"Your bed, not mine, baby. I'm gonna make a nuisance of myself by crashin' at your place, I ain't gonna turn you out of your bed to do it." "You're not a nuisance. And I don't mind sleeping on the couch --" "Neither do I."     (Cammie and Daniel, three months after meeting)

i.

As cave-ins go -- and Daniel's a connisseur by now -- it hadn't been all that bad: space enough to stretch out their legs and even to stand up if they didn't mind ducking, neither of them hurt or bleeding or dying, nothing broken, an air-hole wide enough (if too far above their heads) that oxygen wouldn't have become a problem for far longer than they were likely to be stuck; Sam and Dr. Muñerez, SG-23's engineer, consulting on the other side of the rockfall about the best way to shore up the mud and dirt so that the SAR teams could start digging; ample supply of water and even a few ration bars in his pack, even if Cammie had lost hers in the fall; radio contact with the outside world, a warm enough day that hypothermia wouldn't have been an issue. All they had to do was wait it out.

And Cammie isn't ever quiet -- it should have been his first clue, really -- but she was quiet for the first four hours, sitting with her back pressed up against the wall and her legs splayed out in a V, her eyes shut and her breathing even. It hadn't been until he'd looked over at her and realized that her hands, white-knuckled, were moving up and down her thighs, pressing and squeezing and releasing and moving along the length of her legs (see, they're still there, they're still working) that he had realized.

(Later, he will kick himself for taking so long. But that's later.)

Without opening her eyes, she'd said, "You got any heat packs I can drop into my boots? My toes are freezin'." And it had been sixty degrees in there at the lowest, but some kinds of cold aren't physical, so he'd dug out everything he could find and passed it over without protest, and they'd been silent for another two hours, because some kinds of cold aren't physical and some kinds of memories aren't served by talking about them. He understands that part.

After another two hours, she'd stirred again and said, "Ever tell you why I learned to fly, Daniel? 'Cause I hate enclosed spaces. An' a cockpit's pretty enclosed, but you get to see the whole world spread out under it, and it's just -- Amazing."

Claustrophobia isn't one of his fears (for all the phobias I have not yet developed, dear Lord, I am truly grateful), but he thinks hers might have been bad even before the crash. He hadn't said anything, though. Just made some small noncommittal noise, because Cammie will talk about her joys and Cammie will talk about her hopes, but Cammie never talks about her fears unless she's under duress, and he's figured out enough to have known that it wouldn't be a kindness to call her attention to it.

They'd gone through a few more hours ("talk to me, Daniel, tell me a story, your first dig, something, anything") and she'd gotten more still, more quiet, until she'd interrupted his tale of trying to keep a bunch of bumbling college students coming smack up against the bureaucracy of Egypt (interrupted without apologizing, even, a sign beyond all others, because Cammie's manners are impeccable, unless they're under fire or working to deadline) to say, "I got about another two hours of fighting this off in me. After that, you're gonna have to knock me unconscious. Better start lookin' for a rock."

He doesn't carry medical supplies in his pack. That's Sam. It's going to change, now, because while under Jack's SG-1 they all packed for minimal redundancy so they could carry more of a variety of things, this isn't Jack's SG-1 anymore. He remembers thinking, at the time, that if he'd thought he could do it without risking permanent injury -- knocking someone unconscious, he knows, from Jack's eternal lectures, is nowhere near as simple and safe as it is in the movies -- he would have; he wouldn't have needed a rock. He'd held onto his nine, and you can certainly club someone with one of those. You can also shoot them. Or they can shoot themselves. Cammie had lost both of her weapons in the cave-in, and over his years, he has been in any number of situations where he'd rather have died than endured them even one minute longer, and he hadn't known -- still doesn't -- if this was one of hers. He'd had no intention of allowing her that choice.

The light had been going, by then, sending Cammie's face into shadow, but he remembers thinking her eyes had been too blank.

"They're coming," he had said. "They know exactly where we are. They're working on rescuing us. Even as we speak." Not salvaging equipment. Not cleaning up a potential security breech. He still doesn't know how long she'd been down there. Twelve hours? Fourteen? He's never asked, and he never will. They'd been certain none of the Snakeskinners had survived the battle, and another few hours and none of them would have. "You heard me talking to Sam."

"Yeah. Yeah." She'd breathed in, her voice a little hiccup. "I know. Believe me, I know. Tryin' to shut up the little voice inside my head that's sayin' --"

She'd cut herself off, hard and fast. She'd been holding onto his hand by then, clutching so tightly it had started to go numb; she'd bowed her head over their joined hands, her forehead warm and dry against his skin. He'd felt the puff of her breath across the back of his knuckles. "Nevermind," she'd said. "Panic talking. Not me. I'm a vicious bitch when I'm cornered."

She is, and he knows it, and it's saved them more than once, but he hadn't asked where her venom would have been directed this time.

"It's all right," he'd said. Willing her to believe it. "Nothing said under duress gets held against you later. It's how we've all lasted this long."

Pause. Breathe in. Breathe out. "'Least it ain't snowin'," she'd said, her voice sounding like a bad tape recording, and just as he'd been trying to think of some encouragement to provide, she'd stirred. Slightly. "Need you to relieve me now, Daniel."

He'd known what she'd meant. She's always on guard when they're in the field, even when it isn't her turn for watch, even when she's smiling and laughing and making diplomatic noises at the natives. It's one of the very few overt similarities between her and Jack. He'd squeezed her fingers, rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. "It's all right," he'd said. "I'll take care of it."

She'd nodded. And he'd been bracing himself for hysteria, for screaming and raging -- difficult to bear, in such a small and enclosed space, but he'd been determined to do his best, because he had some small inkling of what she was going through, and he has always known her to have an incredibly high level of self-awareness; she'd know just what she needed to get herself through it, to hang on long enough. It had surprised him when she'd shuffled herself around until she'd been lying on her side, up against the filthy ground, her body pressed up against his extended legs and her head against his thigh. And he'd been opening his mouth to say something, he still isn't sure what, when he'd felt her simply ... go away.

Completely dark, by then. His flashlight hadn't survived the drop. He'd counted her breaths, one by one, made himself as still as possible so as not to disturb whatever peace she'd managed to find, and tried not to think about how utterly unfair it was, that something should hurt her again in the places where she'd been scarred so badly. But he's known for years that the universe doesn't measure things in fair and unfair, no matter how much he might like.

She'd stayed still and calm and silent through the next radio checkin, through the process of Teal'c picking his slow and careful way over the mud and rock above them, flashlight shining at the ground, waiting for Daniel to be able to see the light and call up to let Teal'c know he'd located the airhole, to lower supplies down to them. She'd stayed still and calm and silent as Teal'c had dropped glowsticks both cracked and uncracked, Mylar blankets, heating packs. Temperature drop, after dark, and Cammie had said 'least it ain't snowin' as though it had been the one thing she could have clung to. The airhole had been too small for a canteen of water or food or anything else useful. But the last thing dropped had been a small packet of pills from their medical kit, labeled in Dr. Lam's neat script: Valium.

Daniel hadn't been sure which one of them had sent it, Sam or Teal'c. Probably Sam. She's closest to Cammie; she would remember. In the green-and-blue-and-purple luminescence of the glowstick light, he'd been able to see that Cammie's face was empty. Uninhabited. Not the calm of sleep -- it isn't often that he's awake before she is, and usually by the time he stumbles out of his bedroom in search of coffee, she's long since folded the afghan on the couch and settled herself in the kitchen, but he's seen her sleep before. But she hadn't been asleep this time. She'd just been -- gone. Blank.

