation to rape one Friday night and said he was going out for a few hours and it might be several hours and she wasn't to wait up. And she'd asked him just what the fuck in their relationship had given him the delusion she was his mother, and he'd laughed, and gone off. When she'd woken up in the morning he hadn't been in to bed, but all the books had been moved off the couch and the afghan had been refolded, and he was coming back in from his morning run at the regular time.
And it's every week like clockwork, Fridays or Saturdays but usually Fridays, and he's almost always back sometime before morning (and it doesn't matter how many damned times she tells him he doesn't have to sleep on the couch when he comes in, he always does). And she ponders his social life for about a month (orange juice and toothpaste and screaming fights and oh, they can probably hear them in Denver) before she decides to say something. Not any of her business, but in a way it is. He's living here (he saved her life) and he's not General O'Neill any more (the subject of his former life -- of either of their former lives, but particularly his, General O'Neill's, has always been off limits; Cammie knows this) and she really thinks she owes him the information that this is Liberty Hall (and that he isn't fucking fooling anybody; there's just that little bit of 'don't call me stupid' lurking underneath her tongue that wants to let him know she knows).
And she spent a damned long time as a Leader of Men (oh, not as long as he has, not by a long chalk, but that don't mean she just fell off the turnip truck, either), so she waits around until the next time he's starting to fuss around getting himself ready to go out (two and a half months in, and she's shifted her stuff around in her drawers and cleared him some space there and in the closet too, because it isn't right that he's got to live out of a duffel bag like somebody without a roof over his head) and comes wandering (as wandering as she gets these days, some days it's swing-and-shimmy and not too much wincing, other days it's stump-and-shuffle like Boris-fucking-Karloff) in to the bedroom while he's pondering the merits of what look like three identical black t-shirts.
"So," she says, with studied casualness. "Big night?"
"Another happy day in the worker's paradise," JD says absently. He makes a decision and tosses his selection to the bed beside her. Now Cammie can see that it isn't a black t-shirt, but sort of a ... transparent black t-shirt. She picks it up. Yup. Transparent.
"Look good on you," JD says without turning around.
Cammie snorts faintly. "You have to tell me where you shop, I can maybe pick me up a six-pack. You know, I ain't askin' about your social life --"
"Good."
"-- but I'm saying. You wanna bring any a' your dates back here to the apartment, it's fine with me."
That gets her his undivided attention, and she's seen a good selection of his best expressions over the last several weeks, but this is the first time she thinks she's seen 'flummoxed.' "Yeaaaaah --" (A long drawn-out sound of 'oh my God how am I going to get out of this gracefully' and she's human enough to want to let him twist in the wind a bit.) "Well. Mitchell. Here's the thing. I don't think --"
Fun's fun, but she knows when to call it a day before the other person decides to kill her. "Now you look here, Nielson, you think I didn't know you were queer from close to right off the starting block? Don't you be any stupider'n you gotta be."
"I... You... What?" Half blank, half baffled, his voice is unreadable, and Cammie wonders suddenly if it was such a bright idea to come charging in (where angels fear to tread) and tell him things he already knows. Because from one angle, JD is seventeen and Cammie is thirty-six, and in their world it's here, queer, get over it (except in the military, where it's head down and CYA; Jesus is coming and so is Christmas and maybe the American military will stop being morons some day soon). But from the other angle, JD is -- fifty-two? Fifty-three? -- and Cammie knows goddamn well what kind of world Jack O'Neill grew up in, with what kinds of attitudes and values, and in that world, silence doesn't equal death. It's what keeps you alive.
And she realizes that the only way to get out of this conversation alive and well is to tell him how she knew. So he can cover if he thinks he needs to (and her heart breaks for the thought he would); so he knows she didn't come by this information through anything more than looking at him, and not by prying into anything he might have left around. She can't imagine, even, what that could be, because she is so utterly scrupulous about respecting his privacy that she doesn't even handle his laundry. She shakes her head. "Nielson, you ain't never once looked at my tits in a thinky way, and there is exactly two categories of man on this Earth ain't gonna look: dead and gay. And you ain't dead."
And there's that smile again -- angels and dawn and fierce joy -- and he says, "Sorry to disappoint you, Mitchell. You've got to knock that down by one."
Now it's her turn to say, "What?" and this time he laughs out loud.
"Your tits, Mitchell. And the two categories. There's only one. Someday I'll explain that to you, maybe. Now get your ass out of here," he adds. "I'm going to get dressed, then I'm going out to a gay bar to see if I can get lucky. Maybe some other time we'll talk about me bringing home the leftovers."
