Fic: Joint Fire Support Team: Better Treat Her Right (Generation Kill/SGA) (2/6)
Title: Better Treat Her Right
Fandom: Generation Kill/Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Sometimes, Dr. Jennifer Keller doesn't mind a little tactical fire support.
A/N: So. I'm not... sure about this. I asked hanseatic_keks to look it over and she made a valuable point of some of Colbert's trademark dry wit lacking in the chapter even though there were a few points where I could have inserted it. I did look over the chapter and editted a few parts but... I'm not sure if it really worked. (the main thing is that Jennifer Keller is a female civilian and kind of a figure of authority (at least in a formal way), despite everything and honestly... that's what made this so difficult to figure everything out. I'd be very happy about any input whatsoever. Seriously. I mean it.)
( Drowning on Dry Land )
Better Treat Her Right
"She works hard for the money
So hard for it, honey
She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right."
Gloria Summer, "She Works Hard For The Money"
It’s been an uneventful day so far. A few minor injuries or complaints and no missions gone wrong until now and she hopes it stays that way. After Laura dragging Major Lorne into the Gate room having half bled to death, she's glad things have quieted down. It's six months since she took over the infirmary from Carson but some days make her feel like she's back in her first internship, overwhelmed and scared to death. The day Major Lorne nearly died in her OR was one of them.
But they could stabilize him and he's been in the ICU ever since. He didn't wake up yet, mainly due to the fact that they had to put him in an artificial coma. There's a lot of healing technology buried in this city and some of it they could resurrect. It's helping her patients, but it also usually demands for them to be in some form of stasis, artificial coma or other inconvenient condition. She honestly wonders if that is just because they still haven't fully understood Ancient tech or because the Ancients simply forgot to improve their devices in that regard. She tends toward the latter, simply because the Ancients were the Ancients.
So, anyway, at least she can finally get to organize the antibiotics shelf and... "Hey, Jennifer." Darnit.
Trying to look calm and composed and not like the jumpy chicken people think her to be, she turns around to see Laura Cadman standing in the doorway and... one of the Marines that came here a couple of months ago, Recon or whatever they called themselves. A Sergeant something or other… Colbert, yes, that’s him.
She hasn't seen much of that particular soldier because somehow he never really needed the infirmary's attention until now. Quick post-mission and obligatory check-ups, in, out, gone again, that was it for the most part. Compared to the other soldiers on base, he's actually a miracle. So it's a veritable mystery to her why he'd suddenly be standing there with Laura.
It is, however, not a mystery at all why Laura is here. A look at her hands speaks volumes. She frowns. "Laura, what..." The Sergeant standing behind Laura shakes his head in a very small movement, peering at her with serious blue eyes... obviously trying to tell her something. She turns back to Laura with a tight little smile that probably looks as fake as it feels. "Never mind."
Laura, in turn, shrugs with an almost embarrassed self-conscious little half-smile. "I, uh... I think I need some... I had a little... run-in with... um.."
That really isn't like Laura. Most of all, it's not like Laura in front of other soldiers. However, she's not stupid. A civilian, maybe, but not stupid. So she decides to treat this as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. "Let's get that wrapped, huh." A little... relieved, Laura nods and she walks over to the first aid cabinet to gather a few supplies, beckoning Laura to follow her.
Colbert keeps standing in the doorway... as if he wants to make sure... make sure what? That Laura is taken care of? Of course she would be. She's her friend and... and there's probably more to the scrapes than just "I had a run-in with whatever." And she remembers that particular Sergeant being spoken of as a veritable mother hen. Oh fine. She gives the Sergeant a very firm nod and after one of those indecipherable looks he'd been throwing her since Laura and he arrived here, he leaves.
She concentrates on Laura again.
The first thing she does is have a good look at Laura's scraped knuckles. Or trying to make it look like she does that while she does a much more important assessment of Laura's mental state. She’s not stupid and she isn’t blind, either so she was well aware of Laura’s less than ideal reaction to Major Lorne’s predicament. It’s not the first time she reacted to a mission gone down the drain with a few days of scowling and snapping at people. It is, however, the first time ever she did something to herself.
She’d like to believe that the bruised and bloodied knuckles are the result of some duty related accident or other but Laura being in what they call PT clothes, looking like she’d been at it for quite some time was a dead giveaway. That and the fact that Colbert wouldn’t leave until she’d communicated to him that she’d take care of Laura.
She looks at her friend’s face and finds her only looking away. That’s never a good sign. Laura usually doesn’t do looking away. She looks you in the eye, makes sure you know that she’s talking to you. Laura Cadman just doesn’t do retreats. Her doctor’s instinct is screaming at her that she needs to know what exactly is going on with Laura but the part of her that knows Laura as a friend, as a soldier and as a person knows that if she’d start prying now, she’d run against a wall bigger than the Great one in China. She resists sighing. “Okay, I’d like to x-ray this…”
“No. No, that’s… it’s okay. I don’t think there’s anything broken.” That’s not even… Laura’s normal reaction to medical attention.
