Middle of the night, and JD and Daniel are both snoring (on different wave amplitudes, too, which is just driving her bugfuck), and usually Cammie has no problem drifting off to sleep, but tonight she's staring at the ceiling spinning her wheels.

Isn't from the pain. (Sometimes it is. Not tonight. She hurts, but it's the kind of hurt she's learned to shut out, else she'd never get anything done.) She's not certain why. But something in the back of her head is whispering at her, and she isn't yet ready to hear, and it's apparently decided that it's tired of whispering and it's going to start shouting. On the theory that if she's sleep-deprived and cranky maybe she'll be able to hear it better; who knows.

Snoring to the right of her. Snoring to the left of her. Into the valley of insanity rode the six hundred, and "forward, the Light Brigade" is the rule she's always tried to live by, and she's not getting anywhere by going slowly mad in this bed. She rolls over (goddamn bastards making her sleep in the middle of the goddamn bed, but at least neither of them are too clingy once they've fallen asleep; she has room) and considers her options. JD wakes up too easily; Daniel it is.

She climbs over him, laboriously, trying not to slip and faceplant into him. (That would wake him up, for all that JD's been proven right over the past few months and she now knows that Daniel will sleep like the dead as long as he's identified the things around him as things that aren't a threat to him, at least until the nightmares start up again. And she and JD have been on Daniel's 'safe' list for a long damn time.) It takes her a little bit of effort, but he doesn't even stir.

Her cane's around the other side of the bed; she uses the bed as a crutch as she goes. It wakes JD. (Everything wakes JD; gnats farting wake JD.) One of the channels of the stereo-surround snoring cuts out; JD opens his eyes, rolls over and sits up in one smooth motion. "Just me," she says, quietly, before he can decide she's a threat. He squints at her, satisfies himself, and drops back down again. Within seconds, he's snoring again. She knows he won't even remember it in the morning. (Jumpy household.)

The kitchen's cold. (Goatfucker was the last one to touch the thermostat.) She logs on to the house control panel from the terminal parked in the corner of the kitchen counter. (Can get there with their laptops, too, but there are terminals in the bedroom and the kitchen and the living room, just in case or for the benefit of guests; good thing, since her laptop is downstairs and she doesn't feel like fetching it.) When she sees the results, she sighs. Zone three is set to a temperate and balmy sixty-two degrees. In Colorado Springs. In the middle of September, while they are experiencing a unseasonal cold snap of forty-six degrees outside, with the goddamn kitchen windows open to the outside and no wonder she is freezing. She sets zone three to seventy-one degrees (goatfucker can bite her and besides the bedroom is zone six) and feels the heat kick in. She leaves the windows open, though. The air smells good.

Five minutes' worth of lambasting JD about the thermostat on the house news server. Daniel has not been informed of the existence of the perpetual flamewar yet; Cammie set up his .newsrc to give him house.shopping-list, house.chores, house.schedule, house.menu, and house.who.forgot.to.buy.the.lube, which is a joke newsgroup that they (almost) never use. house.bitch.bitch.bitch is an acquired taste; she'd hate to see Daniel go running. (One point for every profane construct. Bonus points if it's one that hasn't been used in the past month. Double bonus points if you get the newsreader to think your message is spam.) It isn't an articulate night, though; all she can muster for a closing argument (after she explains the problem in four hundred words of things she wouldn't ever say in front of her momma) is next time you decide to do this, might be you could do me a favor and dig a hole in the backyard first, so I don't have to hurt myself digging your GRAVE after I KILL YOU. Not her best effort. She'll try again in the morning.

The clock on the xterm says it's 0345. Cammie sighs. She could take one of the sleeping pills the doctors keep pushing on her: sleep is when your body heals and if she hears it one more time she'll punch something. Her body's not gonna be healing, thank you very much, and if she needed sleep she'd just make both the idiots she sleeps with sleep in the garage so she could get some peace and quiet and not have to put up with the snoring.