He'd fumbled the Mylar packets open, awkwardly, one-handed -- his other hand still twined with her fingers -- and tucked them around her, as much as he could reach. Teal'c had promised to radio fifteen minutes before SG-23 would break through (Daniel had had no problems reading the subtext: so that Colonel Mitchell will not be forced to be seen in such distress by one who is not of us; sometimes he has to stop himself from being jealous that Teal'c and Cammie understand each other so thoroughly, so completely) and it had been another interminable six hours, in the cold and the dark and the slowly-fading glow, before the word had come.

Without thinking of what he would have done if it hadn't worked, Daniel had rested a hand on Cammie's shoulder and said, not particularly loudly, "Cammie. I need you."

She'd sat up before the sound of his words had finished echoing, gasping sharply as though waking from a nightmare, and her eyes had been two dark coals in her face. "They'll have us out of here in fifteen minutes," he'd said, quickly, before the panic could take hold, and pressed the packet of pills into her free hand. "Take them. I've still got it."

(He's often accused of not understanding the people he interacts with, but a blind man could have guessed the tactic that would work to bring Cammie back from wherever she'd brought herself. Cammie answers to need.)

She'd taken the pills, swallowed them dry. There'd been just enough time for them to take hold before the SAR teams had broken through, enough time for her to be able to smile prettily (if a bit glassily) and walk home and pretend, now, to be normal in the infirmary. He often lets her choose on her own where she will be spending the night, having long since given up hope of understanding when she wants his couch (and why) and when (if) she prefers her own bed, but -- sitting on the bed next to her, watching the way she's just a hair too slow in her reactions and a bit too loud in her responses, lying to everyone about how all right she is -- he thinks that she'd asked him to relieve her, and she isn't qualified right now to take that request back, and so he gets a hand under her elbow when she's finally given her clean bill of health and steers her, wordlessly, up several hundred feet (out of the mountain bearing them down, into the light) and into his car.

When they get home, she moves like a sleepwalker. Two pairs of her hand-knit fuzzy socks, pulled on one over the other. Spandex leggings, with a pair of his sweatpants over them. A thermal shirt, a long-sleeved t-shirt, a sweatshirt stolen from his drawers (and it had been Jack's, once upon a time, migrated here by God-knows-what tropism). It's more clothes than she wears at home in a week; they have never had thermostat wars, unlike anyone he's ever shared space with, because she likes it about as warm as he does, but she likes to wear tank tops and thin cotton scrub pants, usually. Tonight, he thinks she'd wrap herself up in every piece of clothing in the house. It's cold where she is, where she is still, and there's nothing he can do or say to make it warmer.

She stumbles into the kitchen and pours herself two fingers of Scotch (she keeps it here; the contents of his kitchen cabinets have always been a mystery to him, but by now they've become hers, through some process he only vaguely understands). He doesn't protest the mixing of Valium and alcohol, though he knows it's a bad idea. It's been long enough since she took them, and letting her sleep unmedicated would be worse. She drinks it down without pausing for breath, walks past him as though she can't even see him and into the living room, where she stares, for a long minute, at the afghan that she brought over when it became clear that she'd be spending more time here than in the apartment she rents. Hand-knit by her grandmother, Daniel remembers her saying. He's slept under it a few times, when she's not here. It smells like her, and it's warmer than it has any right to be.

It's quiet -- she's quiet -- and he doesn't know if he should avoid breaking whatever fragile equilibrium she's managed to find or if he should lend her a hand to climb out of the depths of her nightmares. Before he can decide, she reaches down a hand, picks up the afghan, and drapes it around her shoulders. The edges trail along the floor like Lady MacBeth's nightdress as she walks down the hallway towards his bedroom.

He stands there for a minute, thinking of prices and sacrifices and all manner of damage that will never show, and then checks the locks and follows. She's asleep by the time he finishes getting ready for bed; when he climbs under the covers, under the afghan she's spread on top of them, she rolls over in her sleep to press against him.

(In the morning, she will wake up, hung over in ways that have nothing to do with the alcohol, and she will stumble into the kitchen and drink a gallon of water and apologize to him for being such a headcase; he will not protest her choice of words, just tell her that at least she's never been committed, and she will give him a pale little smile. She will come over to him, in the morning light, and put her arms around him and hold on, her face pressed against his shoulder. He will wrap his arms around her and breathe into her hair. She will hold on for a very long time, until finally she lets go and makes breakfast, and from there, the rest of the day will slip back into their usual routines. When they return from stand-down, he will quietly slip a dose of Valium in among the odds and ends he carries in his tac vest, and he will never say a word about them until the day they will become necessary again.)

ii.

Daniel does not like getting shot. At all.

No sane person would, really, but he never liked taking painkillers even before all of the times he's wound up addicted to something -- the sensation of being out of control disturbs the hell out of him, and he'd never thought of himself as the type of person to develop a taste for it, but this life has done crazier things, and overall, it's just safer if he palms the pills and flushes them down the toilet at the first chance he gets. If it means putting up with a little bit of pain, he's -- well, not happy. But it's a price he's willing to pay. It just doesn't mean he has to like it.

The usual strategy turns out to fall to pieces in the face of one Cameron Evangeline Mitchell.

He's in so much pain he isn't thinking clearly, and he knows he's snapping at her -- knows he's been snapping at her the whole time, knows he's being an utter beast (she's been quite happy to tell him so). But she hasn't gone anywhere. They don't pay her to be a nurse's aide and he's vitally certain she has other (better) things to be doing, but she seems perfectly happy to sit in the easy chair he keeps in the bedroom for reading in, her knitting to hand and a book in her lap, and watch over him while he sleeps.

Oh, God, everything hurts and what doesn't hurt itches and he wants this to be over, and he can't remember why the hell he ever thought coming back to SG-1 was a good idea.

(They'd been meeting with a splinter cell of the Lucians, vital intelligence to be had; Daniel had said something a little too mouthy, and one of the Lucian underlings had shot him and then dove on him, and all of a sudden there'd been a lot of guns pointed everwhere and Daniel had been certain he was about to die. Then, through the pain, he'd heard Cammie hollering "Ev'rybody freeze," and miracle of miracles, everybody had. And she'd said, very calmly, "Sam, take Daniel back through the Gate with you," and Sam had protested that she wasn't going to leave Cammie there even with Teal'c, and Cammie had snapped, "I said now, Colonel," and that had been the last Daniel had known. Teal'c told him, later, that Cammie had stayed there and finished up the negotiations, and she'd gotten the data cube they'd gone for, and had, apparently -- he could hear the words Teal'c is relating translated into her voice, even though Teal'c had had none of her rhythms -- said, to the man who'd shot him, "If he dies, I will come back here and erase you." He gets the sense Teal'c had believed her. Teal'c had added that Cammie had come home, handed over the data cube, sat through an entire debriefing, and only then asked about Daniel, gone down to the infirmary and settled in at his bedside and put her head down against the bed to shake; the entire time Teal'c was relating this story, he was looking at Daniel, and Daniel could tell the look was meaningful, but he was in too much pain to be able to read it.)