Oh, okay, it kind of is. But… it also isn’t? It’s the tone, she thinks. It’s not Laura’s usual devil may care attitude, mixed with that weird understatement and modesty in face of injury that all soldiers seem to have to a certain degree. It’s… defeated. Something isn’t right here. In fact, something is tremendously wrong. She decides to play the COM card. “Maybe, but quite frankly, that’s not yours to decide. There could still be hairline fractures and even though you might not believe it, those could definitely harm your… what’s the word?”
“Combat readiness?” Laura helps out and adds, “Quite frankly, I don’t think hairline fractures are going to be my biggest problem in the near future.”
Whatever does she mean by that, she wonders. As far as she knows, Laura did her best and actually saved Major Lorne on that mission. She always thought soldiers get medals for that, not reprimands. Again, she finds herself wondering what exactly happened on that mission. Hopefully, she’ll learn about that when Major Lorne wakes up, if Laura doesn’t have an unexpected fit of tell all before that. And she’s still the… the goddamn Chief of Medicine in Atlantis. “They’re my biggest concern right now so stop whining and get your… behind to the radiology chamber.”
Did she just see a faint smirk on Laura’s face? Genuine amusement, even? “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get my ass over to the radiology chamber.” Phew. So she didn’t lose her sense of humor, as she’d heard Marines and other personnel in the city assuming, most of all Rodney and those two guys from Zoology… anyway. X-ray her hands. Yes.
Not making any more fuss, Laura accompanies her to radiology and while she waits for the radiographer to finish the shots, she gets some more time to watch her friend. There’s something in her posture… that strikes her. She’s… she’s not slumped but she misses the energy that Laura usually radiates and mischievous twinkle in her eyes. Somehow… where Laura exuded aggression and anger in the last couple of days, she only appears weary and even a little exhausted now. As if she tries to hold up a front but is losing the fight against herself. Oh Laura, she thinks.
When the technician is done, he signals her that he sent the shots to her intranet account and she pulls them up on her tablet while Laura comes walking over. She frowns. Mh… okay… no, that looks to be alright. She’s relieved because she’d have hated to have to pull Laura off the off-world roster. Laura would have hated her for that, and even herself even more. “So… what’s up, Doc?”
She rolls her eyes. “You got off lucky, Bugs Bunny.”
Laura actually kind of perks up. “Oh, good, I guess that means you don’t have to…”
What… nuh-uh. Laura will not get away like that, because the damn scrapes need dressing and… she realizes that Laura needs something else here, as well. “Oh no, you don’t.”
“Aw, come on, Jennifer, can’t I just…”
No? “Definitely not. Laura, I have to…” Did she really just try to leave anyway? Good God. “Lieutenant Cadman.” Apparently, Major Lorne and Colonel Sheppard aren’t the only people addressing Laura by her rank works for. She needs to remember that for the future. “You’re going to stay here until I had a look at those bruises and wrapped them up.” Mh. Why is it that Laura is starting to look… desperate? Is that the right word? “That’s final, Laura. Someone needs to have a look at those and I don’t have anything to do, anyway.”
That is not quite true and for a moment it looks as if Laura is going to voice that thought but in the end… she seems to… deflate a little and simply nods so she starts working at the bruises. During cleaning them, she can feel Laura wanting to wince every time she touches them but being the stoic warrior she tries everyone to tell she is, Laura never says anything, not even moves. That’s… disconcerting because usually, Laura loves to joke about doctors obviously being sadists reveling in the pain of their victims.
All during taking care of Laura’s hands she tries to find a way to learn what exactly this is about. She gets that Laura is really upset by what happened to Major Lorne - not for the first time, she wonders if there’s anything else than just a professional relationship between Laura and Major Lorne - more than usual but that she would start harming herself? That’s new.
The Laura she knows wouldn’t do that to herself, would never do anything to hamper her “combat readiness”, anything that made her unfit for duty. Unless… unless this wasn’t intentional harm. She wishes she could have talked to Colbert for a moment, to ask him how he found Laura and what she was doing but she’s pretty good at deducting that herself.
Laura must have been working out, because that’s what Laura does when she’s upset about something: she tries to get right of it with physical exertion. And she knows Laura’s more of a martial arts person than a running person. She knows Laura has a fondness for battering a punching bag… that was a no-brainer. She should have known that way back when Colbert brought Laura here.
Taking a short moment to fit the bandages for Laura’s right hand she takes another look at her. Yeah, the punching bag. She wonders how often Laura visited it in the last couple of days to make her knuckles raw enough that she would draw blood and it starts to dawn on her that this time, Laura isn’t furious about a command decision or one of her men or someone from the science department making a mistake. All her anger is directed at herself and she’s pretty sure it has to do something with the mission. She must be blaming herself for… for the way Major Lorne came back to Atlantis.
Well. That would also explain why she didn’t see Laura here until now. Finishing the last dressing she makes a decision. “So… I’m not going to put you on light duty, but please do me a favor?” Laura eyes her warily. “Don’t try anything Muhammad Ali as long as that isn’t fully healed.”
