Cammie's in the kitchen, and the kitchen is closest to the door, but she feels like a ton of hammered dogshit today (enough that she's sitting at the table to batter the chicken for frying, instead of standing at the counter), so JD's the one to get the door when the doorbell rings. She can't see who's on the other side, but she can see JD's reaction as he peers through the peek-hole: welcome-wary-welcome. He grabs the shirt he keeps by the door to pull it on, takes down the chain and opens the door, and it's Sam and a man Cammie doesn't know, wearing BDU pants and a black t-shirt.

"Hi," Sam says. "Daniel didn't tell you we were coming?"

"Shit," Cammie hears, as Daniel appears from the living room, and she pries herself out of the chair and limp-shuffles (can't grip a cane with your hands covered in chicken parts; food safety is always a primary concern) over to the sink to wash her hands. "Sorry," Daniel says. She can barely hear his words over the running water: "I'm sorry. I forgot. I thought it was tomorrow. No, I didn't mention. Hi, Sam. Hi, Nelsus."

The man (and there's something wrong with him, but Cammie can't tell what) bows. "Dr. Jackson," he says.

Cammie snaps off the water and dries her hands on the towel she has tucked in the waistband of her pants. Grabs the cane (fucking bastard of a thing) and starts her progress to the door to do the necessary. (Daniel accuses her of having no manners. She has perfect manners. Her Momma'd beat her, otherwise.) JD is standing there, staring at the man -- Nelsus -- with his head cocked. She knows that look. It's the something's-up look, and if Sam hadn't brought this guy here, JD would be turfing him out the door as easy as breathing.

"Nice to see we finally trained you into stopping when you're in the neighborhood," Cammie says to Sam -- Sam's running R&D at Area 51 these days, has been for a while, and she spends half her time in Nevada and half her time halfway across the galaxy and Cammie will not be jealous, won't won't won't -- and then turns to the man, tucks her cane quickly between her legs and offers her hand. He hesitates for a second, then takes it. His handshake seems awkward. "Cameron Mitchell. Call me Cammie, please. This is JD."

JD doesn't offer to shake. "I am pleased to meet you," Nelsus says. And with that kind of a name, and that kind of formality, it's gotta be someone Sam (and Daniel) knows from the other side of the Mountain, because if this man was born here Cammie will eat her cane (fucking bastard of a thing). She takes a minute to silently curse Sam -- it's not that she isn't capable of throwing a welcome-to-Earth celebratory dinner on no notice at all, and the fried chicken is good enough for company (and she's glad she decided to spit in the face of can-do tonight and do it anyway). But a girl likes to know when an alien is going to show up in her living room.

"Ah," Daniel says, from behind her, sounding nervous and guilty. "Nelsus is --"

"Tok'ra," JD says. It's the a-ha sound of someone figuring something out, and Cammie knows a second of panic, because she knows JD's history (Jack O'Neill's history) forwards, backwards, and inside out by now, and she knows what that word means to him. But there's no anger there, no buried resentment. (All right, a little bit of resentment, that his old life is rising up to greet him, but it's the same he gets every time Daniel brings work home from the Mountain that doesn't come in the form of papers and reports; this isn't the first welcome-to-Earth dinner Daniel's brought someone home for. He likes to show their allies what he considers all the good parts of Earth, and he says Cammie's cooking should be one of the Great Wonders of the Modern World. JD usually hides in the office.)

Nelsus's eyes flash, and his chin dips. And Cammie was rank-and-file in the fight against the Goa'uld, and she never (praise God and Jesus and everyone on down) came face-to-face with one of them, but she's heard all the stories (JD's, Daniel's) and she knows what to expect. She's proud of herself; she doesn't jump and she doesn't start when she hears the distorted echo of a voice coming from Nelsus's throat. "And I am Garesh," he -- the symbiote -- he says. "I hope we are not intruding too heavily on your hospitality."

Doesn't jump, but her heart is racing anyway. Fear of snakes, fear of looking into the dark and seeing the flash of eyes looking back; those have been hard-wired in the human brain for a long damn time. But she's a damn fine hostess when she needs to be, and she's not going to shame Daniel (although she might kill him later; JD will help). So she inclines her head and says, "Not at all. Hello, Garesh. I'm Cammie. Welcome to Earth. You two just tell me what you'd like me to call you. Can I get you something to drink?"

Garesh dips his head again and comes up Nelsus. "Thank you," he says. "You may call us by either name, as you see fit. I would like a glass of water, if it isn't too much trouble." She can't tell if it's company manners or if he's always this polite.

"Not at all," Cammie says. "Sam?"

"Nothing for me, thanks," Sam says. Her fingers are twisting in the hem of her shirt. One of her tells. She's got something to say and she thinks Cammie's not gonna like it.

