The weekend before Christmas is when Daniel realizes he has to do something.

They're in the mall (a place Daniel would generally rather shoot himself than set foot in), because Cammie has just found out that Cousin Somebody is going to be at Christmas after all and that means she needs another present and internet ordering wouldn't get it there in time and no, she can't just send JD, because even after twelve years of Christmas with the Mitchell family (a prospect Daniel is vaguely terrified of; he's met five or six members of Cammie's family individually but apparently Christmas is a production; Sam's warned him twice, but where last year he could beg off, this year is a command performance), apparently "that boy" is completely incapable of coming up with anything remotely close to Cammie's standards. "Yeah," JD had said, "okay, whatever, you go enjoy yourself with sixty thousand of your closest friends packed into a monument to consumerism, Mitchell; I'll stay here and get some real work done."

And Daniel knew that JD would have gotten up and gone with Cammie anyway, because the mall on the weekend before Christmas is no place for someone who's getting more and more unstable on her feet every day (a fact which, flatly, terrifies him), but Cammie had whirled on JD, her eyes blazing (they'd been fighting -- again) and said fine, she would, and if he thought she was going to beg him to come along to carry her packages he had another goddamn think coming, and she'd stomped out and headed back to the bedroom to change out of her house-clothes and JD had been left staring after her like a stunned and gaping fish.

"Shit," JD had said. "Read that one fucking wrong. Hell." He'd put his palms down flat on the table and uncoiled his legs (getting ready to get up and go after her), and then, as Daniel watched, had looked at Daniel and pursed his lips. "You up to going with her? I could maybe go talk her into letting me go, but it'll be another three hours of screaming. You, she'd take."

And the thought had flat-out terrified Daniel. He's gotten good at dealing with the facts of Cammie's physical limitations in the house -- knows how to get out of her way, knows how not to get in her way in the first place -- but the house is re-engineered from the ground up to be disability-friendly: hardwood floors, wide hallways, wide doors, a thousand bits of unobtrusive assistive technology, a place for everything and everything in its place. He's getting better at dealing with the smallest bits of how to protect and shield her in the wide world beyond (how to match her steps perfectly so if she has to grab for his arm neither one of them will stumble; how much space to leave between his body and the cane she rests her weight on so he doesn't trip her). He's learned bits and pieces of what he can do for her (very little) without making it worse. But if Daniel is just the rawest apprentice, JD is master-class. He watches JD in Cammie's orbit, when they're all out together, and knows that JD has adapted in a way Daniel thinks it'll take him another decade to master.

But Cammie's been snarly and snappish lately. And at first Daniel had suspected it was due to their changed relationship circumstances -- not jealousy, not from Cammie, but insecurity -- and he'd redoubled his efforts to make sure Cammie knew he loves her, tried time and again to force his own impulses into a language she will understand, and she'd appreciated it each time and kept on snarling. JD had finally told him: the localized numbness in Cammie's legs and feet is spreading, as abused nerves flame out and give up, and it isn't precisely that her condition is degenerative, but wear and tear keeps coming up with new and innovative ways to screw her over.

It isn't right. It isn't fair. But it's what they have to deal with.

So Daniel had agreed, and gone to ask Cammie if she wanted company, and she'd glared at him and asked if JD had put him up to it, and he'd put on his very best innocent expression and said no. And she'd grumbled and muttered, but she'd let him come along, and there were eighty thousand people at the mall when they got there (all right, it's an exaggeration, but not by much), and Daniel had thought he would jump out of his skin trying to grow eyes in the back of his head to guard against the casual cruelty of all the able-bodied people around them who just don't know what kind of danger they're dealing with here.

And it had even been going well (as well as he could have hoped), until a small child on those goddamn wheeled shoes (will that fad never die?) had crashed into Cammie and sent her flying.

He stares at her (lying on the floor of the mall's central plaza, dazed and small and crumpled) for way too long (panic makes him freeze; always has) before the little voice in the back of his head kicks him in the prefrontal cortex and gets him moving. He crouches next to her, rescues her cane before some stray foot can kick it far and wide.

"Oh, my God, is she okay?" somebody says, over his shoulder.

Breathe. Daniel's seen Cammie fall before. (Terrifying. JD has told him: any more damage to her spine, to the small of her back, is a risk nearly as wide in scope as the risk she took going up against Anubis.) He's seen JD handle the aftermath. He knows his lines. He looks up, makes his smile distracted-reassuring-confident. "It's all right," he says. "Just give us a second, really."