Finally, there’s something of the old Laura in her. She was never so glad to see the laconic eye rolling as now. “Yeah, yeah. Can I go…”
“I’d like to show you something.” That… came out quieter than she intended to and maybe that’s why Laura seems to realize almost immediately what this is about.
Again, that strange kind of quiet desperation that she’s seen lurking behind Laura’s façade shows. It’s like she desperately wants to get out of here but has no idea where to. “Jennifer, I…”
“Come on. You need to see this.” Maybe Kate would tell her it’s a bad idea. Maybe Kate’s replacement, Dr. Eshkol, would tell her so too, were she here now instead of M5Z-683 for the first Pegasus pangalactic conference on trauma psychology. But she’s got a feeling Laura really needs to see what she’s going to show her.
So she doesn’t except excuses and steers Laura in the direction of the ICU. Currently, Major Lorne is the only patient there and as soon as Laura realizes where they’re going, she becomes tense and tightlipped. She’s pretty sure Laura would also like to turn around immediately but she counted on Laura’s philosophy of never backing down once she decided to go along with something and it’s working.
When they reach Major Lorne’s current room, it very much looks like Laura is ready to balk at the sight of her CO wired to a couple of monitors, even though it looks a lot worse than it actually is. Since two days he’s breathing on his own again and she’s confident that they’ll be able to wake him up in a couple of days and won’t need any new surgeries.
But Laura doesn’t know that. Laura only heard everything about him second hand and a look at her face tells her why she never came here on her own. She’s seen a lot, even in her rather short career as a doctor but she thinks she never saw guilt like that before. Knowing Laura usually tries to avoid anything that makes her look soft in public, she puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes anyway. When Laura looks at her, she tries to give her an encouraging smile. “I think he’d like some company.”
Okay, what she’d really wanted to say was “I think he’d like your company” but judging from how Laura usually reacts when people start making educated guesses about the nature of her relationship with Major Lorne - and, granted, also her relationship with any of the other soldiers - that doesn’t really sound like a good idea. Again, civilian, not stupid.
“I… wouldn’t be so sure about that, Jennifer.” Mh. She’s tempted to ask what exactly happened on that mission, after all but she won’t hear about it as long as Laura doesn’t want to tell her.
So she does the next best thing. “But I am sure about it. Go on. It’s not like he’s gonna bite you, you know.” It makes Laura roll her eyes and make a face.
Then she looks at the Major again and there seems to be a… shift in her stance. Something… as if she… accepted something? Wow, having been COM for six months actually did wonders to her capability to read people. That’s kind of… amazing. “I can’t hurt him by just sitting at his side for a while, right?”
The growing desire to put her arms around her friend and give her a long, tight hug to squeeze out all the guilt and the hurt reaches a new peak after days of watching her taking out her self-anger at anyone who crossed her path. Maybe she’s gonna do that when they’re in less public surroundings. Right now... “No, Laura. Just sit down and maybe talk a little to him. I really think he’ll appreciate that.”
There’s one last resigned and somehow also relieved look from Laura and then she squares her shoulders and walks over the chair that’s been permanently placed next to Major Lorne. She knows she should give the two of them some privacy but something in her makes her stay, just for a little while longer, just to make sure Laura’s gonna be okay. It’s why she watches Laura sit down carefully next to the bed and sitting perched on the edge of the chair a little stiffly for a moment before she tentatively leans back and then curls up as well as you can in an office chair. Well, good to know that she finally settled…
“Any news on the Major, ma’am?” Holy fucking crap. “Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t want to…”
“Scare the crap out of me? Don’t worry, Sergeant, that frequently happens to me.” She can’t help smiling a little self-deprecatingly at Colbert who just somehow managed to materialize next to her and make her actually jump with his quiet question. Feeling the familiar tug of bashfulness under the inscrutable gaze of the Sergeant she always feels in the presence of people much more experienced and self-assured than herself, she tries to get a grip on herself and escapes to her only real area of expertise. “Anyway, uh… Major Lorne’s stable for now, and I think we’ll be able to wake him up in about two or three days, depending on how well he responds to Ancient technology therapy.”
“Good to hear, ma’am.” For some reason… it surprises her how honest Colbert sounds about this. Or maybe it just surprised her that they’re currently having something that could almost be called a conversation.
Or, okay, had a conversation because as suddenly as it began she’s out of topics to talk to him about… until she realizes that he didn’t look away from her because she bored him. It’s just that she seems not to be the only one interested in Laura’s well-being. It makes her smile a little and prompts her to say, “Thanks for bringing her here, Sergeant.”
There’s an awkward moment in which Colbert looks almost… embarrassed? Nah, he doesn’t, she thinks. You were imagining that. So she’s almost relieved when his next move is to give her a small shrug and an almost bored sounding, “Just doing my job, ma'am.”