Huh. Okay. Stab of quick hell fucking no to that thought; she considers it, searches back the source of that automatic rejection. Sleeping without JD? She's done it plenty of times (nights he goes out and stays out, nights he's on a different sleep/wake cycle than she is, rare though they are; nights when she's exhausted at the end of a work day and just falls asleep on the couch, upstairs or down in the office; nights when they're staying with family, though not when family's staying with them). She prefers having him there; he's warm (her own personal space heater) and he's comfort, human skin to come up against in the middle of the night and know there's someone else there if you need them. Sleeping without Daniel?

Not if I can help it, comes the swift response from that bit of her bastard brain that isn't dealing out its secrets, and she stares at the xterm for a good two minutes before logging out, dialing the lights in the kitchen up to quarter strength, and setting the kettle on the stove.

While it's warming up to boil, she takes down a mug and a teabag (chamomile; if she wants any chance at sleep, which is looking less and less likely, it'd be worth her life to go for anything with caffeine) and sets it up to take the water when it boils. Stares at the counter for a few minutes, not really seeing it. (You listening to me, brain? Don't make me come in there. No response.) Then she turns around and limps to the freezer. She really wants some ice cream, or a double handful of chocolate chip cookies, so she makes herself take out the bag of edamame instead; she measures out a handful of pods into a bowl, adds a few more, and puts the dish into the microwave to thaw them. The kettle whistles and the microwave beeps done at about the same time. She pours the boiling water into the mug, takes it over to the table, comes back for the edamame (only one hand and it's dark enough in here that she doesn't want to risk balancing the bowl on top of the mug).

Then it's one more trip, and she opens the cookie jar and takes out two chocolate chip cookies anyway, because goddamn it, if you're going to be climbing inside your head and taking a good long look around, you goddamn fucking deserve a chocolate chip cookie no matter if it's starting to get cold enough that she can't do laps in the pool out back to keep her metabolism as active. (Swimming is the one activity that doesn't leave her too wrecked, if she takes it easy. Pool's heated; they still close it up from mid-September to mid-May; they have a health club membership for the winter months, but going out to the club is exhausting enough.)

So. Daniel. (Twinge.) Sleeping without Daniel. (Twinge.) She lets herself consider: what if Daniel left tomorrow? He's seemed happy enough with their arrangement. (Peace and security and at least one good meal a day and people to sleep with and someone to make love with and companionship and home.) No harm, no foul, and they'd established it all up front (friendly and non-confrontational) and it's been working, but -- what if Daniel decided their life was too weird for him (mental snort; she knows how weird Daniel's life really is) and decided to end their whatever-the-hell-it-is?

Twinge, shading all the way on to a full-blown wham, and she sits in the semidark and stares at her bowl of edamame and thinks: fuck, I've fucking gone and fucking fallen in fucking love with the fucker.

Fuck.

This was not supposed to happen. She cares about Daniel (cared about him at first because JD cared; came to care about him for himself, because Daniel Jackson is a good man and more than that, a kind one, and he's sweet and funny and smart and always worth the time she spends with him). At first he came around because their place was secure (stable environment, familiar people, no threat), and then he came around because (she thinks) he wanted to see them (see her, and came to, grew to, want to see JD as well), and then he came around because he wanted to be here and he wanted to see her.

And she'd talked it over with JD, and JD had said everything would be all right. That he loved Daniel (probably always will), but there's time and distance there, and a hell of a lot of growth in the between-bits. He wants Daniel to be happy, and if Daniel will be happy with Cammie, JD will be happy to watch it. ("'Course," JD had added, "if it had been anyone but you, Mitchell, I would have had to go off and write tragic emo song lyrics.") And Cammie had nodded, and taken JD at his word (safe to do that; perhaps the only person in her life who says what he means and means exactly what he says) and been secure in the knowledge that whatever developed between her and Daniel, JD would be content for them both.

But she and JD have been sharing a bed for ten years (and some people might view it as pathological, or as infantile, or as co-dependent, but the simple and plain fact is that she sleeps better when he's there with her; she cannot imagine her life without JD in it; he saved her and she saved him and they're bound up forever in some arcane obligation, can't be separated or severed) and she wasn't going to give that up. (Wasn't going to give up her own bed. Wasn't going to make JD move out of his.) Hadn't taken long for her to gentle Daniel into it; he'd cleared that particular hurdle running.

