FanFic100: #007 Days
So much for ‘Business as usual.’ In fact… ‘Business as usual.’ his ass. Because… even in SG1’s terms… this whole thing is far from ‘Business as usual.’, for several reasons. One is that… he never felt so horrible sitting at the bed of one of his team members in the infirmary. Another one is that he never went head to head with General Hammond before like he had six days ago. And the last one is that Henderson and Linley never defied his orders before.
Keeping from groaning he bends down and buries his head in his hands again, partly to try and shut off the memories from what happened six days ago, partly to relieve himself of the sight on the bed before him, at least for a few moments. But it isn’t working for either one.
He keeps remembering the blizzard his team was surprised by, Laura forcing him to leave her behind, forcing General Hammond to let him go back, risking his career in the process… he also remembers Henderson and Linley refusing to let him go alone - with the very convincing statement of “Sir… Lieutenant Cadman would have my ass if I let you walk back in that white hell all on your own. And with all due respect… she can be way scarier than you.” from Henderson - and finding Laura, nearly dead from hypothermia.
He also remembers standing in the observation room and watching the doctors save her life. Impassively, not moving, not even really seeing the commotion down below… just Laura. Thousands of thoughts running through his mind, boiling down to just one: He’d do it all again for her. Of course, he’d do it for Henderson and Linley as well… but not out of the same reasons. He takes a deep breath and looks up again.
He’s alone in the infirmary now, having finally sent Henderson and Linley home after they came here day after day, pretending to go about their duties as usual but in truth just being there to make sure their CO didn’t forget to eat and drink… and to keep an eye on Laura. They did put up quite some resistance, but for some reason… he doesn’t want them to be here today.
It’s the day the docs have decided to bring her out of the artificial coma they put her in to give her body the rest it needed to cope with the effects of the hypothermia. They’ve tried to be all optimistic about it, but they couldn’t fool him - chances are there she won’t wake up again. And if that happens… he doesn’t want Henderson and Linley to be here. If that happens, he wants Henderson, who he knows to be almost as close as an older brother to Laura to be with his wife when he gets told she didn’t make it and he wants Linley, who owes Laura his life and his girlfriend to be with said girlfriend when he tells him.
He, however… he has no one he could call for comfort, due to the fact that his best friend disappeared a year ago and that his family became estranged from him during the time before the alternative Carter saved them from the Ori. His life had centered around the SGC and his work and he’d never found the courage to try and mend fences with his family after. Then Laura came and his life slowly became centered around her as well, even before he had realized what she meant to him. And now he’s sitting here, just ten minutes to go until the decisive moment where she either opens her eyes or will probably remain like this forever.
God, how he wishes she would have put in a transfer request after his admission two weeks ago. Then he wouldn’t have had to endure seeing her day in, day out, determined to be all professional, as if nothing had ever happened in that lab of hers and he wouldn’t have had to pretend to himself that he could lock it all away, for the sake of his and her career. And most important of all: He wouldn’t have had to take her on the mission that might have cost her life.
He looks at her face again, pale and sunken in, somehow looking weary and he remembers how her eyes had looked when she’d pleaded with him to leave her behind because she’d known she would only slow the team down with her twisted ankle… he’d just known that she was just this close to tell him that situations like these were exactly why non-frat regs existed. But goddammit, hearts don’t care about rules… and that would have been exactly what he would have told her if she’d reminded him of the regs then.
She never did, though, and so he just remembers the pleading look as her last conscious action. By the time they’d gotten to her a second time, she’d already been unconscious, scaring him to death because at first he hadn’t even been able to find a pulse. Only his firm belief that Laura was too pig-headed to let herself be defeated by something as trivial as a blizzard had kept him from losing it there in the snow.
It’s what still keeps him from losing it - although he isn't quite sure how much more than sitting at a hospital bed six days straight and forgetting to eat, drink and sleep one can lose it - and he doesn’t want to think about what could happen if she doesn’t wake up again.
He takes another look at his watch. Five more minutes of the torture of being torn between guilt, hope, a broken heart and the fear of losing her. Five more minutes in this strange limbo where everything is still possible, where nothing is decided yet… he wants to talk to her, tell her that she just can’t leave because she became the heart of his team, the one to hold them all together, the one forcing them to leave reservations behind them and become a team instead of four soldiers who were thrown into the same unit by accident.
He also wants to tell Laura that when Sam left, she took a part of him with her he’ll never regain, but that he… doesn’t even have words for what it would mean if she left him as well and plead with her not to leave him… promise her all kinds of things. To leave her in peace, to finally recommend her to the promotion board like he should have done already six months ago, to get her that spectrometer she’d been moping about for at least three months now… if only she wakes up and gets well again.
But his throat and his tongue refuse to work properly as he sees the doctors approaching for the moment that will make him or break him and so the only thing he can bring himself to is squeeze her hand and whisper half pleadingly, “Don’t go, Laura.” Then they are there and all he can do is step back… and hope.
A/N #2: Okay, now, go ahead and hate me...
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TBC in Recovering