Fic: Joint Fire Support Team: Drowning on Dry Land (Generation Kill/SGA) (1/6)
Title: Drowning on Dry Land
Fandom: Generation Kill/Stargate
Rating: T (language warning, guys. No, seriously.)
Genres: gen
Summary: Laura Cadman wouldn't be the first Lieutenant Sergeant Brad Colbert is giving some gentle nudges into the right direction. If she'd just let him.
A/N: Eh. This was inspired both by hanseatic_keks who gave me a Generation Kill/Stargate prompt for this year's Holiday Fic Request Meme and thus made me finally read and watch Generation Kill and arwen_lune who took that prompt as an inspiration to start Rock Happy which is about the coolest thing I'm currently waiting for to be continued and her idea to use Laura Cadman and Brad Colbert in a fic. Originally, this one was rather supposed to be a one-shot but... my characters apparently love to betray me screw me over surprise me and there were a few other Atlantis characters who wanted to appear in a fic together with Brad Colbert (but then again... who doesn't?) so, uh, this kind of became a 'verse. Going by the name of Joint Fire Support Team *rolls eyes at self
Anyway, this is my first story involving Generation Kill and there are no words for how nervous I'm about it. I'm brand new to the fandom and for some reason, Generation Kill seems to be intimidating as a fandom (although I'm sure you're all great people!) and uh.. be gentle? Please?
Also, anyone finding messed up homophones, please jump on them, trample them down and then hand them to me. I will do with them what they deserve. They are my personal nemesis. (ask my part-time beta, mackenziesmomma)
Drowning on Dry Land
“Come on and wade, way out into the water with me,
we're drowning on dry land.
Come on and wade way out into the water with me...
Jump in and take my hand.”Celtic Storm, “Scalliwag”
It’s been going on for a few days now. Ever since Cadman dragged their Zoomie XO into what’s called the Gate Control room around here and kept yelling at him that she’ll fucking kill him with her own fucking hands if he dared dying on her. Left a fucking bloody trail all over the floor bleeding from a couple holes. It’s actually a miracle he didn’t bleed to death.
Lorne’s been in the infirmary since then while Cadman seems to be prowling the city, ready to pick a fight with whomever would be stupid enough to stand in her way. He’s pretty sure she left a couple of zoologists traumatized when they dared to have a little chat outside her boom shack yesterday. He’s almost sure she even gave that overblown Canadian physicist ego McKay a run for his money because whenever someone utters her name in his vicinity he goes all pale and excuses himself from the conversation since two days ago.
So it's probably a supreme example of some fucking heroics that he's standing outside the workout room and contemplating to tell her... ask her not to monopolize the fucking punching bag. He's been here for at least 30 and the only time she stopped beating it to pulp was to up the volume of the crap she's currently listening to. Something with a screeching female sounding even more pissed than Cadman looks. At least it's not hip hop or, Heaven forbid, country.
But yeah, he really wants to use that punching bag himself, so he squares his shoulders and takes a step into the room. There’s no reason to be scared of anything inside the workout room. They used to call him Iceman, so he can very well take on one little Lieutenant, Marine or not. She’s not Nathanial Fick, after all.
He takes another step but she keeps pummeling the bag. He clears his throat. She doesn't stop. He rolls his eyes. "Ma'am?" Still no reaction. "Excuse me, ma'am?"
Ah. She stops and he notices dark spots on the grey fabric that wraps the punching back. The subsequent look at her knuckles confirms it. She came here for the pain. He knows that strategy. Some Marines, they seek pain when something went FUBAR, when they're blaming themselves. He never thought Cadman would be one of them. But then again, since he arrived here, she'd never been in a fuck-up, or at least none that involved bloody trails on the Gate room floor and a trauma team performing emergency surgery right fucking there.
The music stops.
"What, Sergeant?" And that... isn't really the Cadman he got to know. He'd been wary of the officers he encountered in Atlantis, even though all the enlisted men at the Mountain told him it's different from the usual fucked up chain of command and she'd been one of those to surprise him with how approachable she was and how much weight she put in the words of enlisted men, rolling her eyes and telling him he's five years her senior and probably has ten years of combat experience under his belt so what did he expect? That she'd yell at him and give a rat's ass about whatever the fuck he's telling her?