This isn't gonna be fun, whatever it is. And Cammie hurts from her throat on down to her toes (bad day; they're all bad days now, and she tries like hell not to snap and snarl at her boys, but she's scared and it sucks and she's gonna have to watch herself to keep from making Sam a target), but she flicks her eyes to JD (wordless order) and he follows her into the kitchen to be a pair of hands.

She takes down a tumbler, fills it from the cold-water filter on the fridge door. Hands it to him. Opens the fridge, takes out one of Daniel's beers (stout) and one of JD's (ale) and then hesitates and takes out another stout for herself; the Old Peculier will do her, since this situation is peculiar enough. She stacks the bottles in between her arm and her chest, and limps over to put them down on the counter and rummage in the drawer for the bottle-opener (fucking thing never stays where she left it). She knows what JD's thinking. He knows what she's thinking. Neither one of them are happy right now.

"I'm thinking we lock him in the server closet for a week," JD says, as Cammie finally gets her hands on the cunting bastard of a bottle opener. "Maybe two."

"Drop him down a well," Cammie says, darkly. "Grab that plate of chicken and shove it in the fridge; I'll come back and finish it soon's is polite."

JD does so, and then takes two of the bottles (Daniel's, his own) between the fingers of one hand and the glass of water in the other, leaving Cammie to bring her own beer along with her. Good enough, as she's only got one hand free. She limps along in front of him (he's good at pacing her, never makes her feel like the fucking turtle she really is, never makes her feel like she's holding him back). When they get back into the living room, Daniel has offered Nelsus/Garesh and Sam a seat, but nobody's looking at anybody and Daniel's looking guilty too.

So. Whatever this is, Daniel's in on it, and she really is going to drop him down a well (there's an old one on the property back east; capped off so it doesn't drown kids and kittens, but she's pretty sure JD will help her wrestle it open again) but she is by God a Southern lady down to her fingertips, so she waits, standing -- you don't sit until your guests are settled, even if there's a little man shoving razors through your legs -- as JD distributes the drinks. And she turns her back on Daniel, so she doesn't set him on fire with the power of her glare.

"What brings you to Earth, Nelsus?" she asks. Polite and charming, small talk, nothing more (and how was the weather on your planet this morning when you got up? she thinks, and does not let herself laugh or snarl at the surreality of it).

"Sam and I asked Nelsus and Garesh to come and help us with something," Daniel says, quietly, from behind her. "To help you with something. He's the best healer the Tok'ra have. We brought a healing device home from the Mountain with us."

The beer bottle she's holding hits the floor. Shatters and splashes. Glass everywhere. And she's going to fall over, going to faint (going to kill him and hide the body so no one will ever find it), and JD is standing next to her (up and out of the chair he'd settled into, quick as a flash) with his bare feet bleeding from the glass beneath them and his arm around her waist to steady her. "You fucking bastard," he's saying (in her ear, but no, his head's whipped around to stare at Daniel). "You don't spring that on her. You don't spring that on us. You don't."

"I'm sorry," Daniel is saying, helplessly; "I'm sorry, I thought -- I lost track of -- God, I'm sorry." He stands up (he's wearing socks; Cammie knit them for him; they're all always barefoot in the house, but Daniel's toes get cold; she's shocky, she can tell, it's the only reason she's thinking about feet) and crouches to pick up the worst of the pieces. "I'll get the dustpan," he says, and flees.

Sam and Garesh are watching her. She's the hostess; she has a responsibility here. She looks down. JD's feet have left tiny smudges of blood against the hardwood. "You're bleeding," she says.

JD curses, low and vicious. Not at her. "Come on, Mitchell," he says. His 'brace yourself, soldier' voice. "Let's get you sitting without cutting your feet to shreds. Work with me here."

He bends at the knees, puts one arm across the back of her shoulders, the other behind her knees. Heaves. She's not light. He's stronger than he looks. Only a couple of feet to the chair behind her, the one Daniel was sitting in; it humiliates her to be carried, but she's making a spectacle of herself anyway. He deposits her down in the chair like she's glass that'll fracture too (and he never has before, and she wonders what's in her face that makes him think she's about to shatter) and pushes her head down between her knees. The scarring at her back, across her spine, pulls and shifts. Her body doesn't feel like her own. She wonders if that's how Nelsus feels when Garesh is talking.

Shock. Drifting. It's cold in here. Or maybe the cold is something from her memory, something rearing up after years and years to whisper poison in her ears.

"Go get a towel," JD is saying, to Sam, and Sam hears something in his voice that makes her snap to. Up and into the kitchen, and she comes back with the roll of paper towels and uses them to mop up the worst of the spill. JD's attention is on her. "I said work with me, Mitchell. Up and at 'em, airman."

And yeah, she knows what Sam heard there: command voice. Works on her, too. There's a part of her (will be until the End of Days and the Last Trumpet blowing) that's still Air Force straight on through, and JD's got it too, and his isn't even buried as far as hers is. And there's never been any doubt about which one of them is the CO and which one is the 2IC, and it's got nothing to do with corporate structure on paper or what they all do in bed or who runs the house. It just is.