But. He is in pain, and it's bad, and Cammie seems to have missed the memo about how Daniel does not take painkillers, because every time the pain starts coming back more fiercely, she leaves off the cooking and cleaning and God knows what else that she's doing to his poor defenseless apartment while he is rotting in this bed and appears back in front of him. "Time for your drugs," she says, and oh, he wants them, he wants them so badly, which is why he says no, every time.

Cammie doesn't take no, though. And he doesn't want to explain why, because there are some things that are just none of her business (dimly he is aware of a small voice in the back of his mind whispering that he doesn't want her to think any less of him), so instead of giving her rational, reasoned arguments, he resorts to swearing at her in every language he knows.

It turns out that she knows a lot of them, too. Or at least the words he's using. She folds her arms across her chest and stares him down. "You're either taking the painkillers, or you're going back to the infirmary."

"Fine," he says, and he can hear the words coming out of his mouth, but he doesn't particularly care. "Get the fuck out of my house."

He doesn't actually want her to go. Or he does, but he doesn't, but -- It's the drugs. She stares him down, unblinking. Snake eyes. "Certainly," she agrees. "After you take the drugs."

He's approximately three minutes into the process of excoriating her in Arabic (and he's pretty sure she knows that one) when she leans over, puts a hand over his mouth, and bears down hard. He subsides, and -- very quietly, very precisely, not a hint of her drawl -- she says, "I spent four months in a hospital bed addicted to morphine and another six months after kicking the habit and learning to walk at the same time. I understand why you do not want to take the drugs. This doesn't change the fact that you need them. I swear to you that the minute you no longer need them, I will flush them down the toilet for you."

"Flush them now," he suggests, recklessly, to cover up the fact that she has just given him a piece of information he's certain he'll find fascinating once he stops wanting to die from pain, to cover the shame of realizing that she does know why he doesn't want to take the drugs (she's read his file) and the sudden stab of yes, she understands mixed with the immediate retaliation of bitterness: no, she doesn't. He has it on the best of authority (Jack, the only person in the history of time to have done both, and he never asked for details, but Jack had offered it up once) that kicking morphine is a walk in the fucking park compared to coming down from a sarcophagus addiction. "And then go drown yourself in the bathtub. Or shoot me. Or both."

She doesn't blink. "Take. The. Fucking. Pill. And be glad that I respect you too much to grind it up into your food."

And something in her voice, in her face, makes him think that he's not going to win this one, so he takes the pill (with ill-concealed frustration) and puts it in his mouth. She waits until she sees him swallow. Then she leans over, turns over both his hands to check that he hasn't palmed it, and does something (and it hurts like hell, but it's swallowed up in the noise of the rest of his injuries) to his jaw to make it pop open like a cat's. She peers into his mouth, jams two fingers of one hand into his soft palate and curls two fingers of the other around his bottom teeth to keep him from biting her.

He can feel her fingers moving under his tongue, between his teeth and his cheeks, making sure he has swallowed the pill; it's as brisk and as impersonal a touch as any nurse he's ever had, and he's suddenly aware of the fact that even when he's at his full strength, she's still capable of pinning him down and manhandling him into place; they're of a size, and while he's -- probably -- a little stronger, she's got a bag full of dirty tricks and no compunctions about using them. He always forgets, somehow. She seems so light and delicate, in the halls of his memory, until she does something to make him remember.

When she takes her hands away, he can taste the salt tang of her skin lingering in his mouth. "What tender care you give to everyone you command," he sneers, and oh, he can hear what he's saying, but he can't stop himself. "Careful I don't die from it."

For a minute he's sure he's gone too far, that she'll spit in his face and leave him here to rot. It was below the belt. Far below. He knows the deaths she's been responsible for weigh on her shoulders so heavily, all the sins of commission and omission she tortures herself over, at night when the dreams come. But her face simply goes blank and shuttered for a minute, then relaxes. "You really can't be nasty enough to me to make me go away, you know," she says. "No matter how hard you try. Save your effort and put it to something like healing."

"I could be," Daniel says. The drugs are starting to creep in, around the edges; he feels like a scalpel-wielding surgeon is cutting around the edges of the pain, detaching it from his consciousness and lifting it away. "It just isn't worth the effort."

"No," she says. She takes a step back from the bed, still regarding him, unblinking. "You really couldn't. You could probably be nasty enough to kill our friendship for a really long time. If not forever. But I still wouldn't go away until after you were capable of taking care of yourself again." She smiles, then, slowly, and her smile has teeth and razors. "So stop trying. Because I'd hate to have to shoot you and then stitch you up again after."

He doesn't understand her. Not in the least. But she goes away and lets him close his eyes and sleep (again), and when he wakes up, she brings him a tray full of hummus and tabouleh and falafel and pita bread that's still warm, and he realizes that's what he's smelling from the kitchen. He hadn't known she knew what all his comfort foods really are; most people think chicken soup. She sets the tray down on the bedside table, gives him a look, and says, "You gonna hit me if I help prop you up with pillows? Because if you are, I'll go put on some padding first."

He sighs. "I've been really horrible to you, haven't I," he says. It's not a question. He knows he has. He's been half-mad with pain and fear, and he knows that when he gets like that, he'll lash out at anything that gets in his way.

"I was warned," she says, and she's smiling now. "General O'Neill told me to keep you sedated for the first week you were home." She brushes her fingertips against his cheek. He tries to disguise how relieved it makes him feel; Cammie is an indiscriminate toucher, always has been, but she only touches the people who matter to her. "It's all right. I know how much pain you're in. Let me help you get sitting up."

And she does, and he eats the few bits of dinner he thinks he can manage to keep down -- it's good, much better than the Lebanese place he usually gets takeout from, and he's not sure where and when she learned to cook like this, since he's pretty sure hummus isn't a common staple in North Carolina cuisine -- and she sits cross-legged on the foot of the other side of the bed with her own tray and keeps an eagle eye on him while she eats. Their meal is quiet, and he's turning over every inch of the last two weeks in his head, and he doesn't like the conclusions he's arriving at. "I'm sorry," he says, finally. "I just hate ... not being me."

She leans over and puts a hand on his ankle. Her hand is warm and comforting, and she somehow seems to know one of the only places she can touch without it hurting. "I know, baby," she says, her voice calm and soothing. "But you gotta trust someone to take care of you. I ain't gonna let you fall."

He doesn't trust anyone. Especially not himself.

But she takes away the trays, and there are noises from the kitchen, and later on that night, after he's gone through another three cycles of alternating temper and apology ("if you've really decided that the sight of me crying would speed your recovery," she stops and says, after he's dealt another particularly vicious blow even after he'd promised himself he wouldn't, "it would be easier on you if you just said so and let me oblige, rather than going through all this trouble;" he is once more appalled, and God he doesn't know why she puts up with him) she gets him standing so he can put on fresh clothes and he happens to mention that he'd kill for a shower and he thinks he might be able to stand up for one. And she eyes him for a few minutes, and he recognizes her adding-up-the-possibilities face, and she lets him hold onto the dresser while she goes to fuss in the bathroom.