Had caught his heel on the prospect of making love in that bed while JD was there. Nearly tripped and stumbled to the ground over it. Up until that point, JD had been scrupulous about always leaving them time in the evenings, alone in the bedroom, and had always politely declined to take notice of the scent of sex and sweat in the air when he returned, and it's not like she and he haven't been observing each others' sexuality for ten years or so but they'd both agreed Daniel would probably freak. But that night had been a bad night after a string of bad nights, and all three of them had already settled in for the night, and she'd been lying there in the dark and thinking that she wanted -- needed -- somebody to touch her. Somebody to want her.

And she'd thought, clear as day, in rapid succession: I care about Daniel; JD loves Daniel; I love JD -- because she does, as deep and as wide and as fierce as she's never loved anyone else in her whole life, and there isn't anything in the world she wouldn't do for him. And their carefully-built code of household ethics always held that it was each other first, love interests second, no harm no foul and never any nevermind if they traded back and forth or if someone's current bed-partner decided to switch teams, and it had happened two or three times and she knew it wasn't just blowing smoke. So she'd stayed curled up in the dark there, thinking it over, and she'd examined the thought from every angle and every direction, and she'd realized that Daniel had already proven what she'd come to suspect: that anything, to him, can be made to seem normal, if it's just presented as normalizing enough.

And she'd known he was straight, and she'd known it was a firm preference (started with a few tentative feelers, mostly in the form that could be played off as a joke; ended with outright asking). Which meant there was little chance she'd ever be able to push him into JD's arms (never say never, everything is always possible, but possible and likely are two different things). So if she couldn't offer JD the object of his desire, at least she could offer him the vicarious experience.

Might seem cruel, to anyone else in the world -- dangling what JD can't have in front of his nose and snatching it back the minute he reaches for it -- but everyone else isn't them. JD trusts her (wholly, completely); JD loves her. But more than that, JD understands her, and she understands him. He's not the type who'd rather have nothing than have just a little and know he can't have the rest; he takes the little and holds it close for what it is. And there's a streak of jealousy in JD that goes six miles wide and as deep as the Marianas Trench, but somehow she has never tripped it.

And she's a woman. (A fact he points out to her as frequently as she points out his utter pigheadedness, and she wonders sometimes, a thought-experiment just like this one, what would have been between them if she'd been born a boy and everything else about their lives had been the same, but there's no knowing and no telling for sure, so set it aside, Cameron Evangeline, and don't think about what-ifs.) Seeing Daniel with another man would wreck him. Seeing Daniel with a woman -- with her -- would be a gift. An offering, of what little she could share, and she had known he would take it that way.

So she'd rolled over and into Daniel's arms and made him kiss her, and she'd known (Daniel hadn't) the exact instant JD woke to whispered argument, and she and Daniel had made love long and slow. And eventually Daniel had realized JD was awake too, and she'd caught the hitch-stumble-catch of Daniel's rhythm when he'd realized JD was watching him, not Cammie. Wondering if it was a prelude to something he didn't want to deal with at that very moment. Wondering if it was a setup. Wondering if it was a cruel joke. Finally deciding that no, it was just another one of their weirdnesses, and it was a weirdness he could handle, and going back to what he'd been doing, and that had been the minute she'd known it would all work out. Somehow. Didn't know how, but somehow.

Somehow was not supposed to include her going and falling in love with the goddamn bastard.

Because she'd known she cared about him, and she'd known she loved him -- he's an easy person to love -- but in love with. That's a big one. That's a distinction she's always made, and growing up she always thought she'd be like Momma and Daddy -- see The One and everything else would just melt away and the chorus of angels would come farting Hallelujah. And it had been strange, to finally realize that her epic in-love-with, when it turned up in the form of one Jonathan Daniel Nielson, was three parts agape and one part philia, no eros at all, but realizing it had freed her. Liberated her from the idea that any one person could ever be all things to her and fill all needs for her, because if the man she was in love with couldn't, well, nobody could. So her Grand True Love was a skinny mouthy pain in the goddamn ass (twenty years younger; twenty years older), and they both spent ten years filling in the gaps of what they couldn't be for each other by turning elsewhere, and when all was said and done, it hadn't been a bad prospect for the shape of the rest of her life.