It helps, the way he knew it would; some of the shock starts fading, and she picks up her head and breathes. He's crouched in front of her. His eyes are studying her face, and she sees love and care and concern there.

"Yeah," she says -- reporting for duty, sir and shut up, Nielson, I'm fine and thank you, baby, I needed that, all rolled into one, and he'll hear them all. She takes another deep breath. The air's not cold in here. It's perfectly fucking temperate, even if JD was the last one to set the thermostat.

He watches her for another second, then nods. "Yeah," he echoes. Rocks back on his heels. Looks at Sam. "Don't fucking spring that on us," he says, and it's JD talking, not Colonel O'Neill anymore.

"I am sorry," Nelsus says, quietly. "We only thought to help."

"Yeah," JD says. It's not his 'fuck you and the horse you rode in on' voice, but it only misses it by a fraction. "Got that. Give us a second."

"I'm sorry," Cammie says. "It's just --"

Bad hostessing, is what it is, falling to pieces like this in front of a stranger, but Nelsus is dipping his head. "No," he says. Garesh says. Echoes, off the floor, off the walls, and it sends shivers down her spine, but she breathes through it. "Do not apologize. We did not mean to cause you distress."

Daniel comes back, dustpan in hand. (Took him long enough to find it. There's a reason they have a cleaning service, and it's because Cammie can't clean anymore and JD doesn't think to and Daniel's fucking hopeless at it.) He crouches too, sweeps up the bits of glass (they're everywhere) that Sam is herding into a pile with the paper towel. "I'm sorry," he says, to the floor. Lots of apologies flying around here. "I should have mentioned sooner. I'm so sorry. I didn't want to -- to get anyone's hopes up, before I knew if we could pull it off --"

"You snuck him out," JD says, the sound of realization dawning.

"Yeah," Daniel says. "The, ah, healing device, too. Sam rigged the cameras and we got Brent from SG-4 to agree to switch places for the evening. I just thought it was going to be tomorrow."

SG-4 is the new flagship team. Has been for a while. They retired the SG-1 designation special, never be another one again. She's thinking about these little things because she can't let herself think about the big one.

Hope.

They'd had the healing device on her, back when; she'd been airlifted to the Academy hospital from the wreckage of her 302, straight down into Secured Medical, doped to the eyelids with don't-worry and feel-good. Prognosis unknown. Won't walk again, but maybe we can save the legs. And they'd called in Sam (damn few people who can use the healing device; naquadah in the blood, and that means host or former host, and Sam had been the only one available) and Sam had come, tearful and shattered from what she'd just gone through, from the shock of her whole world changing. Sam keeps apologizing. Not very good at it. Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

But Cammie had clawed her way back out of that bed, and she'd spent the next ten years knowing that one wrong move, one false step, one unlucky throw of the dice and she'd be back in it.

(Not long now, the doctors tell her. They don't know when, exactly. But soon.)

"We are -- fairly experienced, in the use of the healing device," Garesh says. "With such an old injury -- we can't be certain. But I believe we can effect some improvement in function, and at the very least, stabilize the system so it doesn't deteriorate further." He pauses. If he were human, Cammie would say the pause were embarrassed. "If you agree."

The system. Her body. This sack of flesh she's been carting around with her for fortymumble years, this skin-suit that's marked and carved and scarred and tattooed and cherished and cursed. Her body, which has been loved (by Daniel, by JD) and done some loving of her own, and hope is the worst part, because hope is so damn fragile.

She lifts her head further. Puts some iron in her spine. (Colonel Mitchell, standing ready, sir.) "Yeah," she says. "Yeah. I agree."

JD, still crouching in front of her, makes a little noise. Like somebody stepped on his foot. Daniel breathes out, then tenses back up. Sam's just tense, period. Garesh nods his head (agreement, not change-of-control). "I hope very much that we can help," he says. Quietly. As quietly as you can when your voice sounds like a dirty tape deck playing at half speed.

"Mitchell --" JD says -- a warning -- but Cammie's shaking her head, and he subsides.

"No," she says. To him. He knows about the danger and the lure of hope, knows it as well as (better than, some ways) she does. And he knows about the technology and he knows about the Tok'ra (too much, she thinks; too well) and he knows every goddamn bit of her, all the way clear on through. And she'll take his guidance, whenever he gives it to her, because she knows damn well he's smarter than she is about so many things, but this choice is hers.

And she's made it.

She reaches out her foot, pulls her cane closer to her with her toes. (The ones she has left.) Daniel pushes it closer to her. JD picks it up and hands it to her. She leans her weight on it, struggles on up. Once upon a time, she ran stairs for fun; now, sitting-to-standing takes more out of her than a double dozen flights ever did. But she does it, because once upon a time (a little bit after that) JD Nielson slammed into her life and dared her to keep on going, and she's never once backed down on a dare he's set her.