But Cammie's face is pale, and she isn't panicking, but she looks like she might want to. "Fuck," she says, her voice sick with pain (not fear, thank God, just pain). She pushes herself up on her elbows. Winces. "Fuck."

Daniel's first impulse is to push her down again (and fucking shoot anyone who accidentally kicks her) and make her lie still until someone can come and check her for injury. (Because she is injured. If she weren't injured, she'd be moving, not lying there where anyone could come along and trip over her and make the situation worse.) Instead, he kneels next to her (breathe). "Tell me what to do," he says.

He's expecting get me up and get me out of here. Instead, she breathes in, and he can see her pulling the mantle of calm control over her shoulders. She looks up at the circle of gawkers that have gathered around them and says, very firmly, "Someone go get mall security and tell them to call an ambulance."

Stab of pure, unadulterated terror. (Breathe.) Daniel runs his eyes over her. She's drawn up her right knee (moved it, thank God; the nerve damage down the right leg is worse than the left; if one-not-both of her legs is damaged it's more likely to be the right, and the fact she could move anything below her waist means she isn't paralyzed). "Are --"

"You ask me if I'm all right, I'm gonna smother you with a pillow in your sleep," she says. "Think my goddamn ankle's broken."

He looks down. Her left foot is lying at an unnatural angle; as he watches, she tries to flex the ankle, can't stifle the whimper, stops. "Okay," he says, and his voice sounds in his ears as though it's coming from down a very deep well. He's broken bones before (there is, in fact, no possible indignity that can be visited upon a human body he is not intimately familiar with; some of the scars have been erased and some of the damage never scarred in the first place, but he remembers). He knows how much pain she must be in right now. He wants to fuss, wants to flutter. But it's not what she needs from him, so he moves down to kneel next to her ankle (her leg is still extended; he doesn't want someone to step on her). "Tell me which of your doctors to call."

The ambulance gets there quickly. Or the mall has paramedics on hand; Daniel's not sure. He watches as the two young men get Cammie up on the gurney (doesn't offer to help; they know what they're doing with her better than he would). Only belatedly, as they're checking her vitals and listening to her explaining her medical situation in quick, tense sentences, does he think to pull out his cellphone and call JD.

He thinks JD is going to kill him. His fault, his fault -- not good enough not fast enough to stop her from getting hurt, and he remembers old nightmares and the calm sure certainty that JD will kill him if he ever causes Cammie to come to harm, and he thinks (now) that JD might understand but that doesn't change the fact that Cammie is in pain and Daniel could not prevent it. But all JD does is say "fuck" and then "fuck" again, and Daniel can hear him moving on the other end of the phone. "From the mall, they'll try to take her to Memorial. Don't let them. Get her to the Academy Hospital -- they'll fight you, since Academy doesn't have an emergency department anymore. But get her to the clinic and tell them to get her over to the Fraiser wing, and they'll know what to do. I'll meet you there."

The Janet Fraiser Memorial Wing of the Academy Hospital is what the outside world knows Secured Medical as. Everyone there has enough clearance to know bits and pieces about the SGC. "Are you going to be able to get in there?" Daniel asks.

"Power of attorney," JD says, and hangs up.

Daniel shoves his cellphone back in his pocket and goes over to stand by the gurney. Cammie is sitting up, her leg stretched out in front of her. The EMTs have taken off her shoe and sock, splinted her ankle to immobilize it, but they haven't tried to set it. (Of course, Daniel thinks. Too many years on the front lines, where a broken bone would get field-set and splinted by whoever had an extra pair of hands. This is America. They're civilized. They can afford to let a doctor do it.) They've given her a nasal cannula to provide extra oxygen, but she's pulled it off; it's lying next to her on the gurney. She's got a clipboard in her lap and a pen in her hand. Even the end of the world will require paperwork.

She sees him coming, and puts the pen down. There are lines of pain around her eyes and mouth, but she seems calm. And any one of the people who are walking by, stopping to stare and gawk at her, would be screaming right now if they were the ones on that gurney, and all Cammie looks is weary, like this is just another cross to bear.

Dimly, Daniel realizes that there is a part of him that is absolutely fucking furious.

"I called JD," he says. He takes her hand in his, squeezes it. She squeezes back, but then extracts her fingers. "He's going to meet us at the hospital."

"Yeah," Cammie says. "Might be we have to drive there ourselves, and that is going to suck beyond all measure, but they're refusin' to transport me to Academy an' I am by God not goin' anywhere near Memorial."

He smiles at her. "Don't worry about it," he assures her, calm and serene. "You fill out the rest of the paperwork. I'll make sure it gets taken care of."