She comes back a few minutes later, and there's a few minutes of oh-God-what-was-I-thinking from the pain as she walks him into the bathroom, and a few more of oh-God-no-really-what-was-I-thinking when she strips him down and sits him on the folding chair she's put into the tub, then strips herself as well and climbs in with him. It is completely unselfconscious. She has a curious ability, one he's seen her demonstrate before, to -- with nothing but body language -- be simply unclothed, rather than naked. He's seen her hit the showers with two teams of mud-covered Marines rather than wait one minute longer to get clean, and something about her carriage or her posture or her attitude had meant they simply hadn't noticed. He's aware that she can do it, though, which makes it not work on him, and if he weren't preoccupied by the pack of rabid weasels trying to chew their way out of his stomach he'd be ready to die of shame.

This really wasn't a good idea, and for once he's actually willing to mention it. She laughs. "Sure it wasn't," she says. "No way you're ready to be out of that bed for this long. But this is the fastest way to prove to you that you ain't as fine as you think you are. And I can drag you back to bed by the hair if you pass out."

He shuts his mouth. She shampoos his hair for him (which feels heavenly), rinses it with clean water from a cup she's brought in with her, hands him the soap so he can wash his front and takes it back so she can wash his back. It feels like the height of luxury to wash away a week's worth of fever-sweat and skin-oils and grime. Afterwards, she shuts off the taps and climbs out of the tub, wrapping a towel around her, and passes him another. "If you lift your arms to dry your hair," she says, "I will kill you. I'm going to go burn your sheets. Then I'll check your stitches and change your dressing, and it's back to bed with you."

When she comes back, she's wearing one of her tank tops and a pair of panties, and she wears them like she wore nothing but skin: as though they are the most natural thing in the world for her to be wearing. She mops up the water they've managed to get everywhere, and she rubs Daniel's hair dry with painstaking care, and she inspects his stitches and bandages him up again and somehow manages to get him back into the scrubs and undershirt she's chosen for him to wear. He swallows the pill she brings him without a word of complaint, and he bites back every single one of the curses that rise to his lips on the ten-mile journey back to his bed, but the fresh sheets and the clean skin are almost worth it.

"I don't deserve you," he says, once he's back in his bed. She has flopped out on the other side, next to him, and closed her eyes, apparently (and with good reason) exhausted. Her aim, though, when she reaches out her hand, is unerring. She threads her fingers through his and holds on.

"No," she says, but she's smiling. "You really don't. But that's why we have friends."

Friends. He doesn't have so many of them that he can afford to be careless with their affections, for all that he's pretty sure Cammie -- once she's decided that someone is hers -- couldn't be moved with a backhoe and some C4.

"Get up in jes' a minute and get you somethin' to drink," she says, and he can hear the weariness in her voice, the slur and slide of her Carolina vowels overwhelming her words. She's been running herself ragged in taking care of him.

"Don't rush," he says. He is thirsty. But she's wiped. And he feels almost human again, so it's nothing for him to lie there and watch her breathing slow, her chest rise and fall, as she slides over the edge into sleep. It doesn't take long for him to follow.

He wakes up in the middle of the night when the pain pills wear off. Everything from his chin on down to his knees aches: brutally, painfully, the entire gamut from sharp stab to dull throb. More than it did this afternoon, less than it did last night. He shifts, ever-so-slightly, testing how badly his body will protest, and his breath is drawn out of him in a huff. Next to him, Cammie stirs in her sleep, one tiny inquisitive noise: do you need me? He stills himself before she can wake fully. She's done enough, and more than enough. Let her get some rest.

It's ... weird. Jack would alternate periods of hovering over him with ignoring him, holing up in the basement with the television turned down low enough so that he'd hear if Daniel yelled. Cammie is just ... there. He's yelled himself hoarse at her, and she's taken it all and faced him down at his worst and fed him afterwards and tucked him in to bed. He's pretty sure this says more about her than it does about him.

With her asleep, with him pinned to the bed by injury and courtesy, he can study her face freely. Not an analgesic, but something to distract him. She isn't beautiful. It's curious, how beautiful she isn't; without animation, her face is too square, too sharp-edged, to fit any contemporary society's model of aesthetic grace. Her beauty is in her power, in the force of personality that inhabits her body and carries it along. In unconsciousness, that force has quieted, leaving only a nose that's too large, cheekbones that are too broad, a mouth that is curiously small for the things he's heard come out of it. There are laugh-lines tanned into the edges of her eyes, and two deep sharp grooves at the sides of her chin from how often she smiles.

Asleep, she isn't beautiful; he doesn't know why this fact should change when she is awake.

Tentatively, gently, he puts his hand on top of hers, and she sighs out on a long breath and rolls over. One long leg hooks out from under the covers; following it with his eyes, he is rewarded by the very edge of her panties, white with black line-art. Butterflies with skull-heads, which is somehow so her it soothes a part of his soul. It's become a running joke at the SGC, how often Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell somehow keeps winding up in the Gateroom in nothing but sports bra and panties, and he twitches at the levity -- inappropriate in any workplace -- but she doesn't seem to mind, has even placed wagers in the underground betting pool about how long she'll manage to keep the universe from depriving her of her clothes this time and what color the undergarments will be when it inevitably happens again. This is a pair he hasn't seen before, but they're in the same family as the ones he has.

He hadn't expected to ever share this bed with a woman, and yet it's the second time. He finds it astonishing to realize how much he doesn't mind.

(Once he's feeling better, and is back at work, he will wander into Cammie's office and find a teddy bear dressed as a nurse, sitting on her desk, and he will ask about its provenance. "The entire nursing staff banded together and collectively nominated me for sainthood," she will assure him. "You were this close to waking up dead one morning with a pillow over your face before I bailed you out and took you home." He will blush, and go to make the usual gift of chocolates and alcohol to the nurses, and resolve to think of something he can do for Cammie that even begins to approach what she's done for him. But their first mission back will be yet another SG-1 Special, and by the time they break out of jail -- again -- he will have forgotten that he had not yet thought of anything, and besides, he's not at all certain whether she'd take it in the spirit he intended or if it would turn out to be one of those times when he somehow manages to do the exact wrong thing.)

iii.

Teal'c brings Cammie flowers.

It's driving Daniel slowly crazy, and he can't figure out why. They're common and unprepossessing blooms, single stems at a time -- daisies, sunflowers, carnations -- and Cammie always takes them with delight, puts them behind her ear and rises to tiptoe to kiss Teal'c's cheek. And Daniel grits his teeth and doesn't -- doesn't! -- give the lecture on propriety and respectability and how it's completely inappropriate for the commanding officer of SG-1 to go wandering around base whistling with a daisy tucked into her hair. He's not at all sure why General Landry hasn't said something to her about regulations yet, except that he knows Cammie has Landry wrapped around her little finger -- and shouldn't people be more worried about that, anyway?

He asks Teal'c about it once, and Teal'c raises an eyebrow and gives him one of those Jaffa looks. Daniel's not sure if this is #395 ("Your inquiry is inappropriate and I shall not dignify it with an answer") or #93 ("You have just said something patently ridiculous, and I am refraining from pointing out your intellectual failings only as a courtesy and in honor of our long association"). "Colonel Mitchell is a woman of formidable will," Teal'c says. "And yet, when she is happy, she wishes for everyone around her to be happy as well. I find this trait admirable. I wish to encourage it."