And now she has Daniel.

Who loves her and desires her and admires and cherishes her, even if he can't say any of these things out loud yet, and who feels for JD a weird and affectionate friendship-loyalty-love, and who (she thinks) is coming around to the point where -- the nights when she's hurting too much, the nights when she wants to watch, the nights when she wants him to receive pleasure and take pleasure but is too tired to be an active participant -- he no longer balks and shies even internally when she takes a less active role in their bed and lets JD be her hands. But it's still no more than an intellectual knowledge that JD wishes to give him pleasure combined with a purely-mechanical physical reaction. She doesn't know if it ever can be more. And she's in love with JD and JD is in love with her, and she loves Daniel and she has no earthly clue how to describe JD's feelings for him, and it would take a pickaxe and a pry-bar to lever Daniel's feelings for JD out of Daniel's head; God must know, because Daniel sure doesn't. They've been able to keep it working so far because there's friendship and care all around (no harm, no foul, and she says it a lot, but she means it; always has). But when love turns to in-love-with, things can get damn messy, damn fast.

She doesn't know if the miracle that brought her and JD to this agreement, this arrangement, could wind up brokered a second time between Daniel and JD. Between her and Daniel.

Motion, out of the corner of her eye; her adrenaline doesn't spike, so it's got to be JD. (Even now, she still starts at Daniel's motion, from time to time. Jumpy household, and she's used to watching everything around her and calculating whether or not it's going to get in her way, and Daniel doesn't yet know how to fit himself in beside her without being just another variable to track.) She lifts her eyes. It is JD. He's naked, and he looks grumpy; his hair is sticking up. "Could hear you thinking all the way from the bedroom," he says, dropping into the chair across from her.

She knows that what he means is that he'd had something calculating in the back of his head, how long she'd been gone, and when the number had ticked over in the clock in the back of his sleeping mind, he'd woken and gone in search of her to see if she'd had some disaster she needed to be rescued from. He reaches out, takes her mug of tea -- gone cold -- and sips from it. Then makes a face, pushes it back, and starts in on the edamame. "And who the fuck told you you could dial the heat up to roasting?"

"Same person who told you that you could turn it down to freezing," she counters, automatically, but it's nothing more than autopilot. Just like his grumbling is strictly for form's sake. To some people, love means being blind to their beloved's faults; to them, it means highlighting them (often in sixteen-point blinking red font with sparkly glittering image files behind). She sighs. He picks up one of the two chocolate chip cookies sitting next to the bowl of edamame, and puts it in her hand. She nibbles on it, then puts it down again.

"Come on, spill," he says. "Like to get back to sleep sometime this century."

Cammie smiles, just a little tipping-up of the lips. "Nothing," she says. "Everything. Little of both. Just one of those nights."

"Uh-huh," JD says. "Worrying about the evil space aliens taking over the world, worrying about your personal life, worrying about work, or worrying about what bit of your body's going to fuck you over next?"

She doesn't answer him. (Pretty sure he suspects the answer anyway. Neither one of them bother seriously worrying about the evil space aliens, since they're as prepared as they can make themselves and planning and preparation defuse worry. Work is going -- if not well -- at least no more badly than a problem always goes at this stage of development. And if she were worrying about what bit of her body was going to collapse next, she'd be in the bed between them, wanting to soak up as much touch as possible.) Instead, she says, after a long minute of silence, "Nineteen fifty-two was a long damn time ago."

"Yeah," he says. "Got that memo, Mitchell. I was there." Curiousity behind the brusqueness, though. He wants to know where she's going with this.

She'd like to know, too; she doesn't yet. So she keeps talking. "Nineteen fifty-two," she says. "Nineteen sixty-four. Nineteen seventy." Pause. "Nineteen eighty-nine." The number on Jonathan Nielson's birth certificate. Perfectly verifiable. Perfectly substantiated. Perfectly fabricated. "Hell, we're three different goddamn generations any way you slice it, even if not by the strictest definition. And you served in goddamn Vietnam while my momma was changing my diapers --" An exaggeration, but not far from one. "And you manage to act as though you really did grow up in a world where -- in a world where it was nobody's business what two people, or three people, or however many people, do in bed, and -- I think I need to know how."