There it is again. The thing that fascinates her so much about soldiers in general and the Marines in particular. Their quiet “just doing my job” attitude when thanking them for something they didn’t have to do. Even when that involved saving someone’s life. Or hands. She always thought they’d be a bunch of bragging, loudmouth guys and girls and because they’re not she feels like she can’t thank them enough for what they’re doing. “You didn’t have to, so… thanks again.”
Well, that should close the conver… or maybe.. not. All of a sudden, there’s a look on the Sergeant’s face that tells her that he decided he needs to get something else off his chest, after all. “Actually, ma’am, I did have to. Otherwise, this city would probably have been down one Lieutenant able to defend it by making things go boom in a very short time. Personally, I’d rather have that one Lieutenant than not. To be honest, someone should have done this the moment the LT… Lieutenant Cadman didn’t show up here after the Major’s surgery was finished.”
That’s… pretty much spot on. It’s making her feel bad. Or, okay, it’s making her admit that she’d felt pretty bad that she didn’t know how to approach Laura. Laura’s her friend and it’s not like they didn’t go through tough times together before, this being Atlantis and all. It’s just that her job is a very busy one and the mental health department’s got their hands full as well and Colonel Sheppard and Colonel Carter were pretty much busy with the audit the IOA sicced on them… And Laura can be just so damn terrifying at times.
The thing is, none of that is a reason to let a friend down. A friend whose health she’s responsible for. She screwed up, bad enough that a Sergeant who’s trained to kill people instead of fixing them had to do her job. She leans against the door frame, crossing her arms in front of her chest and looking at Laura again... who seems to have fallen asleep. If she wouldn’t feel so god awful right now, she’d probably smile. It doesn’t help that Colbert keeps looking at her with that intense, indecipherable look, either. She shifts uncomfortably. “I know, I... That’s not really our standard performance and…”
“Shit happens, ma’am,” he interrupts her calmly, before she can launch into a full scale blame storm, looking at her as serious as he sounded. As if he knew that things like those happened and that you shouldn’t dwell on them once they did. She wonders what kind of medical care he was used to when he thinks a screw up like that isn’t worth dwelling on.
She’s about to tell him that it shouldn’t happen when he shortly looks at Laura and Lorne again and then gives her a crooked, small smile, adding, “Don’t worry, ma’am. You fixed her hands, after all.”
Yeah, well… kind of. She knows she shouldn’t say things like what she’s going to say now, as head of an entire department of everything but in the quiet hours in the infirmary and most of all when she sees friends suffering because she made a wrong decision, or, even worse, no decision at all, she feels like she doesn’t deserve the honor they bestowed on her when they made her Carson Beckett’s successor. “That doesn’t change anything about the fact that I screwed up, Sergeant.”
He regards her with a thoughtful look, his head very slightly cocked to the side. It feels as if he’s measuring her. Against what or whom she doesn’t know but the feeling of desperately wanting to measure up is unnervingly strong. Just when she’s about to start actual squirming, he says with a hint of the kind of patience you usually show students or interns who just made a mistakes because they just don’t know better yet, “Ma’am… just a suggestion but how about you drop me a hint next time you're worried about one of the Marines or other military personnel?”
She’s not really firm in armed forces personnel informal hierarchies - to be honest, she isn't even all that well versed in the intricacies of their formal hierarchy - but Laura keeps telling her over and over again and with great conviction that “the NCOs are the backbone of the Corps” and she’s starting to realize why.
She knows she should be pissed at him because he obviously just regarded her as an intern, not a full-fledged doctor but it is more important that he just offered her his support in dealing with a part of the Atlantis population that still seems alien to her, despite treating a number of them nearly every day. She also knows he just offered to do something that should be more of Colonel Sheppard’s or Major Lorne’s responsibility but she knows enough about both men’s schedules and other responsibilities that she knows she also has to rely on more informal ways of reaching the military Atlantis inhabitants. She nods, trying to sound grateful, “I will Sergeant. Thank you.”
He tips his forehead in a casual two finger salute and nods, saying, “You’re welcome, ma’am.” The weird thing about this is that he sounded… as if he meant it. Not just as a set phrase, he really wants to do this for her, help her, and his fellow soldiers, of course. Marines. Armed forces personnel. Whatever. She’s never gonna get that right, no matter how often Laura tries to correct her.
And anyway… she wants to answer him, tell him something about how much she really, really appreciates his offer but he just calmly nods his good bye to her and then leaves the ICU in the sure step of someone just having had completed an assignment he’d been concerned with for a prolonged amount of time. Huh.
Oh well. She looks at Laura again, takes a few steps back into the room and yeah… her suspicions are confirmed by the sight of Laura having curled up in the chair, her eyes closed and her head tipped slightly to the left. It’s one of the most inconvenient positions for falling asleep in she ever saw but she knows Laura.
She’s going to be a lot grumpier if she wakes her up now than waking up on her own later, cramped back and neck and all. So she decides the next best thing, that is fetching a blanket. It’s the least she can do for Laura right now. They can still do all the talking stuff later, and she’ll fix more than just Laura’s hand. She owes that to Laura and Sergeant Colbert and somehow even to Major Lorne and she always pays her dues.