"You just tell me what I gotta do," she says.

#

The healing thing burns. Itches. Sears. Cold-hot-cold, from the base of her spine all the way down her legs, and it hurts worse than tattoo needles by a factor of a thousand. (Will it spoil her ink? she thinks. She and JD have spent years designing the patterns down her legs -- people gonna stare no matter what, might as well give them something pretty to look at -- and they're her stories like JD's are his, different symbols is all. Weaving in and out of her scars and telling the history of all the things that made her, who she is and what she believes in, and she'd give up every last damn bit of ink for the chance to walk fifty meters without falling again.)

Face down. On the bed. JD had almost protested, bringing a stranger into their space like that, but they needed the room and she's going to be here for a while, Garesh says. She's lying close to the edge. Garesh is standing over her. JD, sitting cross-legged, his back up against the headboard with her facedown in his lap and her arms around his waist. He's petting her hair. Daniel's next to her, his hand warm on her bicep, his thumb stroking patterns against her skin. She doesn't know where Sam is.

Oh, God, it hurts.

But she can feel -- something. Some shift, some shiver, under her skin, pins-and-needles and the way it feels when you leave an ice cube against you for too long, and a thousand knives flaying her open like they've done on an operating table, and a whole host of random nerves firing and making her feet twitch.

"Steady," JD says. Soft and intimate, her ears only. Her lifeline. He'll bring her home.

"Yeah," she says, or tries to, but it comes out as just a bunch of vowels. Daniel's hand closes a little more tightly, then eases off as he realizes. He's worried. They all are. God, it hurts.

Garesh's voice sounds distant, like he's concentrating on something so far away. (Her. Her body. Something.) "As I had feared," he says, and Cammie's heart plummets straight on down (can't fix it can't save it can't do anything but crawl in a hole and wait for it to collapse over you). "The damage is -- extensive. And older. If I had been here at the time of injury --"

"We couldn't fucking find you at the time of injury," JD snarls.

Through the haze of pain, she can feel Garesh's startlement. Doesn't know, then. Hasn't been told. Who JD is. Probably for the better. "As I was saying," he says, and Cammie can feel JD's tension and disgust running straight through his skin under her head. "If I had been here at the time of injury, perhaps I could have healed it completely. I am sorry. But I believe I can --"

Garesh trails off. Concentrating on something. Something inside her. Some part of the feedback he's getting from what he's doing. Her legs spasm, like two fish flopping on the pavement. "Can what?" Daniel demands.

"I can address a significant amount of the nerve blockage," Garesh says. "Reduce some of the scar tissue. It will not be perfect. But I can significantly lower the risk of long-term paralysis."

Cammie buries her face in JD's lap, and his hand ghosts over her hair. He won't tell anyone about the tears he can feel, slipping over his thighs, kissing his skin and falling to the sheet.

"Oh, God," Daniel says, rush of relief. "Did you hear that, Cammie?"

She can't talk. Can't even nod. "She heard it," JD says. "Go ahead. Do what you have to do."

Knives. Razors. It had stopped hurting about five minutes after Betty Lou had hit the ground (not supposed to name the 302s, not supposed to have a favorite, supposed to be able to duck yourself into whichever one's at hand and get on going, but they'd all had the ones that listened to them best and somehow everyone always wound up in theirs) and she'd known at the time how much of a bad sign that was. And since that day, she's pretty much had a choice between hurting a little, hurting a lot, and numb, and she hates the hurt, but she's scared of the numb.

This, though. This isn't like how it had hurt when she and Brian had taken their hit. (Snow, falling through the cracks. Can't hear Brian breathing. Can't feel anything below the waist, and hoping like hell it's because of the cold, and knowing it isn't.) This hurts like that should have hurt, if she hadn't been numb and drifting the whole way. This hurts worse.

"Is the pain bearable, Cameron? Cammie?" Garesh's voice comes from a long way away. Not asking if it hurts. He knows it hurts.

She can't answer him. Her fingers tighten on JD's hips. "Keep going," JD says. Tight and ragged. It hurts him, seeing her in pain. Hurts Daniel, too. Daniel believes in his heart of hearts that no one should hurt, that nobody should ever die, that happily-ever-after is possible (child's belief, but her baby is a child, in so many ways, for all he's older than she and had to grow up so fast). But Daniel can't see her pain as well as JD can. All Daniel sees is her lying next to him, muscles tense, motionless. Bearing.

JD, though. JD has been able to see straight through to how much she hurts since the moment he walked into her life. Picked her up from it, set her back on her feet and got her those last few steps of the way when it looked like she was going to falter, and he's been doing it ever since. Day in. Day out. He knows when she hurts and he knows how much she hurts, at any given time, and he sweeps away barriers and clears away obstacles for her and she puts up with it because it's not pity, it's anger. He is furious -- at the universe, on her behalf -- that her gallantry (his words, the one time she told him the story) had left her so ill-used, and she puts up with it precisely because his anger about the realities of her life is a displacement of his anger about the realities of his own, and if he holds that it'll kill him.