She's talked smack with a lot of men -- hopeful lovers and former lovers and never going to be lovers and just good friends. It's halfway between flirtation and teasing, just a way of saying here I am. There you are. Ain't men and women the damnedest things? And right up until this moment she hasn't had a single conversation like that with JD. Not that kind of sass.
Once he's gone she goes back into the bedroom and strips down to her bra (can't bring herself to pull off the sweatpants) and inspects the damage. Yeah, okay, there's a zipper down the front and some shit across her shoulders and the trach scar. Tits are good. Belly's a little soft (no scarring in the front, at the top). She digs through her dresser drawers. Could be time to get out of all these jog bras. Nobody has to see her underwear but her, and Nielson won't give a rat's ass one way or the other.
That night she's roused halfway out of sleep by the sound of the shower. Familiar sound, familiar presence, she's most of the way back to sleep by the time JD spoons into bed behind her. He's always so warm. "Go the fuck to sleep, Mitchell," he says, so she does.
#
JD seems to see this as another turning point in their relationship; the fact that she called him 'queer' to his face apparently gives him the right to criticize everything about her, from her hair (he tells her she looks like a ninety-year old bag lady and she's got a job so she can get a fucking haircut, Mitchell) to her clothes (goes through her drawers and her closets, bags half of what she owns -- she's been living in sweatshirts and sweatpants and jogging suits -- and then drags her to the mall to shop) to her standards of personal grooming ("For Christ's sake, is lipstick against your personal code of ethics? A pair of earrings wouldn't kill you either.") He badgers her about everything under the sun until she snaps and orders a designer selection of condoms and flavored lube on-line and presents it to him (Gift-basket. Bow.) which is the start of a silly war of gifts -- idiotic and pointed and trivial -- threaded around the edges of their daily lives. (She scores big with the Village People poster -- it makes him laugh -- and he retaliates with a Barbie sleepshirt. She doesn't wear it to sleep in, of course, but it will do for slouching around the apartment in the morning.)
And oh God. When she looks in the mirror these days, she sees Cammie. Her hair's short again, the way she always wore it under her helmet, and sure, she looks like hamburger from the neck down and even the good days are bad days and breakfast is a handful of pills followed by breakfast and she wears the ugliest shoes in the world (and her feet still fucking hurt). But.
She's got a powder blue t-shirt, and it's high-necked, and it's got elbow-length sleeves, but there's an inset of lace over the chest and you can by-damn see she's a girl if you care to.
She's got a sassy-ass boy toy who's queer as a three dollar bill (JD delights in coming up with expressions out of pre-history and he keeps thinking he's going to throw her, and she grew up listening to the previous three generations of Family shoot the breeze morning noon and night -- in language laundered and otherwise -- and she got her history lessons straight from the source and no, he isn't) and who is perfectly willing to play up to her when they go out in public, if she thinks it would be fun.
She's got work to do that eats her brain and JD says is going to make them rich and it gets her out of bed in the morning and it chases her back into it at night and she's wrapped up in it like nothing she's been wrapped up in since before forever.
And she's happy and she gets careless.
It's three months in (one ordinary day in August) and she's feeling good enough that she's thinking about packing it in early and putting in serious kitchen time. A batch or two of bread and maybe a cake. She's working (damn JD'd kill her otherwise) and she's got a window open to a site she's cruising for the next possibility in the War of Gifts; it's cheating to spend too much; the rules are unwritten and elaborate, similar to those governing Family Gift Exchanges at Christmas. And she glances up at him while she's thinking that (draped over the recliner like they forgot to send his bones along with the package) and all of a sudden there's a click inside Cammie's head as a few things rearrange themselves, and she realizes -- for the first time in a really long time -- just how fucking much it must suck for JD to have lost everything. House. Home. Job. Friends. Family.
Lover?
And Cammie's been a selfish, self-absorbed bitch for the past three months, but the revelation slaps her upside the head like Momma with a wooden spoon, and it must show on her face, because JD glances up because she has and suddenly his expression locks down, goes blank and distant.