~*~
TBC in Break the Door Down.
Fandom: Generation Kill/Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Sometimes, Dr. Jennifer Keller doesn't mind a little tactical fire support.
A/N: So. I'm not... sure about this. I asked hanseatic_keks to look it over and she made a valuable point of some of Colbert's trademark dry wit lacking in the chapter even though there were a few points where I could have inserted it. I did look over the chapter and editted a few parts but... I'm not sure if it really worked. (the main thing is that Jennifer Keller is a female civilian and kind of a figure of authority (at least in a formal way), despite everything and honestly... that's what made this so difficult to figure everything out. I'd be very happy about any input whatsoever. Seriously. I mean it.)
( Drowning on Dry Land )
Better Treat Her Right
"She works hard for the money
So hard for it, honey
She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right."
Gloria Summer, "She Works Hard For The Money"
It’s been an uneventful day so far. A few minor injuries or complaints and no missions gone wrong until now and she hopes it stays that way. After Laura dragging Major Lorne into the Gate room having half bled to death, she's glad things have quieted down. It's six months since she took over the infirmary from Carson but some days make her feel like she's back in her first internship, overwhelmed and scared to death. The day Major Lorne nearly died in her OR was one of them.
But they could stabilize him and he's been in the ICU ever since. He didn't wake up yet, mainly due to the fact that they had to put him in an artificial coma. There's a lot of healing technology buried in this city and some of it they could resurrect. It's helping her patients, but it also usually demands for them to be in some form of stasis, artificial coma or other inconvenient condition. She honestly wonders if that is just because they still haven't fully understood Ancient tech or because the Ancients simply forgot to improve their devices in that regard. She tends toward the latter, simply because the Ancients were the Ancients.
So, anyway, at least she can finally get to organize the antibiotics shelf and... "Hey, Jennifer." Darnit.
Trying to look calm and composed and not like the jumpy chicken people think her to be, she turns around to see Laura Cadman standing in the doorway and... one of the Marines that came here a couple of months ago, Recon or whatever they called themselves. A Sergeant something or other… Colbert, yes, that’s him.
She hasn't seen much of that particular soldier because somehow he never really needed the infirmary's attention until now. Quick post-mission and obligatory check-ups, in, out, gone again, that was it for the most part. Compared to the other soldiers on base, he's actually a miracle. So it's a veritable mystery to her why he'd suddenly be standing there with Laura.
It is, however, not a mystery at all why Laura is here. A look at her hands speaks volumes. She frowns. "Laura, what..." The Sergeant standing behind Laura shakes his head in a very small movement, peering at her with serious blue eyes... obviously trying to tell her something. She turns back to Laura with a tight little smile that probably looks as fake as it feels. "Never mind."
Laura, in turn, shrugs with an almost embarrassed self-conscious little half-smile. "I, uh... I think I need some... I had a little... run-in with... um.."
That really isn't like Laura. Most of all, it's not like Laura in front of other soldiers. However, she's not stupid. A civilian, maybe, but not stupid. So she decides to treat this as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. "Let's get that wrapped, huh." A little... relieved, Laura nods and she walks over to the first aid cabinet to gather a few supplies, beckoning Laura to follow her.
Colbert keeps standing in the doorway... as if he wants to make sure... make sure what? That Laura is taken care of? Of course she would be. She's her friend and... and there's probably more to the scrapes than just "I had a run-in with whatever." And she remembers that particular Sergeant being spoken of as a veritable mother hen. Oh fine. She gives the Sergeant a very firm nod and after one of those indecipherable looks he'd been throwing her since Laura and he arrived here, he leaves.
She concentrates on Laura again.
The first thing she does is have a good look at Laura's scraped knuckles. Or trying to make it look like she does that while she does a much more important assessment of Laura's mental state. She’s not stupid and she isn’t blind, either so she was well aware of Laura’s less than ideal reaction to Major Lorne’s predicament. It’s not the first time she reacted to a mission gone down the drain with a few days of scowling and snapping at people. It is, however, the first time ever she did something to herself.
She’d like to believe that the bruised and bloodied knuckles are the result of some duty related accident or other but Laura being in what they call PT clothes, looking like she’d been at it for quite some time was a dead giveaway. That and the fact that Colbert wouldn’t leave until she’d communicated to him that she’d take care of Laura.
She looks at her friend’s face and finds her only looking away. That’s never a good sign. Laura usually doesn’t do looking away. She looks you in the eye, makes sure you know that she’s talking to you. Laura Cadman just doesn’t do retreats. Her doctor’s instinct is screaming at her that she needs to know what exactly is going on with Laura but the part of her that knows Laura as a friend, as a soldier and as a person knows that if she’d start prying now, she’d run against a wall bigger than the Great one in China. She resists sighing. “Okay, I’d like to x-ray this…”
“No. No, that’s… it’s okay. I don’t think there’s anything broken.” That’s not even… Laura’s normal reaction to medical attention.