So that's why his hands are gentle as he strokes her hair, but his voice is vicious.

Dimly, she can feel Daniel stretching out next to her, pressing his body (so strong, so beloved) along her length. Comfort. Helplessly offered up, always wanting to do something, never knowing what to do, desperate to just make it better. He's come so far, learned so much about how to touch her and when not to touch her and how to offer help in a way that doesn't get her back up, and she's awed and blessed every time she stops to think about it, because dealing with her types of needing doesn't come naturally to him, not at all. And he's tried to learn them anyway, for her, and it goes against his nature, but he does it anyway.

It makes her forgive the surprise being sprung on her (they will still have words about the little matter of conflating Wednesday and Thursday, but there's nothing new under the sun). Trying to help. Trying to fix. Willing to sacrifice himself (she knows what trouble he's opened himself up for) to save someone he loves and to right a wrong, and how can she hold that against him?

She remembers this. Pain-fugue; you grab onto something and hold onto it tight, something to use as a route inside your head so you can retreat from what they're doing to your body, climb in and shut the door behind you, stuff the thoughts and the memories around the cracks of the door so none of the pain creeps past. Go away. Go inside. The doctors always ask her: on a scale of one to ten. The doctors ask everyone. And you're supposed to use your own personal scale of reference, but nobody ever talks about how when you live with pain day in and day out, the scale gets warped from true. She wouldn't be able to bear this if she hadn't gotten used to the lesser pains along the way. She's glad they didn't eat first. She wouldn't be able to keep it down.

Muscle, nerve, bone. And her bones have been broken and fitted back together, and her nerves are pinched and shifted in ways no human body should be forced to bear, and her muscles are knotted and twisted and have been for nigh on a decade and a half, and Garesh is undoing it all. Dissolving scar tissue and smoothing away calcium buildups and repairing myelin sheaths. Rolling back time: tick-tock goes the clock, the minute and hour hands spinning backwards, and it's just a smaller version of what JD went through, even if it's taking a different form.

Eventually, the thoughts and the memories can't block the cracks of the door anymore, and that's when she starts screaming.

#

She plays the game with herself every morning as she wakes up. Hold yourself still. Hold yourself motionless. The longer you can keep from moving, the longer you can stave off the indignities that will come crashing down the minute you shift. The longer you can stay in that half-awake dream state, the more time you can spend drifting in the place where your unconscious mind can hold sway (she can still go running, in her dreams).

But the dreaming always slips away, and today's no different. She opens her eyes. Lying on her side in the bed. Daniel's propped up next to her against a veritable mountain of pillows. Knees propped up. Book against them. As she tries to shake off the last of the sleep, he reaches up and turns the page, awkwardly, left-handed; his right hand is resting on her shoulder. Need to touch. Need to feel.

The early-morning inventory of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to is automatic. Second nature. (How much help am I gonna need getting out of this bed? Is the weather changing? How much am I gonna to have to fight with Nielson today about whether I'm willing to court psychological disaster in exchange for physical relief and slap on a fentanyl patch? Where the hell did I leave my cane?) She runs the numbers. Comes up with an impossible answer. Runs them again.

It isn't that nothing hurts. (If nothing hurt, she'd simply conclude that she was still dreaming.) It's just that the hurts are so insignificant she feels like they're barely worth acknowledging. (The chronic pain patient either doesn't notice when she pinches her finger in the door, because the noise of it is drowned out in the discordant symphony of everything else, or screams her damn fool head off because this pain is something new. She's a don't-notice.)

She must make some sort of noise, shift her weight in a way that's different than her usual sleeping toss-and-turn, because Daniel looks up. He puts the book down on the bedside table. (Tented spine-up, instead of finding a bookmark, and that should tell her something right there, as Daniel has always been her ally in the ongoing crusade to get JD to stop destroying book bindings.) He transfers his hand from her shoulder to her cheek. "Good morning," he says. (Not how do you feel, since he's learned to keep those from being his first words, but she can tell he's holding himself back from asking.)

She licks her lips. Her throat's dry. "Hey, baby," she says, and it comes out scratchy. She blinks. The light in the room is weird, and it takes her a minute to put her finger on what it is: it's early afternoon, not morning. She's overslept. Badly. "Time's it?"

"About one," Daniel says. His voice is gentle. Hesitant. Loving. "You've been out for about sixteen hours. Garesh knocked you out so he could keep going without the pain getting in the way. He said you'd probably be asleep for most of the day. He and Sam went back to the Mountain last night. JD just went to make sandwiches for lunch."