The EMTs have both walked away a little (Cammie must have been yelling at them, Daniel thinks). He pulls out his SGC ID, and very patiently (sweet and reasonable and kind and they both keep looking at something in his face and taking another step back) explains to them that they are going to the Academy Hospital.

"Dr. Jackson, your friend --" one of the EMTs says.

"My wife," Daniel says (not true in the eyes of the law, but true where it counts, and medical privacy regulations have gotten overhauled a few times while Daniel was gone and he doesn't think Cammie will mind) "is a retired Lieutenant Colonel who was injured in the line of duty. She's been under care at the Academy Hospital for fourteen years." Smile. (Breathe.) "We are going there."

They go to Academy. (He only has to explain it a few more times.)

Cammie is over in X-Ray when JD arrives. (They still call it X-Ray, even though the imaging technology is adapted from Atlantean design and uses no x-rays at all. Old habits die hard.) Daniel's sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chairs next to the vending machines; JD drops down next to him. "How bad?" he says.

"They're taking the scans now to make sure it's a clean break and that nothing's pinched or dislocated," Daniel says. "The doctor thinks it's broken in a few places. I think she got her ankle caught in something as she went down." Caught against him. He'd been walking too close, wanting to keep anyone from shoving between them. "Um. They think she's my wife. I thought it might help."

He's not sure what kind of reaction he's expecting, but JD only nods. "They think I'm her son," he says, with a snort for something, and Daniel's head hurts (just a little) at the sudden realization that of course JD could be; hadn't he himself thought that when he'd seen them both for the first time, at Jack's graveside? It's been so long since he looked at either of them and saw them as anything other than what he knows they are. And of course JD is known here (drives Cammie to her appointments; physical therapy and massage up to five days a week, now, and scans and tests once a quarter, and Cammie spends so much time here in this building that the intake paperwork had taken them all of five minutes).

Daniel just isn't thinking very clearly right now, is all.

"Dr. Mrenti think they're going to need to do surgery?" JD is asking.

Daniel drags his thoughts back from wherever they've wandered. "Um. He said they have to check the scans first. Last I heard, she and he were shouting at each other about whether or not she was going to get up and walk out of here and find an I'm-quoting-here real doctor instead of a two-bit quack." He'd nearly choked on his tongue when he'd heard it, but the doctor had only smiled.

JD smiles too, just a bare tipping up of the lips. "Yeah, she and Mrenti aren't happy unless they're shouting at each other. He's a good guy. Not top in the field, but top five percent, and the most experienced in dealing with integrating overseas technology. The bits that make it here, at least." He stands up, digs around in his jeans pockets, comes up empty-handed. "You got any money on you? Left the house without finding any cash, and they still haven't refitted the vending machines here to take credit."

"No," Daniel says. "No, I don't carry it either." He takes a deep breath. "Look, I --"

"Stop." JD reaches out, puts two fingers beneath Daniel's chin, forces it up so Daniel has to meet his eyes. "I don't know what happened. But as long as you didn't push her over, it isn't your fault."

Daniel only wishes he could believe it.

When Cammie is wheeled back from X-Ray, she's smiling, soft and a little bit loopy. "Hey, baby," she drawls, seeing JD and Daniel sitting there. "Babies. My babies. Didn't mean to make you come over'n get me, Nielson. I'm doin' jes' fine."

Her accent is wide and thick, and Daniel notices that her pupils are wider than he's ever seen them before. Looks like someone finally managed to get her to agree to let them push some painkillers through her IV. Or maybe they just did it anyway. (He'd told them to; they have a list of all her drug allergies and interactions on hand, and they'll know what she can take.) He knows she lives with regular pain, knows she has ever-increasing levels of narcotics available to her at home (he's seen the bottles, the patches), knows she refuses to take them. Doesn't know why. JD won't tell him, and he's never asked Cammie.

"Great," JD mutters, under his breath, and then gets up to follow the gurney into the room they put Cammie into. "Came over to play poke-the-freak," he says, and Cammie --

Giggles. It's a bright and merry sound, and Daniel has heard Cammie happy and he's heard her laugh and he's heard her cheerful, but he's never heard her sound like she doesn't have a care in the world like this. "Broke my ankle," she informs JD. "Bet it's gonna hurt like a sonofabitch when the drugs wear off. Daniel's sneaky, you know. He made them tell me it was the dose of my dailies that I was gonna miss." She drops her head back against the bed, studies them both. "Gonna yell at you when I come on down from this, honeybaby," she tells Daniel. "If I do. Might be I won't. I don't hurt too bad at all right now. Feels too good."