Oh, okay, it kind of is. But… it also isn’t? It’s the tone, she thinks. It’s not Laura’s usual devil may care attitude, mixed with that weird understatement and modesty in face of injury that all soldiers seem to have to a certain degree. It’s… defeated. Something isn’t right here. In fact, something is tremendously wrong. She decides to play the COM card. “Maybe, but quite frankly, that’s not yours to decide. There could still be hairline fractures and even though you might not believe it, those could definitely harm your… what’s the word?”
“Combat readiness?” Laura helps out and adds, “Quite frankly, I don’t think hairline fractures are going to be my biggest problem in the near future.”
Whatever does she mean by that, she wonders. As far as she knows, Laura did her best and actually saved Major Lorne on that mission. She always thought soldiers get medals for that, not reprimands. Again, she finds herself wondering what exactly happened on that mission. Hopefully, she’ll learn about that when Major Lorne wakes up, if Laura doesn’t have an unexpected fit of tell all before that. And she’s still the… the goddamn Chief of Medicine in Atlantis. “They’re my biggest concern right now so stop whining and get your… behind to the radiology chamber.”
Did she just see a faint smirk on Laura’s face? Genuine amusement, even? “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get my ass over to the radiology chamber.” Phew. So she didn’t lose her sense of humor, as she’d heard Marines and other personnel in the city assuming, most of all Rodney and those two guys from Zoology… anyway. X-ray her hands. Yes.
Not making any more fuss, Laura accompanies her to radiology and while she waits for the radiographer to finish the shots, she gets some more time to watch her friend. There’s something in her posture… that strikes her. She’s… she’s not slumped but she misses the energy that Laura usually radiates and mischievous twinkle in her eyes. Somehow… where Laura exuded aggression and anger in the last couple of days, she only appears weary and even a little exhausted now. As if she tries to hold up a front but is losing the fight against herself. Oh Laura, she thinks.
When the technician is done, he signals her that he sent the shots to her intranet account and she pulls them up on her tablet while Laura comes walking over. She frowns. Mh… okay… no, that looks to be alright. She’s relieved because she’d have hated to have to pull Laura off the off-world roster. Laura would have hated her for that, and even herself even more. “So… what’s up, Doc?”
She rolls her eyes. “You got off lucky, Bugs Bunny.”
Laura actually kind of perks up. “Oh, good, I guess that means you don’t have to…”
What… nuh-uh. Laura will not get away like that, because the damn scrapes need dressing and… she realizes that Laura needs something else here, as well. “Oh no, you don’t.”
“Aw, come on, Jennifer, can’t I just…”
No? “Definitely not. Laura, I have to…” Did she really just try to leave anyway? Good God. “Lieutenant Cadman.” Apparently, Major Lorne and Colonel Sheppard aren’t the only people addressing Laura by her rank works for. She needs to remember that for the future. “You’re going to stay here until I had a look at those bruises and wrapped them up.” Mh. Why is it that Laura is starting to look… desperate? Is that the right word? “That’s final, Laura. Someone needs to have a look at those and I don’t have anything to do, anyway.”
That is not quite true and for a moment it looks as if Laura is going to voice that thought but in the end… she seems to… deflate a little and simply nods so she starts working at the bruises. During cleaning them, she can feel Laura wanting to wince every time she touches them but being the stoic warrior she tries everyone to tell she is, Laura never says anything, not even moves. That’s… disconcerting because usually, Laura loves to joke about doctors obviously being sadists reveling in the pain of their victims.
All during taking care of Laura’s hands she tries to find a way to learn what exactly this is about. She gets that Laura is really upset by what happened to Major Lorne - not for the first time, she wonders if there’s anything else than just a professional relationship between Laura and Major Lorne - more than usual but that she would start harming herself? That’s new.
The Laura she knows wouldn’t do that to herself, would never do anything to hamper her “combat readiness”, anything that made her unfit for duty. Unless… unless this wasn’t intentional harm. She wishes she could have talked to Colbert for a moment, to ask him how he found Laura and what she was doing but she’s pretty good at deducting that herself.
Laura must have been working out, because that’s what Laura does when she’s upset about something: she tries to get right of it with physical exertion. And she knows Laura’s more of a martial arts person than a running person. She knows Laura has a fondness for battering a punching bag… that was a no-brainer. She should have known that way back when Colbert brought Laura here.
Taking a short moment to fit the bandages for Laura’s right hand she takes another look at her. Yeah, the punching bag. She wonders how often Laura visited it in the last couple of days to make her knuckles raw enough that she would draw blood and it starts to dawn on her that this time, Laura isn’t furious about a command decision or one of her men or someone from the science department making a mistake. All her anger is directed at herself and she’s pretty sure it has to do something with the mission. She must be blaming herself for… for the way Major Lorne came back to Atlantis.
Well. That would also explain why she didn’t see Laura here until now. Finishing the last dressing she makes a decision. “So… I’m not going to put you on light duty, but please do me a favor?” Laura eyes her warily. “Don’t try anything Muhammad Ali as long as that isn’t fully healed.”