SG-1 left marks on both her boys, she thinks, just like SG-1 left marks on Sam (and on Master Teal'c, or so she's been told; she's never met the man). One of them is that both of them are used to quick-summarizing for someone who's just been unconscious for the lion's share of the last twenty-four, and used to knowing exactly what information they're going to want to have. She licks her lips again. "You're home," she says. Her brain's not quite working yet. Stating the obvious.

"Yeah," he says. "I took the day off. In case you needed me."

"Don't lie to the woman, Daniel," comes the voice from the door. Cammie blinks away the last bits of sleep from her eyes and watches JD cross the room to stand on the other side of the bed. He's upset, she can tell, but not upset at her. Or at Daniel, even. He looks down at her. "Morning, sweetheart," he says, quietly. JD never calls her 'sweetheart' as anything but sarcasm more than once or twice a year, but she supposes she's put him through a lot in the past day. Enough to warrant the verbal affection.

Daniel sighs. "I figured I'd let her finish waking up before mentioning it. Cup of coffee, chance to pee, something for breakfast, not hi-good-morning-can-I-have-a-job."

Got found out, then. He must be in serious shit. "Told you," she manages. "Twice what you're making." (She knows what his contract specifies as penalties for disclosure of classified information, misappropriation of offworld technology, use of Program resources for personal gain. But he's here and not in Leavenworth, so she'll save her panic for later.)

JD snorts. "That's my girl. We can probably pick him up cheaper now, though. Buyer's market. Come on. Out of bed."

She doesn't want to. Doesn't want to move, doesn't want to find out whether that little thrill of hope is going to get beaten against the rocks, doesn't want to reach for the stars and trip and stumble on the rock she didn't notice because she had her eyes on the prize. But JD is holding down his hands to her, and it's because she doesn't want to move that she makes herself: clasps his wrists with her hands and sits up, swings her legs over the edge of the bed, puts her weight on them.

Her knees buckle. She nearly goes down again. But JD's holding her wrists just like she's holding his, and he steps in close and shores her up, his hands sliding along her forearms until they're gripping her elbows. "Oh, no you don't," he says. "No falling. I'm not carrying you twice in twenty-four hours."

"JD," Daniel says, mild reproof hiding major worry.

JD transfers his eyes over Cammie's shoulder. "Don't you 'JD' me," he says. "She's forgotten how to stand up without hunching over, is all. C'mon, Mitchell. Spine straight."

Her hip is throbbing, dully. Her thigh's burning. But she can feel her goddamn legs and toes. Actually feel them, not muted sensation punctuated by stabbing pain. And the small of her back is aching, and her neck hurts and her throat's sore, and she lifts her hands from JD's arms and takes a step and doesn't feel like she needs to scream.

"Oh, God," Daniel says, behind her, laughter and tears in his voice all at once. "Oh, thank God."

JD steps back. He's still got his hands hovering under her elbows, ready to catch her if he needs to. "Another," he orders. And she does. And another, and another, and by the end of it, she has walked herself to the goddamn bathroom under her own goddamn power without needing to stop and lean on the cane once, without having to stop and gather her strength to climb the insumountable mountain of the next level step, and she's not crying, but only because the emotions are too damn much.

#

It's not a miracle cure. Too much damage for that. Too many things scarred, or missing, or used to being where they shouldn't be. She's going to need the cane still -- she can tell -- but for balance, not to replace the function of a half-dead limb. She wonders, as she feels her way through the house and into the kitchen, what her doctors are going to say. Oh, well. Academy hospital. Secured Medical. They'll think of some way to explain it.

JD and Daniel are sitting at the kitchen table when she comes in. (Footfalls even. Not halting. She wonders how long it'll take JD to retrain his subconscious to expect her new pace, those few times she's awake before he is.) They both cut off their conversation the minute they hear her coming, look up. Daniel's face is naked relief. JD's is, too, but she's the only one who can read it on him.

"Body heard a rumor of sandwiches," she says. She's starving. "I don't remember authorizing either of you to make free with my kitchen."

"Sold your part of the house to Daniel while you were unconscious," JD says. He sets his coffee aside, bounces up, opens the fridge. "It's not your kitchen anymore."

Usually, she'd insist on gathering breakfast for herself (just like one of the Family babies banging on the table and shouting Cammie do, and for much the same reasons of pride and independence). Today, she works her way over to the table and settles in her chair. (All the chairs have the special padding, not just hers. But this one's closest to the counter.)

Can't steal JD's coffee; he drinks it light and sweet (and revolting). So she steals Daniel's instead. He hands it over willingly. "I'll sell the kitchen back to you," he says. He seems lighter. So much lighter. Almost giddy, like a weight's been lifted from his shoulders, and she can't tell for sure (off her game this morning), but she thinks it's not just from seeing the way she's moving. "A dollar and other valuable considerations."

"Sold," she says, instantly. "Nielson, give the man a dollar, I left my wallet in my other pants."

"You take an IOU?" JD asks.