It makes absolutely no sense to him. But it does make him start watching, and sure enough, when Cammie's happy -- and Cammie is often happy -- the base halls seem lighter somehow: more smiles, more laughter, more jokes and fewer outbreaks of tension. He's not immune, either. The morning she comes whistling into Daniel's office -- they never grew out of the habit of using it as a congregating point -- and announces to him and Sam that she and Teal'c found what is apparently the best pool hall in Colorado Springs last night, he catches himself smiling back at her before he can stop himself.

"We should go," Cammie says, bright and cheerful. "All of us. Sam, honey, looks to be a great place to pick up a date, an' we can make it a team night and you can kick my ass at pool again. Been too long."

And Daniel's good mood takes a nosedive. It isn't that he doesn't think Cammie should be dating. Out of all of them, she's the one who has the best chance at normal; he's known this for a while. Certainly, she hasn't lacked for companionship since she arrived. She can't date the military -- and there are many men who have been heard to often bemoan this fact in the locker rooms, and every time he overhears it, it makes him want to punch something, because Cammie deserves far more than to be Marine gossip. But it's been a long-standing tradition in the SGC to turn a blind eye on casual flings between military and civilian. And Cammie's flings are casual, as casual as could be. He hears things. Sometimes from his own department, even. Cammie stays on his couch five nights out of every seven that they're on-world, and he doesn't ask -- doesn't -- what (who) occupies the other two. It's none of his business.

Still. He's spent too long hearing Sam bemoan the perception of women in the military (though thankfully not at the SGC, not often) not to find his eyelid twitching every time he hears tell of Cammie doing something that could cause her reputation problems down the line.

But Cammie's turning to him and saying "You'll come too, won't you, Daniel, baby? It'll be fun." And he keeps saying 'no', and that he doesn't play pool, and that it wouldn't be appropriate anyway (although he's still not sure how they could get more inappropriate than Cammie apparently living on his couch, but he's given up fighting that war, even with himself) and somehow it turns into 'yes' anyway.

She's dangerous when she gets an idea in her head. He keeps forgetting.

Cammie has two modes of dress for the Outside World (three if you count BDU pants and black t-shirt): Impoverished Grad Student and Yes-These-Clothes-Were-Sprayed-On. Tonight it's the latter; she and Teal'c (her designated driver, she announces, which means there'll be drinking, and Daniel can feel the eyelid twitch starting up already) arrive after Daniel and Sam have already gotten settled, and Cammie has apparently detoured back to her apartment to change. She's in jeans and a tightly-clinging sleeveless black t-shirt. Classic for a reason, he catches himself thinking.

Then he puts a few things together, all the little pieces of observation he hadn't realized he'd been making, and realizes that -- while she is content to wander around his apartment in spaghetti-strap tank tops and bike shorts, with all of her scars, if not on display, then at least unremarked-upon -- she is always careful to cover the roadmaps of her service when she is going out with the agreed-upon goal of meeting people. It is not, he thinks, that she is self-conscious about them. (Burn marks, bullet wounds, surgical remnants; SG-1 is not an easy life, and she didn't come to them unmarred to begin with.) It's just that she doesn't want to have to bear the pressure of curious eyes.

She and Sam are drinking tequila. And Daniel remembers having been surprised (back when he still thought Sam was a Nice Girl, a notion he's been thoroughly disabused of since she and Cammie started terrorizing everyone) that Sam could put away tequila like a sailor, but he's thinking, now, that he's found the person who taught her how, because Cammie and Sam just buy the bottle and drink it down and he can't see any signs that Cammie's intoxicated. At all. The only hints are in the liquid slur of her accent getting deeper still, and the way -- as the evening progresses -- she starts leaning on them all, more and more. Not to hold her up, just because she likes the leaning.

But only them. At one point a pair of UCCS students (and God, had he ever been that young when he'd been in college?) come up and blushingly ask Cammie and Sam for a game, and Cammie and Sam seem more than happy to oblige. Cammie doesn't lean on them, but Daniel catches (out of the corner of his eye; he's not watching, he's not a boyfriend and he's not a chaperone and they're both perfectly capable of taking care of themselves) her put an arm around Sam's waist at one point, turn her head to rest it against Sam's shoulder, laughing. Sam laughs back and runs the table; the boys pay up with good grace.

It's a good thing one of them can play pool, because Cammie sure can't. But she doesn't let it stop her. And after a while, Daniel starts to realize that he really is having fun. After all, Cammie seems determined to make him, and it would be ungracious to resist the effort.

Later on, Cammie announces that Teal'c has agreed to drive Sam home, since she's going to Daniel's. It's Friday night; she doesn't often grace him with her presence on a Friday, unless they've moved Team Night; Saturday is when she generally shows up and claims his couch for the afternoon sports-watching, while Sunday morning is for church -- he doesn't go, she does -- and Sunday Breakfast. But tonight she pours herself into his passenger seat, all long and loose and drunken, and lets her head spill back against the headrest. Her eyes are bright and merry as she turns her head to look at him. "Home, Jeeves," she announces. "And don't spare the horses. Sooner we get to sleep, sooner I can make us french toast an' home fries for breakfast."

Cammie's french toast is quite possibly a cause strong enough to wage war for. He laughs. "If you can even look at food through the hangover you're going to have in the morning, I'll be impressed."

She grins at him. "Been drinkin' Uncle Jock's moonshine since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, an' I ain't been hung over but once. Little bit of tequila won't even slow me down."

It's not a little bit of tequila. It's quite a lot of tequila, actually. He'd been watching. "I'm surprised you ever lived to grow up," he says, shaking his head. He's heard too many stories of her childhood.

"So'm I, sometimes," she says. "'Specially given the family propensity towards the occasional mayhem involvin' explosives."

It's actually fairly impressive that she manages all four syllables of 'propensity' without slurring. "I'm pretty sure you're making that up," he says. But only pretty sure. Some spirit of chivalry moves him, or perhaps it's just the thought that -- as drunk as she must be -- she runs the risk of falling off the couch in the middle of the night. "Take the bed tonight. I'll take the couch. You're drunk."

"Naw," she says back -- another sign of the alcohol; usually she remembers enough to make it 'no' instead. "We been over this. Turnin' a man outta his own bed isn't very gentlemanly. An' I may not be a lady all that often, but I always try to be a gentleman." It's not the first time he's heard her say it; every now and then he almost thinks he understands. Almost. Then it slips away again, because if there's one mystery in the world he'll never be able to solve, it's the mystery of Cameron Mitchell. "I'll be fine. I like your couch."

Obviously so, since she sleeps on it. Regularly. Far more regularly than she sleeps in her own bed. "You're too drunk to take the couch," he says, stubbornly. "And I'm not arguing with you until you're sober again."

"Ain't drunk," she says. "An' I ain't arguin', either. I'm just tellin' you that either you're sleeping in your bed an' I'm sleeping on the couch, way it's always been, or you're sleeping on the couch an' I'm sleeping on the floor if you decide you're gonna try to force my hand, and you don't wanna make me have to sleep on the floor, do you? Cold down there. An' uncomfortable."

"Oh, for the love of --" He closes his eyes. Thankfully, they're at a red light. "Be reasonable. In the first place, the bed's bigger than the couch. In the second place, there's no need for anyone to sleep on the floor. And in the third place, I'm just trying to be nice to you for once, why do you need to be such a pain in the --"

He stops, appalled. He's promised himself he's going to watch what he says to her -- the memory of the Recovery Incident is still fresh, even though she's never indicated, by word or deed, that she's holding any grudges. But there's something about Cammie that drives him absolutely fucking nuts sometimes.