No way, she'd said. No fucking way and now she's staring at him with eyes blazing in anger and bloodied knuckles that seem to be itching for more than just some stuffed canvas. He resists rolling his eyes. Hers is a shitty coping strategy and she should know it. "Just wondering when I might get a go, ma'am."
“When I’m done with mine, Sergeant.” Whoa. That was clear. A lesser man would probably have been real frightened.
He’s no lesser man, though. So he figures grabbing the bull by its horns could actually serve a good purpose here. “There’s blood on the punching bag, ma’am,” he points out to her. He abstains from mentioning the blood on her knuckles.
She looks at the bag and what gets to him is the bafflement blooming on her face. It’s worse than he thought. She doesn’t even feel the pain she came here for.
After a moment of confused silence, he sees her face going blank. Like those Marines who simply shut down in the face of brutality and suffering. He never thought Lieutenant Laura Cadman of all people would be capable of that. “I’ll be okay.”
Right. That one he knows. Cadman might be female, but apparently, female Marines learn the same routine when handling injury that male Marines do. As long as it’s not life threatening, they just pretend there’s nothing there. That was one of the things that really took some getting used to.
But it’s not the physical injury that makes the alarm bells ring in the back of his mind that he got every time one of his men wasn’t okay in Iraq. He decides to be blunt with her. Someone should have done this days ago. “I don’t think so, ma’am. I really don’t think you’re going to be okay the way you’re going about this mission fuck-up.” For a moment he wonders if he should have added “with all due respect” but he’s pretty sure Cadman knows he respects her. Every Marine, be it male or female, serving in a combat unit like a Gate team deserves his respect.
At first, it looks as if she’d go and bust his ass after all but then she just shakes her head. “I fucked up the mission, Sergeant. This is my way of dealing with it.”
Bullshit. “This is no way of dealing with it.”
She eyes him, as if she’s taken aback a little but then she tries to assume the stance usually officers that he couldn’t stand assumed. “I’m pretty sure I’m fit to decide whichever way I want to deal with crap like this.”
He’s pretty sure she’s fit for a lot of things - she did get Lorne back in time to Atlantis, after all, and apparently almost singlehandedly at that, seeing as her team had been more occupied with providing cover for her to drag him through the Gate - but not for that. He understands that she wouldn’t want to talk to a shrink or a padre. That’s normal. For a Marine, anyway. What’s not normal is that she wouldn’t turn to another Marine. Or maybe even a Zoomie. Or a scientist. A peer, as the people over in Social Sciences would say.
He flexes his hands. Sometimes, when a Marine doesn’t want to talk… you have to make them talk. He’s pretty sure she’d not reject a little advise from a Sergeant with a bit of Recon experience. “Ma’am, missions get fucked up all the time. It’s a fact of life.”
he snorts but beneath the derision, he can hear a sort of bitter desperation. “Oh really? And nearly getting your fucking commanding officer killed? Is that a fact of life, too?”
This is familiar. Actually, it's like Iraq all over again. It's Trombley after shooting the shepherd and Walt after shooting the unarmed man in the blue sedan. Only Cadman didn't shoot the enemy. He's got no idea what happened but she seems to think she's responsible for Lorne ending up in the infirmary. That just can't be healthy. “Yes, ma’am, even that is.”
There’s a sound from her. Like a strangled sob she only held back because she remembered you weren’t supposed to cry in front of anyone, at any time as a female Marine just in time. She tries a different route instead. “Fuck you, Sergeant.”
His first impulse is to tell her he might actually take one of them - her or Mehra or any of the other female Marines or Airmen - up on the offer if they keep saying that but he’s not a sexist asshole, nor does he hate women, despite everything people might have believed of him whenever Ray told them he doesn’t intend to get married because of the girl who dumped him for his best friend.
Instead of saying that, he gears up to get her back to talking to him but she’s faster, throwing her hands up and saying, “This is pointless. I got better things to do.”
Yeah, he can see what that is supposed to be. Beating up a poor innocent punching bag and ruining her hands in the process. Not on his watch. “You mean like visiting Major Lorne in the infirmary, ma’am?”
“Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of here, Sergeant.” It’s a good reaction. It means he struck the right cord. She really hasn’t been down to the infirmary yet. That really isn’t like her, who’d gone out of her way to make sure her teammates were treated well by the infirmary staff whenever someone landed their ass there as long as he’s been here. He knows that much about her.
It’s also a very good opening for him to dig in to. “I will, ma’am. If you do me the favor and explain to an ignorant Sergeant why you would drag your CO’s ass back all the way to the city and yell at him loud enough for everyone including your CO’s CO to hear only to never see how he’s doing.”
It’s not that he doesn’t have an idea what that could be. It’s just that he thinks she needs to spell it out, for her sake. “I know how he’s doing, Sergeant.”
Holy shit. She just managed to surprise him enough that he only wonders, “How?”
She runs one of her hands through her unruly, sticky hair, obviously still oblivious to the damage she wrecked on her hands. There’s a strange burning, pained expression in her eyes when she finally looks at him again. As if she’s been trying to fight so that she doesn’t have to cry. “I just… do. Listen, I don’t need to explain myself to you. Or anyone else for that matter.” Why are you gearing up to do it anyway, then, he wants to ask but knows it’s wiser to keep that to himself. It looks very much like she’s finally going to open up to him. “I know that Major Lorne is in the ICU and hasn’t woken up yet. I also know that Dr. Keller thinks he’s going to pull through but that he’s not out of the woods yet. I know all that.” That didn’t answer his question. But the next sentence does. “I just don’t want to see it.”
He lets that sink in. The bruised knuckles, the hair that looks nothing like her usual neat and regulation abiding pinned up hair, the little smear of blood against her cheek she left when she rubbed against it with the back of her hand, the fidgeting. The words. I just don’t want to see it. There was something to it… something sad and desperate, even a little defiant. Something that struck him as odd. “You got anything going on with the Major, ma’am?”
That was probably a bad idea. “What the everloving fucking hell is it that makes all you stupid knuckleheads insinuate that a female Marine just has to be sleeping with her superior because we’re obviously all just career driven bitches every damn time we even so much as look at a soldier with a fucking dick which is basically all the fucking time?”
Not quite sure if that statement really made sense, he takes his time to answer. This reeks of having touched a nerve, the way she lit up at the question, not meant to be insinuating anything. As if she’s been waiting for someone to ask it for a very long time, ready to shoot down anyone who did.
And maybe she was. Or maybe she’s had people making unfounded accusations about sleeping her way up the chain of command since basic training. Maybe it’s one of those female armed forces personnel things he hadn’t even been fully aware of before coming here and starting to work with female soldiers that were actually going into battle as full-fledged team members. He decides to give her the benefit of a doubt. “It was an objective question to assess the situation, ma’am.”
Cadman, still seems to be livid about his question… up until he tells her he’d just wanted to have some information on something, not imply something inappropriate. The question actually makes her take a break, a deep breath and a step back, figuratively. He’s pretty sure Cadman wouldn’t back down literally from anyone. It takes her another moment in which the guilt over Lorne’s condition returns to her face until she asks quietly, “Does it really matter?”
He contemplates that. From a strictly formal stance it does matter. A fucking lot, even. It matters everything if she’s sleeping with her team leader or not. He’s not stupid, though. Even if it’s not his style, he knows that war zones aren’t non-sexual, non-feeling zones. Actually, he knows war zones to be among the most sexual zones known to men.
It’s not only all the sex talk bullshitting of men hyped up on adrenaline and deprived of female company. It’s couples of all sexes and builds sneaking around base camps, sometimes even FOBs. It’s kissing in dark corners and making out in latrine stalls. Actually, to his knowledge, Atlantis is pretty tame in that regard, tamer than Camp Pendleton or even Camp Mathilda or any other camps in war zones and stateside he’d been stationed at.
As for Cadman and Lorne’s case… “No, ma’am.” Because even if she is sleeping with him… why the fuck is it important? He’s never seen them behave unprofessionally to anyone, and he knows that if Cadman gets promoted, and hopefully soon, it wouldn’t be because she’s fucking one of her superiors. She’s above that.