He loves her, she thinks, in no small part because she never forgets who she's talking to. Never makes him think she has. But they both agreed a long time ago -- tacitly, quietly -- that he'd behave in the confines of the role he'd chosen to play, even at home, even when the doors were shut and nobody was looking. Easier for him to live in JD Nielson's skin fulltime than to pick it up and put it down as needed, and even when she sees him do something she thinks of as belonging to 'Jack' instead of belonging to 'JD', even when she's seen him slip back into O'Neill's skin, she can still find JD somewhere inside. But he sighs, and he scrubs a hand over his face -- JD's gesture, Jack's gesture, she doesn't know -- and he looks down and looks up and when he does, he's wearing the face of a familiar stranger.

"I had to," he says, and even his voice is different now, and the hair on the back of her neck rises. Twelve years, and he can still do this. Still be who he was, and who he'll always be, and she doesn't ever wonder if his entire life now -- with her, with everything -- is a lie, because she knows it to be a great and profound truth, but she does wonder if he ever finds it exhausting, to force himself to pretend so thoroughly it stops even being a role after a while. "Given an opportunity I had to take, and it was either hi-ho-let's-go or lie down and give up and be done with it. And I didn't want to waste the opportunity." His eyes scour her face. "You're in love with him, aren't you."

Cammie can feel the prickling of tears at the backs of her eyes, and she wishes she didn't feel so much like she'd betrayed him. Somehow. In some way. She doesn't look at him; she can't. She just looks down at her hands, folded around the mug of (cold) tea, and says, "I think I am. I don't know. I just realized. I haven't been able to figure out all of what I'm feeling yet."

He reaches across the table; she can see his hands coming into her field of vision, one after the other. Gently, but insistently, he unknots her hands from around the mug and takes them both in his. "Knew it was coming," he says. "Told you, Mitchell. It's okay."

"You," she says. You loved him first. You've known him longer. You're so goddamn important to me.

"All things to all men," he counters. As in, nobody can be. Her own argument, from so long ago, thrown back in her face.

She looks up. "I would rather cut off both my legs than do anything that would hurt you," she says, fierce and fast.

He picks up one of her hands. Brings the knuckles to his lips, and the gesture should look ridiculous on him, but it doesn't. "Don't do that, sweetheart," he says. "We spent a long time getting that ink right."

She sighs. Picks up the nibbled-on chocolate chip cookie, breaks off a tiny chunk, hands him the rest. He pops the rest of it into his mouth whole, and as he's chewing, between one blink and the next, he's JD again. "Answer to the question you didn't know you were asking is," he says, mouth still full, "no, I don't think he'll be able to reprogram himself the way I did. Not even if he really wants to. Not even if you really want him to. I was a special case and I had a damn lot of motive, and I'm not saying he wouldn't have motive, I'm saying that some things are hard-wired. Potential for this --" Gesture, quick hand-flick, up and down to encompass his body, out and around to encompass the world it walks through. "-- was always there, in a way. If we'd been born at a different time. So I shoveled a whole hell of a lot of shit out of the back of my head and made it so that my first priority was always behaving as though I had been, and the rest of it came from there. But it couldn't have, if it hadn't already been there, in a way."

He shrugs, one bare inked shoulder rising, falling. "Daniel's straight. Always knew it. This way I at least know he's being taken care of. Loved him for a long damn time, but this thing you and I have, it taught me I was okay with all different kinds of love. Get laid, Mitchell. It's all right. You're not going to wander off from me, and if you do, I know where you live."

The situations aren't an exact parallel (for one thing, they have never had to contend with one-sided sexual desire), but -- put like that, it eases something for her. She puts the bite of cookie she'd saved into her mouth. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah. Okay."