But she's just grinning at him, and then the light turns and he has to take his eyes off her. "You're so sweet, baby," she says. "You can drop me at my place, if you want. If you don't want company."

She makes the offer regularly; she doesn't want to be a burden, he thinks. He always assures her that no, he likes having her around, even though he hadn't. Not at first. The first thing he'd promised himself after receiving his doctorates had been no roommates, never again. He'd kept that promise, even when rooming with someone might have meant the difference between ramen noodles and actual food. He's still not sure how this arrangement even happened; all he knows is that one day he was telling Cammie that yes, of course she could do her baking in his kitchen since hers is the size of a postage stamp (something about gas stove vs. electric stove, the usefulness of both, and the fact that Sam's has the wrong one; he's still a little fuzzy on the details) and from there it had just snowballed.

But he likes having her around. It's ... restful. She chatters like a magpie and mis-shelves all his books and leaves her clothes thrown across his easy chair and containers of her hair goop strewn across his bathroom sink. And when she's not there, his apartment feels ten times smaller and more cramped than it does with her presence filling up every square inch.

"I don't mind," he says. It's easier than trying to find a way to tell her that he finds her presence restful, soothing; he's pretty sure it would come out sounding wrong. "But I'm not taking no for an answer this time. You're taking the bed."

His eyes are on the road, so he can't see her expression, but he can hear her indrawn breath as though she is about to argue. Then she laughs, long and slow and throaty, and something about it makes his heart thump in his chest. "A'ight, fine," she says. "Long's I ain't turning you out to do it."

It has the sound of a dare, of a challenge, but he's just annoyed enough with arguing with her to agree. Once he's parked the car, she trails behind him up into the apartment, where she kicks off her shoes, drinks six tumblers of water from the kitchen faucet seemingly without pause for breath, dives into her backpack for shorts and a tank top, and disappears into the bathroom. He folds down both sides of the covers neatly, and listens to the sounds of someone else moving about in his space.

The moonlight makes pretty pictures on the floor of the bedroom when he clicks off the bedside lamp. She comes out of the bathroom, picking her unerring way around the stacks of books and his bedroom furniture, and tosses herself into the bed with abandon. He can feel the heat radiating from her skin, despite the foot and a half of space between them; she's like a portable furnace. "G'night, baby," she murmurs, and he turns his head to see her eyes, wide and luminous in the dark.

"Sleep well," he says back, and tells himself that the only reason he's disappointed that she hasn't rolled over to snuggle up against him is because she's warm enough that he'd actually be sleeping at a comfortable temperature for once.

(In the morning, he will wake to find his hand flung out to rest on her pillow, which has long since gone cold; he will think nothing of it, until after he has brushed his teeth and showered and stumbled into the kitchen for coffee, when he remembers the night before. She will be nowhere to be seen, but that isn't unusual; she is constitutionally incapable of sleeping past seven in the morning, no matter how late she was awake the night before. He will settle at the table with a cup of coffee and the latest issue of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and when he hears the key turning in the lock, he will look up to find her, in sweat-soaked t-shirt and running shorts, wrestling two bags of produce from the farmer's market and not looking hung over in the least. Breakfast will be french toast and blueberry muffins and fresh fruit salad. He will only barely register the fact that she also brought home a bouquet of tulips, red and white and purple; they will live on his kitchen table, where he will be constantly surprised by their presence, until the team is stuck on P45-8N9 for an extra week and he will come home to find them withered in their vase.)

iv.

It turns out that there is nothing in the world more pathetic than Cameron Mitchell down for the count with the flu.

They'd all had their flu shots, but this winter's strain is particularly virulent, and it's going through the SGC ("like a hot knife through butter", as Cammie puts it; she has a colorful metaphor for every occasion). Cammie usually has the constitution of an ox; the fact that she comes down with it actually makes Dr. Lam run cultures to make sure it's an Earth-based varietal (it is) before anyone who's been exposed is allowed off-base. Cammie insists on going to her apartment ("don't wanna be a burden"); Daniel won't let her.

She wraps herself up in her afghan (sweating and feverish and chilled, all at once) and complains about her bones aching; he is treated to a constant litany (apparently even her hair hurts). Underneath the tan from P82-2CV, her face is paler than death, enough to make Daniel nervous. Terrified, actually. He's never seen her so listless and lethargic; even when she's been shot and drugged, there's a sort of vitality to her that's absent now.

He tries not to fuss -- he hates it when people fuss over him when he's sick or injured -- but he's worried; her fever's spiked at a hundred and five, and she can't keep anything down, not even the home-made soup he'd defrosted (Cammie's version of MREs; his freezer is full of unidentified things in Tupperware). He kneels on the bathroom floor next to her while she loses every bite she'd managed to choke down; she doesn't have long enough hair to hold back, but he rubs circles on her back (trying to ignore how her skin is burning) and murmurs soft and comforting nonsense words.

"Go 'way," she says, batting feebly at his hand. "You're gonna get this."

"I'm not leaving you alone," he says, firmly and (he thinks) reasonably enough. "You're sick."

"It's the goddamn flu," she mutters. "I don't fucking get sick."

"Empirical evidence suggests," he says. He reaches under his sink, where he keeps his linens, and pulls out a washcloth, soaks it in cold water; she moans when he drapes it over the back of her neck.

"Stop hovering, God damn it," she says. If she were feeling better, it would be a snap; she really only manages to muster enough energy to sound sulky. "I'm fine."

"You have a fever of a hundred and five," he points out. He knows; he shoved a thermometer in her mouth not ten minutes before, no matter how much she glared at him. "That's not 'fine' by anyone's standards."

"Go away or I really am trading you to Reynolds for a chocolate bar," she says, petulant.

But eventually he gets her installed back on the couch (afghan in tow; it's really kind of adorable that his thirty-eight-year-old commanding officer, leader of men, feared and revered by the entire Mountain, has a security blanket) with a bowl of Jello (he doesn't think he did too badly in making it, although it displays a distressing tendency to sag instead of quiver like Jello should), a bottle of water, a glass of 7-Up, one of the horrible paperback romances she devours like candy, and the remote for the TV. "Do you need anything else?" he asks, taking a step back.

She glares at him again. It's a particularly weak glare. "You to give me my keys so I can drive myself home and get away from your hovering," she says.

He's not hovering. Or, well, maybe he is, but it's only because he's worried. "I could get you some more soup," he says, disregarding her words. "Or make some tea."

She stares at him for a long minute. Then balls her hands up into fists, lets her head drop back, closes her eyes, and screams as loud as she can. Which is not, at the moment, even particularly loud enough to trouble the neighbors. (Who are used to momentary explosions of Cammie's temper by now anyway; she's not shy about expressing her displeasure with him. Once, there was throwing things. It's okay, he hadn't liked that vase much anyway.) This time, it's just a particularly frustrated-sounding weak screech. He hopes it makes her feel better; it can't do her throat much good. She yanks the afghan around herself a little more firmly, tucks her legs up on the couch with her, and hunkers down, then grabs the remote and drags it under the afghan, too. "If I see you in my field of sight anytime in the next two hours, I am going to shoot you."

"You'd have plenty of privacy if you'd just take the bedroom," Daniel says.