Even her current behavior, while not exactly professional, probably stems more from the fact that whatever happened on that mission to get Lorne shot up like that she considers to be her fault than having any romantic feelings she can’t get under control. It’s a fucking truckload of guilt that makes her do this, guilt that doesn’t have anything to do with other personal feelings. He knows that. He’s seen it in others, occasionally even in himself.
It’s probably why she doesn’t answer anything, just nods with a deep breath, in the near desperate attempt at keeping back the tears. He’s close to telling her to stop that crap and just goddamn cry but it probably wouldn’t go over well so all he does is say, a lot softer than he’d intended to, “Someone should have a look at your hands, ma’am.”
She looks at him, a bit like deer in headlights, then at her hands and it dawns on him that this really is the first time she notices how much she wrecked them. Slowly, she flexes them and it seems that the pain starts to set in only now. When she looks at him again, he wishes she hadn’t. He’s tempted to say he never saw a Marine look like that but that’s bullshit. The one he saw in the field out of Nasiriyah, the one who lost his unit and just kept wandering around… for a moment she looked just like him. “Yeah, I guess someone should."
He could leave it at that, move past her, have a go at the punching bag himself. Or he could do his job as a Sergeant and show a Lieutenant the way out of a SNAFU she doesn’t know how to get out of herself. He’s just too damn dutiful for his own fucking good. “I just remembered I got a couple things to do at the infirmary. Care to come along, ma’am?”
For a very long moment, she seems to seriously consider it, even on the verge of saying no when she finally nods and says, “Can’t harm, right?”
Ridiculously relieved, he shakes his head no and turns to go, Cadman actually leaving with him. He’s about to start in a quick pace he’s used to from her - this is kind of urgent after all - but quickly adjusts to the slow steps she makes today. Baby steps, he thinks, and nearly winces because it sounds just so damn corny.
It doesn’t matter, he thinks a moment later. What matters is that she’s taking steps forward, however slow they are. It’s a lot better than tearing up her knuckles against a punching bag at least. Things can only get better for her now. He’s kind of glad he was the one showing her the right direction. It means he hasn’t lost his touch. It’s a good feeling.
~*~
TBC in Better Treat Her Right.
Fandom: Generation Kill/Stargate
Rating: T (language warning, guys. No, seriously.)
Genres: gen
Summary: Laura Cadman wouldn't be the first Lieutenant Sergeant Brad Colbert is giving some gentle nudges into the right direction. If she'd just let him.
A/N: Eh. This was inspired both by hanseatic_keks who gave me a Generation Kill/Stargate prompt for this year's Holiday Fic Request Meme and thus made me finally read and watch Generation Kill and arwen_lune who took that prompt as an inspiration to start Rock Happy which is about the coolest thing I'm currently waiting for to be continued and her idea to use Laura Cadman and Brad Colbert in a fic. Originally, this one was rather supposed to be a one-shot but... my characters apparently love to betray me screw me over surprise me and there were a few other Atlantis characters who wanted to appear in a fic together with Brad Colbert (but then again... who doesn't?) so, uh, this kind of became a 'verse. Going by the name of Joint Fire Support Team *rolls eyes at self
Anyway, this is my first story involving Generation Kill and there are no words for how nervous I'm about it. I'm brand new to the fandom and for some reason, Generation Kill seems to be intimidating as a fandom (although I'm sure you're all great people!) and uh.. be gentle? Please?
Also, anyone finding messed up homophones, please jump on them, trample them down and then hand them to me. I will do with them what they deserve. They are my personal nemesis. (ask my part-time beta, mackenziesmomma)
Drowning on Dry Land
“Come on and wade, way out into the water with me,
we're drowning on dry land.
Come on and wade way out into the water with me...
Jump in and take my hand.”Celtic Storm, “Scalliwag”
It’s been going on for a few days now. Ever since Cadman dragged their Zoomie XO into what’s called the Gate Control room around here and kept yelling at him that she’ll fucking kill him with her own fucking hands if he dared dying on her. Left a fucking bloody trail all over the floor bleeding from a couple holes. It’s actually a miracle he didn’t bleed to death.