"No," Cammie says, quickly, before JD can retreat entirely. "Which one of them was it?" The words are out of her mouth before she thinks, and she'd give anything to take them back, but when she hears herself she knows they have to be true, and her stomach sinks, because she's asking JD which of General O'Neill's team he was in love with and JD's gay and Sam has told Cammie every goddamned thing in her particular universe that wasn't covered by a security clearance since Cammie busted her loose from Jonas Hansen and Cammie knows (don't ask don't tell) that Sam's had a thing for somebody she works with for years but Sam did her not-talking-about-it in the way that told Cammie it could-might be one-sided and that doesn't leave a lot of people.
"Back off," JD warns, and she can't (never can once she's hit one of his minefields; the only thing to do is make it right or make it worse, but she can't just leave it alone).
"What was it you threw at me couple of months ago?" she says. "I'm not the only one who has problems? Goes both ways."
"You have no fucking idea," JD snarls, and then -- before Cammie can say anything, do anything -- he's up off the couch and pulling on a shirt and slamming out the door. She can hear his footsteps thudding down the stairs, two at a time. (The sound of so much freedom and ease always hurts her down deep inside, and he doesn't mean it to -- most of the time, probably not even this time -- and she tries so hard not to let him see that it does, and she thinks she probably succeeds. Usually.) And even if Cammie wanted to follow, she couldn't.
She sits on the couch for a minute, thinking about new lives, about starting over (fucking goddamned hard, you can take that to the bank, even if you just have to rebuild your life and your body and your expectations and not pretend to be somebody else on top of all of it). Then she plugs the power cord back into JD's laptop, so JD doesn't come back (if JD comes back, and the fact that he might not is an uneasy weight in the pit of her stomach) to find the battery completely drained, closes the lid of her own laptop and rests it on the table, and then shuffles off to the bedroom. The least she can do is give JD the illusion of space when he returns.
But he isn't back by an hour later, so she says screw it and stumps out to the kitchen (handful of pills, shot of whisky to celebrate the fact that sometimes life fucking sucks) then goes ahead with her plans for the day. Baking bread is the sovereign cure for all ills. (Used to be flying. Used to be running. Used to be long drives in Miz Mam'zelle, or nights of drinking and dancing and flirting with the boys -- and the girls. She won't wallow in self-pity: some of those things are gone forever. Some she might get back -- someday -- in different ways. For now, she bakes bread.)
Not back by the time the bread is baked, or the cake is done and frosted, or dinner time, and she doesn't have anything like an appetite, so dinner is cold cereal (and Momma's disapproval) and she stays up just long enough to stay on schedule for the evening pills, because she knows from bitter experience what she'll feel like if she flirts with skipping them. Then she takes herself off to bed, and JD's laptop is still sitting in the middle of the living room like a promise, but Cammie knows damned well he could get in and out to pick it up without waking her, and she doesn't think there's much else here he values. And she might as well try to ride the lightning as try to make him change his mind, if he's of a mind to go, so she goes on to bed. What can't be cured must be endured. She's done her fucking graduate work in that, hasn't she?
She wakes up in the middle of the night with JD's hand over her mouth and JD's lean hard body pressed up against her back. The panic starts to spread before she gets a hold of it: she already knows her subconscious doesn't think of JD as any kind of a threat (because her subconscious had JD figured out weeks before she did, and yeah, rape is about violence, not sex, but if he doesn't want her, he doesn't hate her either), but all that being said, he's never handled her like this before either. She's hyper-conscious of JD's breath in his ear, the beating of JD's heart against her back, the way JD's legs are tangled with hers. JD smells like soap and good clean sweat. He must have been running.
"All of them," JD says, in her ear, soft and low. It takes Cammie a minute to remember: she'd asked JD a question, hours before, and apparently JD can only answer it in the middle of the night, in the dark. "In one way or another. But the one you're talking about, that was Daniel. Came out of nowhere. Broadsided me. And he's completely fucking straight."
Cammie wants to say something -- anything, she's not sure what (I hear you or I'm sorry or Love's never wasted and it's never wrong). JD's still got his hand over her mouth, though, so she can't. Can't even say any of those things with her face, because she's on her side and JD's behind her. She thinks about Sam, and about the world General O'Neill grew up in (queer-bashing and codes of honor and the way some of her great-uncles look at some of her cousins -- Family is Family and that trumps everything, but the world's changed too fast and not fast enough and they're afraid for their kin and they're afraid of their kin) and JD's still talking, in a rough-edged voice that sounds far older, far calmer, than it should.