"No TV in the bedroom," she mutters, and starts bouncing from channel to channel in the way she knows drives him insane.

So he retreats to the bedroom instead. He doesn't think she'd actually shoot him -- for one thing, he's pretty sure she's too weak to hold either of the holdout pieces he keeps in the apartment, and for another, he's only half sure she meant it -- but discretion is sometimes the better part of valor. He does take the precaution of taking her car keys out from where he stashed them in the pocket of his jacket and dropping them down the back of the toilet tank, though. (After a second, he pauses, reconsiders, fishes them back out again, dries them off and shoves them in the right toe of his second-best pair of dress shoes, all the way back in the back of his closet; he's pretty sure the toilet tank would be one of the first places she looks.)

Then he calls Dr. Lam to see if there's anything else he should be doing. Dr. Lam assures him (again) that she ran the cultures twice, and this is definitely the same strain of flu that's going around Colorado Springs. She suggests that he make Colonel Mitchell a cup of tea. He remembers to hang up the phone before he says "fuck your tea", but it's pretty close.

He can hear Cammie sneezing in the living room, blowing her nose from time to time, and keeping up a steady stream of muttering, just barely audible over the sound of the TV. It's physically painful for him not to poke his head out of the bedroom and see what she needs, because the sound of her monologue is nothing like the usual happy babble she trails along behind her. Cammie talks to herself like the way Jack always used to play with anything within reach; it's a useful diagnostic for the state of her mind. This, though, sounds like she's vilifying him in his absence, and while he'd be perfectly content to be vilified -- they generally amuse everyone around them by how they can fight like cats and dogs sometimes -- it sounds more pathetic than venomous.

He's proud of himself, though; he doesn't get up and go look. (Both of his sidearms are stashed in the bedroom, but he wouldn't put it past her to have smuggled something in and left it under the couch. And he's pretty sure that even if she did shoot him, she'd have the manners to aim for something non-life-threatening, but he really doesn't want to test this theory right about now.) He's just settled into the bedroom armchair with a book (one of her romances; he doesn't have the brain for anything academic right now, and he's ashamed to admit that he's starting to see what she finds appealing about them; they're appallingly bad, but entertaining) when the door to the bedroom comes flying open and she streaks past him, faster than she should be able to move, and into the bathroom again.

His two hours aren't up, but he's pretty sure that she couldn't actually shoot him even if she tried right now. He settles down next to her on the bathroom floor again, and he tactfully ignores the way she's actually sobbing in between heaves, just passing her wadded-up handfuls of toilet paper to wipe her mouth and blow her nose. "I don't get sick!" she finally wails, slumping sideways to rest her face against the tile of the bathroom wall.

Daniel puts a hesitant hand on her thigh; he tries not to take it personally when she jerks away. "Would you like to -- take a bath, or something?" he asks, trying to rack his brains to think of something she might find comforting.

"Your bathtub sucks," she mutters. "Mine's better. If you'd let me go home."

He closes his eyes and prays for patience. "You're not going home," he says, firmly. Then hits on a tactic which might have a chance in hell of working: "I'd just worry too much about you. But if you get in the bed, I could drag the TV in there. There is a cable hookup." He just never bothers using it; he only had the TV in the living room in the first place because Jack had insisted. Before Cammie, it hadn't been turned on in over a year.

"Rather you drag me home," she snarls. "I feel like hell, I look like hell --"

And with that, something clicks in the back of his head. He's never thought of Cammie as vain; he's seen her in nearly every circumstance imaginable, from covered-in-mud to shot-and-bleeding and all manner of indignities between, and she's never seemed to mind. But that was on missions, and he's known for a while that Cammie on the other side of the Gate is a different person than Cammie-at-home. Cammie-at-home scatters jars of makeup across his bathroom sink and fusses for fifteen minutes over the right pair of jeans to wear out to dinner or the movies. In fever veritas; this must be hell for her.

He wants to tell her that she's beautiful even when she's feverish and grubby and kneeling on the floor of his bathroom, but he can't think of any way to make it come out sounding right. So he just passes her another wet washcloth and rocks back on his heels to stand. "Take a bath," he says, as gently as he can. "It will make you feel better. Then you can curl up in bed and I'll read you one of those stupid romance novels you love so much."

"Don't give me that," she mutters; "I see you stealing them when I'm not looking," but she musters up enough energy to try to get herself standing as well. He keeps from reaching down a hand; he's pretty sure she won't pitch over, and he's got a sense that she's trying to keep as much of her dignity as she can.

Once he hears the sound of running water, he heads into the kitchen -- furthest spot in the apartment from the bathroom; voices carry, and he doesn't particularly want to let Cammie know that he's calling "hey, Rube" -- and steals Cammie's cellphone, pages through the address book, and calls her brother. He only met Ashton Mitchell once, for a grand total of four hours -- routed through Peterson on his way to somewhere classified, and Cammie had dragged him out to dinner with the team -- but he's the only one of Cammie's family that Daniel knows to talk to, and he's at the point where he's ready to give up and admit he needs help.

"Of course I remember you," Ash assures Daniel when he's in the process of trying to identify himself, and then his voice sharpens: "Is Cammie okay?"

And Daniel hadn't even thought of how his call might be interpreted; he kicks himself and nearly trips over his words. "Yeah, yeah, she's fine -- or, well, she's really sick, and I can't keep her in bed --" Too late, he realizes how that sounds. "I mean, on the couch. Not, you know, in bed. I mean --"

On the other end of the phone, Ash is laughing. Daniel has no earthly clue what Cammie's told her family about him, about them, about the fact that she never answers the phone at her own apartment. But Ash's laugh is merry, just like Cammie's when she's honestly amused at something. "An' I bet you been hovering, and she's been snapping, and the more you fuss at her, the more snarly she gets, and you're about ready to tear your hair out, is that right?"

Daniel sighs. "She's really sick," he says. Admitting it to someone else -- someone who isn't from the SGC, someone Cammie doesn't have to play the hero around -- only makes the worry rise back up into his throat again. "Like, really sick. And she keeps trying to get up, put on her shoes, find her keys, and drive home, and I'm terrified that sooner or later she's going to do it while I'm asleep." He leaves out the visions he's had, of her losing control of the car and driving into a tree, or her getting back to her apartment and dying of some horrible flu-like complication and nobody realizing until she just didn't answer the phone.

"You mean you haven't let the air out of her tires yet?" Ash sounds shocked. "Okay, okay, you don't know how it works with us. Go let the air out of her tires. You can't just hide her keys, she'll find 'em."

Daniel blinks. "You want me to what?"

"When she had the chicken pox when she was seventeen, Momma wound up having to actually take the tires off all the cars in the driveway," Ash says. "Cammie doesn't like being helpless. And for someone who does so much taking care of other people, she sure as blazes hates needing it herself."

"I had noticed," Daniel mutters. "So. Tires. I suppose I should do mine, too?"

"Oh, no, no, no," Ash says. "Stealing your car would be cheating. There are rules." He pauses. "Unless she's on your lease. If she's on your lease, then yeah, yours too."