Lorne’s been in the infirmary since then while Cadman seems to be prowling the city, ready to pick a fight with whomever would be stupid enough to stand in her way. He’s pretty sure she left a couple of zoologists traumatized when they dared to have a little chat outside her boom shack yesterday. He’s almost sure she even gave that overblown Canadian physicist ego McKay a run for his money because whenever someone utters her name in his vicinity he goes all pale and excuses himself from the conversation since two days ago.
So it's probably a supreme example of some fucking heroics that he's standing outside the workout room and contemplating to tell her... ask her not to monopolize the fucking punching bag. He's been here for at least 30 and the only time she stopped beating it to pulp was to up the volume of the crap she's currently listening to. Something with a screeching female sounding even more pissed than Cadman looks. At least it's not hip hop or, Heaven forbid, country.
But yeah, he really wants to use that punching bag himself, so he squares his shoulders and takes a step into the room. There’s no reason to be scared of anything inside the workout room. They used to call him Iceman, so he can very well take on one little Lieutenant, Marine or not. She’s not Nathanial Fick, after all.
He takes another step but she keeps pummeling the bag. He clears his throat. She doesn't stop. He rolls his eyes. "Ma'am?" Still no reaction. "Excuse me, ma'am?"
Ah. She stops and he notices dark spots on the grey fabric that wraps the punching back. The subsequent look at her knuckles confirms it. She came here for the pain. He knows that strategy. Some Marines, they seek pain when something went FUBAR, when they're blaming themselves. He never thought Cadman would be one of them. But then again, since he arrived here, she'd never been in a fuck-up, or at least none that involved bloody trails on the Gate room floor and a trauma team performing emergency surgery right fucking there.
The music stops.
"What, Sergeant?" And that... isn't really the Cadman he got to know. He'd been wary of the officers he encountered in Atlantis, even though all the enlisted men at the Mountain told him it's different from the usual fucked up chain of command and she'd been one of those to surprise him with how approachable she was and how much weight she put in the words of enlisted men, rolling her eyes and telling him he's five years her senior and probably has ten years of combat experience under his belt so what did he expect? That she'd yell at him and give a rat's ass about whatever the fuck he's telling her?
No way, she'd said. No fucking way and now she's staring at him with eyes blazing in anger and bloodied knuckles that seem to be itching for more than just some stuffed canvas. He resists rolling his eyes. Hers is a shitty coping strategy and she should know it. "Just wondering when I might get a go, ma'am."
“When I’m done with mine, Sergeant.” Whoa. That was clear. A lesser man would probably have been real frightened.
He’s no lesser man, though. So he figures grabbing the bull by its horns could actually serve a good purpose here. “There’s blood on the punching bag, ma’am,” he points out to her. He abstains from mentioning the blood on her knuckles.
She looks at the bag and what gets to him is the bafflement blooming on her face. It’s worse than he thought. She doesn’t even feel the pain she came here for.
After a moment of confused silence, he sees her face going blank. Like those Marines who simply shut down in the face of brutality and suffering. He never thought Lieutenant Laura Cadman of all people would be capable of that. “I’ll be okay.”
Right. That one he knows. Cadman might be female, but apparently, female Marines learn the same routine when handling injury that male Marines do. As long as it’s not life threatening, they just pretend there’s nothing there. That was one of the things that really took some getting used to.
But it’s not the physical injury that makes the alarm bells ring in the back of his mind that he got every time one of his men wasn’t okay in Iraq. He decides to be blunt with her. Someone should have done this days ago. “I don’t think so, ma’am. I really don’t think you’re going to be okay the way you’re going about this mission fuck-up.” For a moment he wonders if he should have added “with all due respect” but he’s pretty sure Cadman knows he respects her. Every Marine, be it male or female, serving in a combat unit like a Gate team deserves his respect.
At first, it looks as if she’d go and bust his ass after all but then she just shakes her head. “I fucked up the mission, Sergeant. This is my way of dealing with it.”
Bullshit. “This is no way of dealing with it.”
She eyes him, as if she’s taken aback a little but then she tries to assume the stance usually officers that he couldn’t stand assumed. “I’m pretty sure I’m fit to decide whichever way I want to deal with crap like this.”