"And he died a few times, and I died a few times -- I think technically I win, if you count the tortured-to-death-and-revived thing, which I do, let me tell you -- and lots of other things happened that are past your security clearance, and then I woke up one morning as me instead of O'Neill and O'Neill went off to live our old life. I spent a few weeks mad enough to spit bullets, and then I realized I didn't envy the poor bastard for having to deal with that mess. That he could deal with it for us. That the downside to all of this was that I didn't get to have his life anymore, but the upside was that he didn't get to have mine. That I got a do-over, and I didn't have to hold to old choices. So I play with cool toys, and I fuck men, and I'm going to make us rich, and someday, way down the line, I'm going to call him up and tell him how it would have gone for us if we'd turned left instead of right and thank him for taking all the weight so I didn't have to."
JD's fingers stroke Cammie's cheek, and Cammie can barely breathe. Honesty and truth and intimacy, and underneath it all there's love. For General O'Neill. For her, she thinks. Why else would he have come back? Why else would he tell her these things? (Telling secrets in the dark; it's what best friends do; they aren't that, oh, not by a long chalk, but they're on they're way to friends, she thinks, unless they're past it and off in another direction already. Left instead of right.)
"But you don't get to ask about it," JD says. Still calm. Still quiet. "You weren't there. You might have heard about it, you might even have read the reports, you might know on paper what it was like. But you weren't there. You came in at the end, and you pulled off a miracle, and you got dealt a shitty hand for your sins and your reward and they should have done better by you. But you'll never know the reality of it. So you don't get to ask. Maybe someday I'll tell you. But you don't get to ask. You got that, Mitchell?"
Cammie nods, in the dark, against her pillow.
"Okay," JD says (long sigh against her neck; surrender, she can read that much, but she's not sure what he's surrendering to). And then -- Cammie's heart gives a hop-skip-stutter, because this, this, is love, he's telling her flat, in the only way she thinks he can, and it isn't bodies, but bodies aren't worth a fart in a windstorm to what matters really -- dips his head to rest his lips against the curve of her neck, just behind the ear. "Now go back to fucking sleep." And JD lets his hand fall from her mouth, drapes it over her side, and -- apparently between one heartbeat and the next -- falls asleep.
They don't talk about it. Cammie's not sure of the extent of JD's conversational prohibitions, and JD apparently doesn't see the need to bring it up again.
She buys him fancy underwear (thongs; red and black and she even found gold lamé.) He wears them. (Sometimes around the house -- smirking at her -- and sometimes to go out on his dates.) He buys nail polish in ridiculous colors (glitter pink and frost gold and radioactive green) and insists on painting her nails. Toenails too, no matter how much she tries to fight him on it. ("You got seven left, Mitchell," he says mercilessly. "You might as well admit to it.")
She keeps the freezer stocked with ice cream and the cabinets stocked with candy (gets back into the swing of baking cookies on a regular basis, too; JD has a hummingbird metabolism and if she can't eat like a twelve-year-old any more, well, the sweet stuff isn't around long enough to tempt her). JD talks her into letting him into the kitchen to make chili.
September turns to October (five months). JD pronounces them three weeks from code-complete. Cammie flies to Washington, puts on a blue blazer and a white blouse and a pair of gray flannel slacks and little gold earrings and spends an hour showing PowerPoint slides to the third assistant underling of the Secretary of the Navy. She doesn't even think about detouring over to E ring, to what's never publicly called Homeworld; if it had still been General Hammond there, she might have, but General O'Neill's a two-star now, and that would be more weird than Cammie's brain could handle. She comes home with a big enough check to justify all the hell they've been putting themselves through and the promise of more where that came from, and to JD kissing her on the forehead and putting his arms around her and wordlessly apologizing for making Cammie fly under someone else's hands.
Momma starts making noises about Cammie bringing her partner home for Thanksgiving, and Cammie's said 'business partner' all along, but Momma wants the chance to make up her own mind whether it's big-P partner or little-p partner, so Cammie figures she'll make a decent number of tries at getting Nielson out of it and then warn him to brace for the worst. (Hasn't met any of his dates yet, but she suspects why by now; seventeen and gay in Colorado Springs, he's either dating much older men (apparently much older men) or kids who look the age he is who'd bolt at the sight of a responsible adult).
Cammie starts watching the classifieds for a bigger place, a nicer place, and she knows JD catches her doing it, but JD doesn't say anything. Their argument about the GUI ends with Cammie throwing a couch pillow at JD and JD threatening to set Cammie's cane on fire. Cammie wins, and tries to be gracious in victory.
She's never going to tell the little cocksucker he saved her life. She suspects he knows.
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