Daniel supposes that makes sense. In their world. "No," he says, quickly. "I mean -- she doesn't live here, she just stays over every now and then -- I'm just taking care of her for a bit while she's sick -- I mean, she's not on the lease --"

"Then she still considers herself a guest," Ash says. "No matter how close y'all are. And when she's a guest, she wouldn't dare steal your car. Against the rules. Just go and let all the air out of her tires, then hide her keys. And stop hovering. No matter how much you wanna take care of her, just leave her be and let her figure out on her own a few times that she'll fall down if she tries to get up. Pick her up when she needs picking, but otherwise let her be. Few days of that, and she'll let you do for her even if she doesn't ask."

It sounds crazy, and Daniel's about to protest, but then he remembers the way Cammie was when he'd been recovering -- never quite hovering, but always there with whatever he was going to need just before he realized he needed it, and the minute he'd decided that he was well enough to take a shower -- even though he hadn't been -- she'd pitched right in and let him realize for himself that he wasn't quite cleared for solo flight. "Huh," he says.

"You got any real problems," Ash says, "you call me back. I'm kinda tied up right about now, but one of the cousins could come running if you whistle."

For a second, Daniel's tempted. Not because he thinks he can't handle Cammie, but because he's pretty sure -- from all the things she's said, over time -- that she just feels better around her family. But he's pretty sure she'd kill him. He sighs and pushes up his glasses with his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. "No," he says. "I can handle it. Really. So. Let the air out of her tires, hide the keys, maybe hide her shoes, too, and pick her up off the floor when she falls over because she's too stubborn to admit that she shouldn't be out of bed yet. I can do that."

Ash laughs again. "You got the picture. You call me with updates, you hear?"

Daniel keeps Ash's words in mind when he hears the splashing noises from the bathroom indicating that the water's being drained from the tub, and he doesn't immediately spring to his feet and hover outside the bathroom door, ready to give a hand. He stays sitting in the bedroom chair, instead. It's the hardest thing he's done in a while -- especially when Cammie opens the door and appears, pale and wan, to shuffle across the room, shivering and looking like she's about to faint -- but he does his best to not even look up from the book he's reading, past that first glance. He did, however, spread the afghan out on the bed, and she pauses, bed-side, to glare at it accusingly. "I didn't say yes," she says. She sounds just as petulant as she had before the bath, but there's a little less heat behind it; Daniel will call the bath a tentative success.

"You didn't say no, either," he says, as casually as he can. "I just figured that reading when I've got a fever always gives me a migraine, and the last thing you probably want right now is for your head to hurt on top of all the rest of it."

She mutters something rude and indistinct, but it's soft enough that he feels justified in ignoring it. He turns a page (he's not actually reading the words he's seeing, and he'd have to back up and read them again, if any of these things had anything resembling plot or characterization to begin with, and he's really not sure why he's enjoying them so much; Cammie calls them "brain candy", and he's never particularly thought his brain had a sweet tooth, but Cammie makes him discover a number of previously-unsuspected things about himself) and doesn't look up. Doesn't. But the sounds she's making lead him to believe that she's actually settling herself into the bed, and after a few minutes, he feels as though it might be safe to spare a glance.

She's curled up in a miserable little ball, her back to him, and he would give just about anything to make her better right now. With the power of his mind. But he gets up, quietly, and goes into the living room, where he rescues the book she'd been reading and brings it back into the bedroom. She's still facing away from him when he comes back in, but she's not asleep (her breathing changes when she's asleep; it's a little astonishing for him to realize he knows this). For a minute, he debates chair vs. bed, but eventually he decides to prop up the pillows on the side of the bed she's not occupying, settles himself into them, and -- greatly daring -- arrange himself so that he's just nearly touching her.

She holds herself separate for a minute, and then sighs and wiggles backwards to press up against him (and oh, if he thought she was warm when she wasn't running a fever, this is like lying next to a bonfire). The touch seems to ease her, though. He's noticed how much she just plain touches people, everything from an arm snaked around Sam's waist to drag her out of the way while Cammie is cooking to the way she rests her head against Teal'c's shoulder while they're watching movies on Team Night to the way she worms her toes underneath Daniel's thighs when they're sitting on the couch and reading together. And really, Daniel likes touching people, too -- a fact which would astonish ninety percent of the SGC if they were to know it, because he'd spent so long training himself into the American concept of 'personal space', something that never came naturally to him, that it takes a near-superhuman effort of will to drop it when it comes time. So he reaches over her hip and takes her hand, twines their fingers together, and holds the book splayed open with his other hand.

He reads to her for two hours, until he hears the telltale hitch-shuffle of her breath that tells him that he's managed to lull her to sleep, and then he puts the book on the nightstand, frees his fingers as gently as possible, and carefully shifts his weight until he's spooned up behind her. She makes a sleepy murmur (she wakes for any motion, no matter how careful he's being, sometimes particularly when he's being careful; 'care' translates to 'stealth', and Daniel finds it so curious how she and Jack have many of the same subconscious sentries) and he makes an equally-wordless noise of reassurance. She subsides, and her breathing evens out again, and he holds her there in the darkening twilight and thinks that leaving her alone without trying to take care of her is going to be the hardest thing he's done in a long time.

(It will be another three days before her fever breaks. Around four in the afternoon on the second day, while he is biting his nails to keep from leaping up and forcibly ejecting her from the kitchen, where she's swaying in front of the freezer like she's about to fall over and loudly complaining that she never wants to eat another bite of food in her whole life, he will have a momentary epiphany. He will realize, as fleeting and ephermal as the wind, that the reason he is fussing so fiercely over an illness, something that is -- in the grand scheme of things -- relatively free of danger, is because it is her responsibility -- all their responsibilities -- to throw themselves headlong into danger and sacrifice themselves with open eyes and willing heart if it should be necessary, and because he knows that responsibility down to his bones, he can't let himself think about what he would do if (when) it actually comes to that point. The realization will not be anything he can put into words, though, and it will pop like a soap bubble when she drops a Tupperware container of soup and he can't stop himself from rushing to clean it up for her, and by the time she's done shouting at him, he will not remember what he was thinking. Four days after that, when she discovers that all of her tires have been deflated, she will throw a box of tissues at his head and accuse him of conspiring with her brother behind her back, and he will be so glad to hear that she has enough breath to yell at him properly that he won't even mind the shouting.)

v.

She is sitting sideways on the couch with her toes tucked under his leg and her Christmas knitting in her lap; he has the latest issue of Anthropology Today at his side. The last minutes of Die Hard 3 ("I can't believe you ain't never seen those; baby, where the hell you been livin', under a rock?") are playing out on the TV.

They are both sound asleep. She snores. He doesn't. (Fortunately, he finds it cute.) The DVD ends; after a time, the player turns itself off, leaving behind the faint whine of a television with no video input.

(In the morning, she will wake well before he does, and she will yawn, stretch, and ease her toes out of the couch-cushions and out from under his rear end. She will watch him for a long while, studying the sweep of his cheekbones, the curve of his mouth, and she will smile. She will get up slowly, careful not to disturb him, and spread the afghan over his lap. The urge to touch his hair, to layer soft kisses against his lips, will be as irresistable as it has been since more or less the moment she met him, and it will be just as important to resist now as was then; he's still not ready to admit anything yet, not even to himself. She will turn away from him, still smiling, and go into the kitchen -- her kitchen -- where she will start a pot of coffee and study the contents of the refrigerator, thinking about breakfast, before she goes to brush her teeth and shower. The entire time, the words will be beating in her heart: soon, soon, soon.)

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