Daniel laughs, and oh, she's heard Daniel laugh -- made Daniel laugh, more and more as the time went on -- but this is a sound of joy, bubbling up from deep inside his chest. "We'll talk about my interest rates later."

JD comes back. Plate of cold fried chicken, and she didn't make it last night -- was too busy being unconscious -- which means one of them must have, and it's a little scorched around the edges but the tricky part is in the seasoning and she'd gotten that prepped up ahead of time, so she's willing to at least try putting it in her mouth. She's a little startled to find that she's ravenous. She takes a bigger bite.

JD drops into the chair next to her, grabs a piece for himself. (Universal truisms. Water is wet. Ice is cold. JD is hungry.) "I'd call you pretty damn interesting, yeah," he says. Morning banter. Same as any other day. Her life.

She needs to know how it's going to be changing. What Daniel risked, to set her back on her feet again. Tear the bandage off fast. "How much trouble you in, baby?" she asks.

Daniel steals his coffee back for a sip. "Oh," he says, lightly. "Not much. I am a very bad man who is a disgrace to my country and my planet and to all the noble men and women who have sacrificed over the years --"

"Ignoring the fact that he was the one doing the sacrificing half the time --" JD interrupts.

Daniel throws him a fond and tolerant look. "--and if it weren't for the fact that the Program is going public, soon, Dr. Jackson, and we're going to need to be able to produce you for the public relations circus, we'd drop you down a deep, dark hole, but we're certain you'll understand that you simply can't be trusted anymore --" He spreads his hands. "End result, I'm being offered -- strongly suggested -- early retirement. I can go back next week to pack up my personal stuff. Under guard."

For her. All for her. She shakes her head. "Baby, you shouldn't have --"

"No," JD says. "He really shouldn't have. And he's damn lucky that they didn't decide that it would be better to have a dead hero than a live liability." He drops the chicken bone on the plate. Takes another piece, but instead of taking a bite out of it, pushes it into her hand. "But he did. And they didn't. And I'm not all that broken up about it, although I do plan on taking a switch to him and Carter later for being stupid enough to get caught."

"Kinky," Daniel says. "I'll get the handcuffs."

He's downright boyish this morning. Happy and cheerful, and looking at him she thinks that this must be the man he used to be, once upon a time, before she knew him. Before JD knew him, maybe, even. And she realizes again that for the entire time she's known Daniel -- for far longer than that -- he's been quietly, desperately hating his job, hating what it made him into, sticking on out of duty. The dangled promise of being allowed to submerge himself in intellectual and cultural discovery was always just over the horizon (jam yesterday and jam to-morrow but never jam to-day) as soon as people stopped shooting at him, and they never did.

They've both been pushing Daniel to retire for a long time, and he kept saying no. (Or saying later, which is Daniel's no, because Daniel hates conflict that wasn't his idea.) JD had had to be the one to explain it to her. Considering himself bound by a never-made promise to the shade of a dead man, and no matter how many times JD had tried to release Daniel from that promise as Jack O'Neill's proxy, it had never worked, because Daniel has never learned how to say I stand relieved even when he really needs to.

But it's out of his hands now. A relief. After a while, you don't notice the pain unless it gets worse or goes away and then comes back. His has gone away. And he looks like he'd had no idea how heavy the weight he was carrying really was.

She can relate to that.

She knows better than to say anything. (Looks at JD, though, and JD raises his eyebrows in the way that means yeah, I know, and she quirks her mouth in the way that means why didn't you tell me and he lifts his shoulder in the way that means couldn't be helped, so I just didn't mention.) She steals the coffee back. "Sam gonna be okay?" she asks.

Sam wouldn't care if she weren't. Sam's been feeling guilty every time she looks at Cammie for the past ten years. (Crashed saving SG-1. Sam couldn't fix her. And Sam Carter will find a way to blame herself every time a hero perish or a sparrow fall, but with Cammie it's personal; they're friends, and Sam never gave up feeling she should have done more.) Doesn't mean she should be able to wreck her career for Cammie. Sam likes her job.

"She's fine," Daniel says. He gets up, crosses the kitchen, brings back another coffee mug and the carafe. Tops off the mug of coffee Cammie's holding, pours himself fresh. "I told them it was my fault and my idea and that I bullied her into it."

The Air Force is still thirty years behind the times in terms of racial, sexual, and gender politics. Cammie has no problems believing that the Powers That Be will believe Sam was the silly emotional woman being manipulated by her (male) former teammate. It sticks in her throat, to allow it -- she would have had no problems with it; she always believed in letting people think whatever they wanted as long as it worked out to her advantage, but Sam has been throwing herself head-first into that wall for as long as Cammie has known her -- but there's not much she can do about it. "Careful she don't kill you for it," she says. "And the guy you got to cover for you?"

"SG-1 Teflon," JD says, amusement and bitterness all wrapped up into one. "Bet it survived the changeover to SG-4."