Finally, there’s something of the old Laura in her. She was never so glad to see the laconic eye rolling as now. “Yeah, yeah. Can I go…”
“I’d like to show you something.” That… came out quieter than she intended to and maybe that’s why Laura seems to realize almost immediately what this is about.
Again, that strange kind of quiet desperation that she’s seen lurking behind Laura’s façade shows. It’s like she desperately wants to get out of here but has no idea where to. “Jennifer, I…”
“Come on. You need to see this.” Maybe Kate would tell her it’s a bad idea. Maybe Kate’s replacement, Dr. Eshkol, would tell her so too, were she here now instead of M5Z-683 for the first Pegasus pangalactic conference on trauma psychology. But she’s got a feeling Laura really needs to see what she’s going to show her.
So she doesn’t except excuses and steers Laura in the direction of the ICU. Currently, Major Lorne is the only patient there and as soon as Laura realizes where they’re going, she becomes tense and tightlipped. She’s pretty sure Laura would also like to turn around immediately but she counted on Laura’s philosophy of never backing down once she decided to go along with something and it’s working.
When they reach Major Lorne’s current room, it very much looks like Laura is ready to balk at the sight of her CO wired to a couple of monitors, even though it looks a lot worse than it actually is. Since two days he’s breathing on his own again and she’s confident that they’ll be able to wake him up in a couple of days and won’t need any new surgeries.
But Laura doesn’t know that. Laura only heard everything about him second hand and a look at her face tells her why she never came here on her own. She’s seen a lot, even in her rather short career as a doctor but she thinks she never saw guilt like that before. Knowing Laura usually tries to avoid anything that makes her look soft in public, she puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes anyway. When Laura looks at her, she tries to give her an encouraging smile. “I think he’d like some company.”
Okay, what she’d really wanted to say was “I think he’d like your company” but judging from how Laura usually reacts when people start making educated guesses about the nature of her relationship with Major Lorne - and, granted, also her relationship with any of the other soldiers - that doesn’t really sound like a good idea. Again, civilian, not stupid.
“I… wouldn’t be so sure about that, Jennifer.” Mh. She’s tempted to ask what exactly happened on that mission, after all but she won’t hear about it as long as Laura doesn’t want to tell her.
So she does the next best thing. “But I am sure about it. Go on. It’s not like he’s gonna bite you, you know.” It makes Laura roll her eyes and make a face.
Then she looks at the Major again and there seems to be a… shift in her stance. Something… as if she… accepted something? Wow, having been COM for six months actually did wonders to her capability to read people. That’s kind of… amazing. “I can’t hurt him by just sitting at his side for a while, right?”
The growing desire to put her arms around her friend and give her a long, tight hug to squeeze out all the guilt and the hurt reaches a new peak after days of watching her taking out her self-anger at anyone who crossed her path. Maybe she’s gonna do that when they’re in less public surroundings. Right now... “No, Laura. Just sit down and maybe talk a little to him. I really think he’ll appreciate that.”
There’s one last resigned and somehow also relieved look from Laura and then she squares her shoulders and walks over the chair that’s been permanently placed next to Major Lorne. She knows she should give the two of them some privacy but something in her makes her stay, just for a little while longer, just to make sure Laura’s gonna be okay. It’s why she watches Laura sit down carefully next to the bed and sitting perched on the edge of the chair a little stiffly for a moment before she tentatively leans back and then curls up as well as you can in an office chair. Well, good to know that she finally settled…
“Any news on the Major, ma’am?” Holy fucking crap. “Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t want to…”
“Scare the crap out of me? Don’t worry, Sergeant, that frequently happens to me.” She can’t help smiling a little self-deprecatingly at Colbert who just somehow managed to materialize next to her and make her actually jump with his quiet question. Feeling the familiar tug of bashfulness under the inscrutable gaze of the Sergeant she always feels in the presence of people much more experienced and self-assured than herself, she tries to get a grip on herself and escapes to her only real area of expertise. “Anyway, uh… Major Lorne’s stable for now, and I think we’ll be able to wake him up in about two or three days, depending on how well he responds to Ancient technology therapy.”
“Good to hear, ma’am.” For some reason… it surprises her how honest Colbert sounds about this. Or maybe it just surprised her that they’re currently having something that could almost be called a conversation.
Or, okay, had a conversation because as suddenly as it began she’s out of topics to talk to him about… until she realizes that he didn’t look away from her because she bored him. It’s just that she seems not to be the only one interested in Laura’s well-being. It makes her smile a little and prompts her to say, “Thanks for bringing her here, Sergeant.”
There’s an awkward moment in which Colbert looks almost… embarrassed? Nah, he doesn’t, she thinks. You were imagining that. So she’s almost relieved when his next move is to give her a small shrug and an almost bored sounding, “Just doing my job, ma'am.”
There it is again. The thing that fascinates her so much about soldiers in general and the Marines in particular. Their quiet “just doing my job” attitude when thanking them for something they didn’t have to do. Even when that involved saving someone’s life. Or hands. She always thought they’d be a bunch of bragging, loudmouth guys and girls and because they’re not she feels like she can’t thank them enough for what they’re doing. “You didn’t have to, so… thanks again.”