Of course. Of course. A hundred things fall into place in Daniel's head -- the way JD is always the one to bring Cammie her pills if he's making her take anything stronger than her daily-dose painkillers, the way she never lets herself reach for the bottles herself, the way JD is always the one to fill Cammie's glass if they're drinking wine or beer with dinner. He's known for a while that she's habitually under-medicating her pain, and pondered yelling at her about it; he knows she won't ever be likely to hit 'pain-free', but surely she should be able to get more relief? But if she's susceptable to addiction (already flirted with addiction?) and knows it, how much strength must it take to fight off the temptation every day?

"I'm sorry," Daniel says, an undertone, for JD's ears alone. "I didn't know. I didn't --"

"Couldn't have," JD says back. He looks at the nurse who wheeled Cammie in. "What's the verdict?"

Cammie answers, though. "Snap, crackle, pop," she sings. "Double break. Ain't gonna need pins, but no walking cast for little ol' me, an' guess who can't use crutches?"

"Dr. Mrenti is going to come in and set it soon," the nurse says. "We can arrange to let you borrow a wheelchair to get her home in --"

"Got our own, thanks," JD says. Brisk and sharp, and if Daniel didn't know him, he'd think it was cold. It's not. It's relief mixed with anger. "Brought it over with me just in case. How long?"

"Usually we say six to eight weeks," the nurse says. "Given Ms. Mitchell's condition, I'm certain the doctor will want her to stay in the wheelchair for longer. He says that you're familiar with what will need to be done while she's healing?"

JD nods. "Not our first barbecue," he says, and Daniel listens as they talk about treatment plans and wheelchair accomodations and physical therapy and he wants to scream.

This is Cammie's world. This is what JD's been doing for her, day in, day out, for years, and this is what she'll be dealing with for the rest of her life, and it makes Daniel want to put his fist through the window or just stand in the middle of the room and scream. Cammie's condition has always been fact and reality to him (first thing he'd noticed about her, first priority to adapt to in daily household life), but both Cammie and JD treat it as fact, not tragedy. 'Crippled' isn't a dirty word in their household (can't be when both Cammie and JD sling it around as casual insult, no matter how much it makes Daniel choke) but it's never been used with gravitas.

It's sinking in now.

Cammie is crippled. Took her 302 up to fight Anubis and save Earth, and if it had been just to save SG-1, Daniel would feel guilt, but it wasn't, it was to save everything. And he has risked life and limb more times than he can count, and he's walking wounded because of it, but he's walking. Unscathed. (A little jumpiness, a few nightmares. They're bearable.) It isn't fair that he should have gotten off so lightly, while Cammie copes with this. (Copes with it and bears up under it and tries to -- not tries to hide it from him, not precisely, but tries to downplay it, to carry her burden with grace and strength.)

It isn't fair. It's not right.

There's a nagging little voice in the back of Daniel's head that says if it had been one of the members of SG-1, this wouldn't have happened. Not like this. (How often had strings been pulled for them? How often had rules been broken? SG-1 Teflon, they'd always called it, and it had been a joke and a laugh and it's not fucking funny anymore.)

He remembers the aftermath of the battle over Antarctica (dimly; it was a long time ago and he'd been a different person then). Jack in stasis and Daniel's heart breaking and a hundred thousand things to be done all at once, and he remembers Sam being called over to the Academy Hospital (right here, maybe even in this room) to treat the survivor of the 302 wing with the Goa'uld healing device, remembers paying a courtesy call on Lt. Col. Mitchell afterwards and thinking we owe her one, I should see if I can call in some favors. And then he'd gone back to the Mountain and stepped into utter chaos and he'd forgotten. Maybe he hadn't been the only one.

But that doesn't make it right.

He's asked around at the Mountain (they know he's living with Cammie and JD; it had come up on his quarterly security review, and he'd explained that both Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Nielson held DOD clearances through their work, that Ms. Mitchell was an SGC veteran, and his reviewer had ticked off a box and nodded and said thank you, Dr. Jackson and that had been the last of it). Started with General Napolitano (sympathetic and apologetic and completely unhelpful) and worked his way on down. Nobody had anything to offer him. Everything they've learned from Atlantis has been cleared through to the Academy Hospital; the Goa'uld Empire is cracked and broken (finally) and its technology scattered. Nobody's even heard rumor of a sarcophagus in close to four years now.