He’s pretty sure she’s fit for a lot of things - she did get Lorne back in time to Atlantis, after all, and apparently almost singlehandedly at that, seeing as her team had been more occupied with providing cover for her to drag him through the Gate - but not for that. He understands that she wouldn’t want to talk to a shrink or a padre. That’s normal. For a Marine, anyway. What’s not normal is that she wouldn’t turn to another Marine. Or maybe even a Zoomie. Or a scientist. A peer, as the people over in Social Sciences would say.
He flexes his hands. Sometimes, when a Marine doesn’t want to talk… you have to make them talk. He’s pretty sure she’d not reject a little advise from a Sergeant with a bit of Recon experience. “Ma’am, missions get fucked up all the time. It’s a fact of life.”
he snorts but beneath the derision, he can hear a sort of bitter desperation. “Oh really? And nearly getting your fucking commanding officer killed? Is that a fact of life, too?”
This is familiar. Actually, it's like Iraq all over again. It's Trombley after shooting the shepherd and Walt after shooting the unarmed man in the blue sedan. Only Cadman didn't shoot the enemy. He's got no idea what happened but she seems to think she's responsible for Lorne ending up in the infirmary. That just can't be healthy. “Yes, ma’am, even that is.”
There’s a sound from her. Like a strangled sob she only held back because she remembered you weren’t supposed to cry in front of anyone, at any time as a female Marine just in time. She tries a different route instead. “Fuck you, Sergeant.”
His first impulse is to tell her he might actually take one of them - her or Mehra or any of the other female Marines or Airmen - up on the offer if they keep saying that but he’s not a sexist asshole, nor does he hate women, despite everything people might have believed of him whenever Ray told them he doesn’t intend to get married because of the girl who dumped him for his best friend.
Instead of saying that, he gears up to get her back to talking to him but she’s faster, throwing her hands up and saying, “This is pointless. I got better things to do.”
Yeah, he can see what that is supposed to be. Beating up a poor innocent punching bag and ruining her hands in the process. Not on his watch. “You mean like visiting Major Lorne in the infirmary, ma’am?”
“Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of here, Sergeant.” It’s a good reaction. It means he struck the right cord. She really hasn’t been down to the infirmary yet. That really isn’t like her, who’d gone out of her way to make sure her teammates were treated well by the infirmary staff whenever someone landed their ass there as long as he’s been here. He knows that much about her.
It’s also a very good opening for him to dig in to. “I will, ma’am. If you do me the favor and explain to an ignorant Sergeant why you would drag your CO’s ass back all the way to the city and yell at him loud enough for everyone including your CO’s CO to hear only to never see how he’s doing.”
It’s not that he doesn’t have an idea what that could be. It’s just that he thinks she needs to spell it out, for her sake. “I know how he’s doing, Sergeant.”
Holy shit. She just managed to surprise him enough that he only wonders, “How?”
She runs one of her hands through her unruly, sticky hair, obviously still oblivious to the damage she wrecked on her hands. There’s a strange burning, pained expression in her eyes when she finally looks at him again. As if she’s been trying to fight so that she doesn’t have to cry. “I just… do. Listen, I don’t need to explain myself to you. Or anyone else for that matter.” Why are you gearing up to do it anyway, then, he wants to ask but knows it’s wiser to keep that to himself. It looks very much like she’s finally going to open up to him. “I know that Major Lorne is in the ICU and hasn’t woken up yet. I also know that Dr. Keller thinks he’s going to pull through but that he’s not out of the woods yet. I know all that.” That didn’t answer his question. But the next sentence does. “I just don’t want to see it.”
He lets that sink in. The bruised knuckles, the hair that looks nothing like her usual neat and regulation abiding pinned up hair, the little smear of blood against her cheek she left when she rubbed against it with the back of her hand, the fidgeting. The words. I just don’t want to see it. There was something to it… something sad and desperate, even a little defiant. Something that struck him as odd. “You got anything going on with the Major, ma’am?”
That was probably a bad idea. “What the everloving fucking hell is it that makes all you stupid knuckleheads insinuate that a female Marine just has to be sleeping with her superior because we’re obviously all just career driven bitches every damn time we even so much as look at a soldier with a fucking dick which is basically all the fucking time?”