He nods. "Now put your goddamn dishes in the sink, take an Ambien, and get your saggy ass back to bed," he says. "And if I'm already asleep by the time you make it in there, climb over him, not me, because if you wake me up again, I'll kill you."

He takes the cold mug of tea from her hands and puts it in the sink, as he goes.

Alone, in the dark, she considers. Three of them. A triangle can be the most or the least stable configuration. The Pyramids are built of triangles. So is a three-legged stool that can be knocked over when you so much as look at it. She, herself, is tripedal; two legs, a cane, and without that third point of contact with the ground she'll fall over as easily as she breathes. But she and JD had been stable for so long, and she doesn't know if introducing Daniel to the equation -- as a participant on equal footing with the two of them, that is; they introduced him into their lives a while back -- will ground them further or knock them off balance.

She doesn't think JD is wrong. About Daniel's sexual orientation, about Daniel's desires. And perhaps if Jack O'Neill had come to Daniel and confessed both love and physical desire, Daniel would have said that he could share the love and tolerate the physical desire, try to pretend it and if the pretense didn't work out, at least manage to settle on not being revolted by the idea. But Daniel doesn't think of Jonathan Nielson and Jack O'Neill as the same person -- she knows -- and --

Dammit, she doesn't want JD to settle for second best.

Although, is it really second best? If you'd asked her (a year ago, a moment ago) if her relationship with JD were 'second best', just because there was no erotic impulse present, she'd have laughed. They have love, and friendship, and connection, and a partnership so deep and vast that it brought her back to life and made her life worth living. Sex is just bodies, compared to that. (Fun. Enjoyable. One of the great joys of life, in fact. But the lack of it is no excuse to throw away something otherwise perfect.)

Still. Jack O'Neill had wanted so few things in his life. Cammie knows this. And he'd gotten some, and he'd given up on others, and he'd gotten others and then had them taken away from him, and some things JD has said makes her think that Jack O'Neill had viewed JD as his second chance. The doppelganger, the golem, the pair of hands that could have the things Jack himself couldn't. And Jack had wanted Daniel, and JD wants Daniel, and what Daniel wants is --

Comfort. Stability. Home. Daniel wants to be loved, and doesn't know how to accept it when he finds it, but if there's one thing she knows it's how to show love. Always has.

Love is a funny thing. So many flavors; so many facets. At O'Neill's graveside, Daniel had said my best friend is dead, and the minute he'd heard he'd come chasing home from Atlantis (his escape) as though the hounds of Hell were at his heels, and he'd stepped back into the confines of a life he'd come to find intolerable, upholding a promise he'd never explicitly uttered. He's doing what he thinks Jack O'Neill wanted him to do. Guard the Program, defend the planet; Daniel believes in self-sacrifice for the good of the many, but this form of it doesn't come naturally to one who was raised to distrust the military motive instead of believing service to be an honor and a privilege. Daniel's self-sacrifice is for people, not ideals. Ideals made manifest through people. And JD has tried a hundred times to tell him that O'Neill wouldn't have wanted him to destroy himself in the pursuit of that duty, that there's no shame in passing it along to someone else, but Daniel won't hear.

It all turns around and around in Cammie's head, one piece coming clear from one direction even as the corresponding piece goes murky and tangled alongside, and finally, she sighs. Love is a funny thing. A thousand tiny varying forms of compromise, day in, day out. Daniel views himself as Jack's hands, as Jack's proxy, and he's doing what he thinks Jack would do if Jack were still here to do it, because SG-1 (in their way) had a bond like the bond she has with JD: separate bodies, shared goals. Out of love. They'd brought Daniel home with them because JD still feels he's bound by that bond. SG-1, semper fidelis and über alles, and half the time they (Daniel, Sam, Master Teal'c) view JD as being included in it and half the time they want to shy away from trying to figure out if their grief for Jack O'Neill should be tempered by the knowledge that he somehow lives on.