Well, that should close the conver… or maybe.. not. All of a sudden, there’s a look on the Sergeant’s face that tells her that he decided he needs to get something else off his chest, after all. “Actually, ma’am, I did have to. Otherwise, this city would probably have been down one Lieutenant able to defend it by making things go boom in a very short time. Personally, I’d rather have that one Lieutenant than not. To be honest, someone should have done this the moment the LT… Lieutenant Cadman didn’t show up here after the Major’s surgery was finished.”
That’s… pretty much spot on. It’s making her feel bad. Or, okay, it’s making her admit that she’d felt pretty bad that she didn’t know how to approach Laura. Laura’s her friend and it’s not like they didn’t go through tough times together before, this being Atlantis and all. It’s just that her job is a very busy one and the mental health department’s got their hands full as well and Colonel Sheppard and Colonel Carter were pretty much busy with the audit the IOA sicced on them… And Laura can be just so damn terrifying at times.
The thing is, none of that is a reason to let a friend down. A friend whose health she’s responsible for. She screwed up, bad enough that a Sergeant who’s trained to kill people instead of fixing them had to do her job. She leans against the door frame, crossing her arms in front of her chest and looking at Laura again... who seems to have fallen asleep. If she wouldn’t feel so god awful right now, she’d probably smile. It doesn’t help that Colbert keeps looking at her with that intense, indecipherable look, either. She shifts uncomfortably. “I know, I... That’s not really our standard performance and…”
“Shit happens, ma’am,” he interrupts her calmly, before she can launch into a full scale blame storm, looking at her as serious as he sounded. As if he knew that things like those happened and that you shouldn’t dwell on them once they did. She wonders what kind of medical care he was used to when he thinks a screw up like that isn’t worth dwelling on.
She’s about to tell him that it shouldn’t happen when he shortly looks at Laura and Lorne again and then gives her a crooked, small smile, adding, “Don’t worry, ma’am. You fixed her hands, after all.”
Yeah, well… kind of. She knows she shouldn’t say things like what she’s going to say now, as head of an entire department of everything but in the quiet hours in the infirmary and most of all when she sees friends suffering because she made a wrong decision, or, even worse, no decision at all, she feels like she doesn’t deserve the honor they bestowed on her when they made her Carson Beckett’s successor. “That doesn’t change anything about the fact that I screwed up, Sergeant.”
He regards her with a thoughtful look, his head very slightly cocked to the side. It feels as if he’s measuring her. Against what or whom she doesn’t know but the feeling of desperately wanting to measure up is unnervingly strong. Just when she’s about to start actual squirming, he says with a hint of the kind of patience you usually show students or interns who just made a mistakes because they just don’t know better yet, “Ma’am… just a suggestion but how about you drop me a hint next time you're worried about one of the Marines or other military personnel?”
She’s not really firm in armed forces personnel informal hierarchies - to be honest, she isn't even all that well versed in the intricacies of their formal hierarchy - but Laura keeps telling her over and over again and with great conviction that “the NCOs are the backbone of the Corps” and she’s starting to realize why.
She knows she should be pissed at him because he obviously just regarded her as an intern, not a full-fledged doctor but it is more important that he just offered her his support in dealing with a part of the Atlantis population that still seems alien to her, despite treating a number of them nearly every day. She also knows he just offered to do something that should be more of Colonel Sheppard’s or Major Lorne’s responsibility but she knows enough about both men’s schedules and other responsibilities that she knows she also has to rely on more informal ways of reaching the military Atlantis inhabitants. She nods, trying to sound grateful, “I will Sergeant. Thank you.”
He tips his forehead in a casual two finger salute and nods, saying, “You’re welcome, ma’am.” The weird thing about this is that he sounded… as if he meant it. Not just as a set phrase, he really wants to do this for her, help her, and his fellow soldiers, of course. Marines. Armed forces personnel. Whatever. She’s never gonna get that right, no matter how often Laura tries to correct her.
And anyway… she wants to answer him, tell him something about how much she really, really appreciates his offer but he just calmly nods his good bye to her and then leaves the ICU in the sure step of someone just having had completed an assignment he’d been concerned with for a prolonged amount of time. Huh.
Oh well. She looks at Laura again, takes a few steps back into the room and yeah… her suspicions are confirmed by the sight of Laura having curled up in the chair, her eyes closed and her head tipped slightly to the left. It’s one of the most inconvenient positions for falling asleep in she ever saw but she knows Laura.
She’s going to be a lot grumpier if she wakes her up now than waking up on her own later, cramped back and neck and all. So she decides the next best thing, that is fetching a blanket. It’s the least she can do for Laura right now. They can still do all the talking stuff later, and she’ll fix more than just Laura’s hand. She owes that to Laura and Sergeant Colbert and somehow even to Major Lorne and she always pays her dues.
~*~
TBC in Break the Door Down.