The lesser Goa'uld healing technology, the healing device -- perhaps. But that requires a host or a former host to operate, and Sam had already tried it on Cammie. (Saved her life with it. Saved her legs from frostbite, saved her from paraplegia, saved her from losing more skin to the burns. Couldn't heal her entirely.) And -- the Tok'ra would take Cammie in, take her as a host, what few of them there are left (and Daniel ignores the utter panic that thought inspires; for Cammie, he would fucking well get over his old issues dammit the Tok'ra are their allies), but Daniel had (once; no more than that) started to maneuver the conversation around to a place where he could propose it, and Cammie had said a flat-out no.

God damn it, what fucking good is alien technology if he can't use it to save someone he loves? What's the use of the last twenty years if he can't trade it in to right a wrong committed by the universe against someone who should know no wrong? (Saved people. Lost others. But so many of his life is defined by his failures, and he keeps charging forward and hoping he'll get it right the next time, and the next time rolls around and he never does.)

Eventually, he realizes that JD is standing in front of him and snapping his fingers in Daniel's face. "Earth to Daniel," he says. (Fond, exasperated. Familiar.) "Ground Control to Major Tom. If you're with us --"

Daniel refocuses. He's still standing in the corner of Cammie's hospital room, his hands in his pockets, staring out the window. Has been for a while, he thinks. Cammie's out of the bed, wearing a pair of hospital scrubs to replace the pair of jeans they'd had to slit the leg of, her foot and ankle and the top of her thigh in a thick and heavy cast. She's looking less loopy than she had been, but not by much. (Before, she'd looked as though she couldn't even find the ground, much less hit it with her hat. Now, she looks as though she at least knows where the ground is.)

She's sitting in a wheelchair. Manual. Lightweight, padded seat (neon pink; the metal of the frame is electric purple), high back, huge wheels that look like they could take on anything. No arm rests. No handles for pushing. It bears about as much resemblance to the wheelchairs of Daniel's experience as a horse-and-buggy bears to the F-306. She's got her hands on the handrims, and she's rocking the chair back and forth: the seated equivalent of JD's come-on-I-wanna-get-out-of-here pacing. "Come on, baby," she says. "Ready to get the hell outta this place."

"Um," Daniel says. "Sorry."

Cammie grins at him (it makes him revise his estimation of her ground-detecting ability; it's not precisely merry, but it's soft and unfocused). "Gotta get me home and get me to bed," she sing-songs. "You gotta come tuck me in. Else I'll pout."

She leans back in the chair. The front stabilizer wheels come off the ground. She shuffles it back, forward, back, and then JD's stepping behind her and wrapping his hands around the corners of the frame, forcing it down before Daniel can have a heart attack. (At least they're already in the hospital.) "Come on, cowboy," JD says. "They ticket people for driving like that around here."

"Hell," Cammie says. "I'm gonna get stuck in this goatfuckin' thing, you're fuckin' gonna let me drive it the way I wanna," and Daniel follows along down the corridor behind them as they bicker the entire way out to the car.

It isn't fair. It isn't right. Someday -- sooner or later, and please God may it be later, but Daniel knows better than to count on luck -- she's going to wind up in that chair permanently. Full-time. And he knows it's why they had it, so that if and when disaster strikes, they'd be prepared, and he knows she hates the fucking thing worse than JD hates Windows and Daniel hates Budge, and Daniel bets that the doctors have been trying to get her to agree to use the chair -- on bad days, when she goes out -- and she's been saying no-no-no the entire time. She's been living with that knowledge for years now, been forced to adapt in so many ways to a world that won't adapt to her (and oh, God, they're leaving for her family's house for Christmas in six days and travel is going to be impossible and Daniel doesn't even know how accessable her family's house is -- or, no, he knows her father's dealing with many of the same issues; one hurdle cleared, at least). And no amount of wheelchair tricks (while drugged) can conceal the fact she's scared and she's stubborn and she's hurting and she's doing her absolute level best not to let it destroy or poison her.

She's one of the strongest people Daniel knows. And goddamnit, he loves her. He doesn't have the same instinctive knowledge of her that JD has, and he gets things so very wrong sometimes (and he will apologize to her for the painkillers once she comes down more from them, but he isn't sorry that she isn't hurting right now, dammit). And he might not be able to face this whole situation with as much calm equanimity as JD can, but he's going to ask her to tell him everything, anyway. Everything she's willing to tell him. Or maybe he'll ask her to ask JD to tell him, because that way he won't have to try to hide how upset it makes him, and she won't have to put on a brave face for him. Either way, he wants to know. Because it isn't right, and there has to be something he can do.

He just doesn't know what it could possibly be.

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