Daniel's presence at the SGC is a stepping-up, a stepping-in. Stepping into O'Neill's shoes -- not command, but influence -- and it's a role he's unqualified for by temperament and training but someone has to do it and Daniel thinks he has to, until someone comes along he can hand that duty over to. Someone he trusts enough to do it right. (Just one more chapter before bed, Mom, and then I'll turn out the light.) It's why he won't let himself believe that JD is O'Neill. If Daniel believed it, he'd have to wonder why JD had walked away, why O'Neill had let him, and Daniel would have to confront, head-on, the problem of whether or not he was doing the right thing.

It isn't often that Cammie sits down and actually tries to think things out, from alpha to omega and from can to can't. She operates on impulse and character most of the time, things rising from the depths of her subconscious the minute she needs them and guiding her words and her thoughts, then slipping away. She's saved only by the fact that those subconscious impulses that passeth understanding are usually right: right words, right thoughts, right deeds. And she still feels guilty, and she still feels like she's betraying JD (by loving the man he loves; by moving to create and accept a bond with Daniel that is the bond JD has wanted for longer than Cammie has even known Daniel), but she realizes, sitting there in the semidark, that the guilt all rises from the waking parts of her mind. Her subconscious doesn't want her to feel guilty. It just wanted her to know.

And what she knows, she can work with.

Happily-ever-after is a fairy tale. But everybody getting the lion's share of what they want, well, that's a goal to work towards.

Roll the dice: you pays your money and you takes your chances. Momma always said that those who settle deserve what they get, and what they have might not be 'second best', but it's not what JD wants. It might be what he's all right with, but he deserves more.

She has patience. (No matter what the goatfucker says.) No deadline to life; there's no doors about to shut on them. And Daniel is a good man, and Daniel is a kind man, and if he sees that she cares about him and wants him to be happy, if she shows him that she wants him to be easy with this life, then maybe he will be. There's a lot of self-reinvention that can be done, in the name of love. Maybe Daniel will be able to do some of it.

Eventually, with the faintest glimmer of purple and pink starting to peek over the edges of the mountains out the window, she nods to herself and gets up. Legs nearly buckle beneath her. Sitting too damn long in one position, and her spine and her thighs and her feet don't want to take the weight. She clings to the edge of the table until the constant pins-and-needles prickling in her feet starts to recede back down to the level she's grown used to living with, and then she takes her cane and limps over to shut each of the windows in turn. She dumps the edamame shells in the bag of things destined for the compost heap, sets the bowl in the sink, and makes her way to the steadily-growing pyramid of prescription bottles on the corner of the counter. She's pretty sure she'll be able to fall asleep now, and JD will know she was late in getting there -- actually modulate his decibel level in the morning, make Daniel do the same -- but she still can't sleep much past 0700 without chemical assistance, even on the days when she was up 'til all hours, and so she takes the Ambien so she can have some hope of getting at least a few hours out cold before waking.

She turns the oven to 'warm', loads a few of the corn muffins she baked yesterday into a basket, and sets the basket into the oven so there'll be breakfast waiting. (It's 0500. Daniel will sleep to 0700, but JD will be awake in another fifteen or twenty, tops.) Dials the lights back down to their lowest setting, nothing more than a bare glimmer at the baseboard to show her the way. (Leaves the heat set at seventy-one, though. Goatfucker can just goddamn cope with the temperature when he wakes up; it's her damn kitchen and if she wants to heat it, she will.) Then -- slowly, laboriously -- she makes her way back down the hall, and into the bedroom.

Double dose of snoring there to greet her. She tucks her cane in between the bed and the nightstand on the side Daniel's sleeping on, gets her hands underneath his side and his thighs, and heaves. He rolls over, muttering a sleepy protest, into the center of the bed.

She eases herself into the spot he'd left, slipping between sheets that are warm with the heat of his body and smell like the softness of his skin, and hitches herself across the distance between the edge of the bed and his still-mostly-asleep form, spooning herself up behind him. She drapes her top arm over his side, slides her bottom arm under her head and under the pillow, and makes a dozen fractional and minute changes to re-balance her weight so nothing goes numb (more numb) and nothing's pressing anywhere it shouldn't.

By the time she's finished, Daniel is snoring again. She closes her eyes, stifles a yawn, and drifts off to sleep feeling JD's fingers move to thread through hers, under the pillow Daniel is sleeping on.

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