Daniel laughs again. "Oh, God, yes. The shit we got away with --" He shakes his head. There's fondness starting to creep into the edges now. Like he can allow himself to remember the good parts, now that the bad parts are done poisoning it. "Really. It's okay. I'm okay. Everything's okay. You. You're okay."

Question, but not quite. Still, she hears it. "I'm okay, baby," she says, and reaches over the table to grab his hand. "Ain't perfect. But nothing is, and I'm okay. Better'n I was." And hi, yeah, that's the understatement from hell. "You still shouldn't have."

"Shouldn't have had to," JD says. "They should have gotten someone out here to do that for you, oh, anytime in the past ten fucking years." He transfers his attention to Daniel. "They should have let you do it open-and-aboveboard instead of having to pull a stunt like that."

"I know," Daniel says. "I tried. I did. But --" He shakes his head. "Politics. We couldn't get the Tok'ra to agree without giving up things the people in charge didn't want to give up. I got Nelsus and Garesh to agree as a personal favor, between us. Individuals. Not as an Earth/Tok'ra thing. I hope he doesn't get into too much trouble at his end. I don't care, though." He laughs. Like he wants to just stop laughing and not stop, and Cammie has heard him at that point a few times, but the difference is that this time it isn't hysteria. "I just flat-out don't care. I've been plotting this forever. I should have said something sooner, but I didn't want to --"

To get Cammie's hopes up. To make JD face his old demons if it might turn out to be nothing. She squeezes his hand. All of them, in their own way, trying to take the whole entire weight of the world in their hands in order to spare the other two the trouble of trying to shoulder their own piece of it. "Next time, you say something, baby," she says. Knows he won't. Has to say it anyway.

"If you'd said something," JD mutters, "I would have been able to help you make sure you wouldn't get caught."

He sounds grumpy as a bear, and Cammie knows full well he's glad Daniel's out of there but she still can't help cracking up at the fact he apparently is annoyed at Daniel for being sloppy. That's her boy.

Daniel dips his fingers in the top of his cup of coffee. Flicks the droplets at JD. "Quit your bitching," he says. "Anyway. Cammie, they want to see you over at the hospital at your 'earliest convenience', to figure out changes in your treatment plan --"

"To play poke-the-freak," JD mutters into his coffee. (They both ignore him.)

"--and I, as of this morning, am gainfully unemployed. And on the job market. Or maybe I'll just be a kept man." He grins at her. "Buy me breakfast?"

"Buy you the whole damn pig," Cammie says, automatically -- anything she has is his, and she knows JD would say the same, would have even before this, but she knows he's perfectly well-off; ten years of paychecks piling up in his bank account while he was on Atlantis means he won't have to work another damn day in his life if he doesn't want to. "Or you could write your memoirs. Bet the bidding war for that'd be damn high."

"To buy them, or to be left out of them?" JD snorts. Uncoils himself from the chair, takes the plate of chicken bones (Cammie is startled to realize she's demolished the entire pile; makes sense, if the speed-healing uses the body's own resources, but she hasn't had an actual appetite half the time for what feels like years) to dump them in the garbage. "Tell her about the fun part. The part where if you try to, oh, say, write a paper in the field of archaeology, or take a teaching job, the offer of quiet retirement goes away faster than you can say 'plugging the leaks in the classified dam'."

"What?" Cammie says. She turns around to look at JD -- not his joking face, not that she thought it would be -- and then whips her head back around to stare at Daniel. "They can't --"

He puts his other hand over the top of hers. "Cammie. It's all right. It's all right. I always knew I'd never be able to go back to it. I wouldn't want to. Not knowing what I know now, about all the ways they're wrong, and not being able to say anything. And sure, yeah, it's a little annoying to find out that they apparently think I'm stupid enough to slip and tell a classroom full of undergrads all the ways the textbook is full of crap, but it's all right. I'm done. I'm through. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do next. And I don't. Fucking. Care."

It could be denial. (How many times has she heard JD make the jokes about the river in Egypt, about the anagram of Daniel's name?) It's not. It's the God's honest, and it's a relief to him, and he did it for her (would have even if he hadn't wanted to) but there's a part of him that did it for himself, too.

So she puts a hand on his shoulder (he blinks at her, but he doesn't move) and she uses him as a pillar to get herself out of the chair (and there's a part of her that's still bracing itself against the pain and a part of her that wants to see just how far she can go push herself now and she ignores both parts because they're both fucking idiotic). Picks up the cane, and it's nice, so fucking wonderful, to be able to just lightly skip its tip over the floor instead of having to lean half her weight on it to keep her leg from buckling, as she walks across the kitchen. Not the stairs; she's not that stupid. (Soon. Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn't matter.) But the cargo elevator's right there.

"Where are you going?" Daniel asks.

She opens the grate and steps into the elevator. Grins at him as she shuts the grate behind her. "Down to the office," she says. "That's where we keep all the papers for the new hires."

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