Not quite sure if that statement really made sense, he takes his time to answer. This reeks of having touched a nerve, the way she lit up at the question, not meant to be insinuating anything. As if she’s been waiting for someone to ask it for a very long time, ready to shoot down anyone who did.
And maybe she was. Or maybe she’s had people making unfounded accusations about sleeping her way up the chain of command since basic training. Maybe it’s one of those female armed forces personnel things he hadn’t even been fully aware of before coming here and starting to work with female soldiers that were actually going into battle as full-fledged team members. He decides to give her the benefit of a doubt. “It was an objective question to assess the situation, ma’am.”
Cadman, still seems to be livid about his question… up until he tells her he’d just wanted to have some information on something, not imply something inappropriate. The question actually makes her take a break, a deep breath and a step back, figuratively. He’s pretty sure Cadman wouldn’t back down literally from anyone. It takes her another moment in which the guilt over Lorne’s condition returns to her face until she asks quietly, “Does it really matter?”
He contemplates that. From a strictly formal stance it does matter. A fucking lot, even. It matters everything if she’s sleeping with her team leader or not. He’s not stupid, though. Even if it’s not his style, he knows that war zones aren’t non-sexual, non-feeling zones. Actually, he knows war zones to be among the most sexual zones known to men.
It’s not only all the sex talk bullshitting of men hyped up on adrenaline and deprived of female company. It’s couples of all sexes and builds sneaking around base camps, sometimes even FOBs. It’s kissing in dark corners and making out in latrine stalls. Actually, to his knowledge, Atlantis is pretty tame in that regard, tamer than Camp Pendleton or even Camp Mathilda or any other camps in war zones and stateside he’d been stationed at.
As for Cadman and Lorne’s case… “No, ma’am.” Because even if she is sleeping with him… why the fuck is it important? He’s never seen them behave unprofessionally to anyone, and he knows that if Cadman gets promoted, and hopefully soon, it wouldn’t be because she’s fucking one of her superiors. She’s above that.
Even her current behavior, while not exactly professional, probably stems more from the fact that whatever happened on that mission to get Lorne shot up like that she considers to be her fault than having any romantic feelings she can’t get under control. It’s a fucking truckload of guilt that makes her do this, guilt that doesn’t have anything to do with other personal feelings. He knows that. He’s seen it in others, occasionally even in himself.
It’s probably why she doesn’t answer anything, just nods with a deep breath, in the near desperate attempt at keeping back the tears. He’s close to telling her to stop that crap and just goddamn cry but it probably wouldn’t go over well so all he does is say, a lot softer than he’d intended to, “Someone should have a look at your hands, ma’am.”
She looks at him, a bit like deer in headlights, then at her hands and it dawns on him that this really is the first time she notices how much she wrecked them. Slowly, she flexes them and it seems that the pain starts to set in only now. When she looks at him again, he wishes she hadn’t. He’s tempted to say he never saw a Marine look like that but that’s bullshit. The one he saw in the field out of Nasiriyah, the one who lost his unit and just kept wandering around… for a moment she looked just like him. “Yeah, I guess someone should."
He could leave it at that, move past her, have a go at the punching bag himself. Or he could do his job as a Sergeant and show a Lieutenant the way out of a SNAFU she doesn’t know how to get out of herself. He’s just too damn dutiful for his own fucking good. “I just remembered I got a couple things to do at the infirmary. Care to come along, ma’am?”
For a very long moment, she seems to seriously consider it, even on the verge of saying no when she finally nods and says, “Can’t harm, right?”
Ridiculously relieved, he shakes his head no and turns to go, Cadman actually leaving with him. He’s about to start in a quick pace he’s used to from her - this is kind of urgent after all - but quickly adjusts to the slow steps she makes today. Baby steps, he thinks, and nearly winces because it sounds just so damn corny.
It doesn’t matter, he thinks a moment later. What matters is that she’s taking steps forward, however slow they are. It’s a lot better than tearing up her knuckles against a punching bag at least. Things can only get better for her now. He’s kind of glad he was the one showing her the right direction. It means he hasn’t lost his touch. It’s a good feeling.
~*~
TBC in Better Treat Her Right.