Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #05 Kiss on the shoulder - desire
Title: Kiss Away the Pain
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It was supposed a simple recon mission to an abandoned ship for Laura Cadman and Evan Lorne, and then it went FUBAR. And not in a good way.
A/N: Okay, this is all ancient_leah's fault since she persuaded me to take part in this project. Just thought I'd mention that.
Also, it wasn't exactly planned to start off the project with something as this but apparently, I was in a really bad drama queen mood because this kind of wrote itself, after pingulotta bestowed her extensive medical knowledge on me. Thanks so much for that :D And so much thanks to ancient_leah for bouncing ideas. Every story needs its first step and for this one, I had exceptionally helpers :)
You can see the rest of the table here.
Kiss Away the Pain
“I can be your hero, baby.
I can kiss away the pain.
I would stand by you forever
You can take my breath away."
Enrique Iglesias, “Hero”
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
It never is, sure, but this was never supposed to end in blood and pain. A simple recon mission to a clearly abandoned ship, to see if there was anything to get from that ship and then it turned into a goddamn suicide mission.
She’s still not quite sure what happened but suddenly there was a boom and a lurching and a couple smaller booms and suddenly she was alone with Major Lorne. An unconscious Major Lorne. He must have hit his head when one of the smaller explosions had rocked the ship and they’d been cut off from both the bridge and the hatch they came through.
She remembers being hit in the side, too but apart from having the wind knocked out of her once and then a bit of queasiness afterwards she’s fine. And all she can do now is sit next to Major Lorne, take care that he doesn’t suddenly throw up and choke on his vomit and wait. Laura Cadman was never good with waiting.
It’s not that she’s freaking out - because Lieutenant Laura Cadman does not freak out - but she’s starting to get… restless. Her wrist chrono broke some at some point between the fourth and fifth time she bumped against a wall during an explosion and she can only guess for how long she’s been sitting here, hearing the ship around her creak and hiss and if she’s not mistaken, they’re trundling through space, with no way whatsoever to contact Atlantis. She estimates them stuck here for about thirty minutes.
Fuck, she thinks, if at least they’d get to a radio or to the bridge to stop the trundling or at least had a way of knowing how much oxygen they still have left. Or if fucking Major Lorne would just fucking wake up because seeing him lying there all still - she tells herself the only reason she’s leaning towards him and putting a hand under his nose now and then is that it’s part of first aid training to check for signs of breathing - is starting to make her feel… desperate.
Okay, maybe not desperate but if she could at least get moving, she’d feel a lot better. She’d be able to ignore the dull pain in her left side because she’d have something to do, something to occupy her, something to make her believe Atlantis is just an FTL jump away.
And she’d stop being worried sick about the guy who’s her superior like he was something entirely else. It’s not like there’s anything between them and it’s not like she’d actually want that but honestly, if he’d just wake up and order her around or at least try to create some plan with her, she could go back to convincingly tell herself he’s a just a superior.
God, that really… “Cadman?”
Oh. Oh, huh…
“Cadman… you alright?”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
She takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the pain that just got a little more intense. Just a bruise, she thinks. You’re not going to trouble him over something as insignificant as that. She rolls her head to the side, angling for a deadpan look. “I didn’t get a bump to the head, sir.”
His reaction is shaking and sounding like he’s coughing… oh, wait, he’s laughing. That’s… a good thing, right? “I can’t believe you… holy shit.” What… In a moment, she scooted over so that she’s sitting next to him when he’s clutching his head. “Holy shit mother of all headaches…” And just like that he leans away from her, retching his heart out. Amazingly fast thinking on his part, she’s got to give him that.
Not that it helped make her cease worrying, though. Headache, vomiting… definitely a concussion. “Sir, are you…”
“Fine, yes. Pretty sure this is a concussion. Not even really bad one, I think.” Oh since when did you become a doctor, she nearly asks but he seems to have read her thoughts anyway. “I can still see straight, no double images and I know exactly what happened before I blacked out, despite the headache. Trust me on this, Lieutenant.”
She doesn’t, which has nothing to do with her not accepting his authority and everything with the very bad feeling that suddenly starts to pool in her stomach. Something about this, she thinks, is going to go horribly wrong. Which is kind of ironic since until now she’d thought it couldn’t get much worse than being stuck on a ship out of control with only her concussed CO as company.
“Lieutenant?” She looks back at him. “Think you’re up for trying to find a way out of this debris?”
“Sure, sir,” she says and gets up carefully. She checked herself for any outward injuries earlier but mindful of Carson’s warning that you couldn’t trust your body until you didn’t try it out in every position you needed to complete the mission.
Okay, so he didn’t say it exactly like… argh. “Lieutenant?” Shit, the stupid bruise is suddenly giving her some real trouble, making her bend forward and brace a hand on the wall next to her. “Cadman, are you okay?”
For a guy with a concussion, Lorne’s startlingly fast on his feet all of a sudden. “I’m… it’s just…” God, that hurts. Enough that she doesn’t even fully realize for a moment that Lorne caught her in his arms, awkwardly embracing her to keep her upright.
“Where does it hurt, Lieutenant?” Everywhere? is the first thing she wants to answer but the pain is still taking away the breath she’d need for speaking, so she simply leans against him, pressing her face into his shoulder, her eyes squeezed shut and her breathing labored until she can locate the source of the pain.
“Left…” she takes another breath, not quite able to believe how hard it suddenly seems, “left side. Just a… bruise.”
“Don’t think so, Lieutenant.” Only marginally she realizes that he’s gently lowering her on the floor again, her back resting against the wall. When she hears him mumble “Sorry, Lieutenant.” she’s confused what exactly he’s sorry for but then she feels him opening her tac vest and she has to bite her tongueso that she doesn’t scream when he makes a particularly jarring move against her side. Then he very, very gently pushes up her uniform shirt. All she hears is a nearly swallowed gasp.
At that, she opens her eyes, wondering why her lids feel so heavy all of a sudden. What she sees in his face… “That bad, huh?”
In a corner of her mind that’s still strangely untouched by all that pain and queasiness, she wonders if he’s ever been as open as book as right now. Despite the haze of hurt that’s starting to overtake her thinking process, she can see clearly that he’s at war with himself, until he finally settles with, “I don’t think that’s just a bruise, Laura.”
She blinks. He never called her Laura before. They’ve been on a lot of missions together, been serving in Atlantis for more than three years, shared a lot of gate control room shifts, saw each other at nearly every rec event during all those years… and he never called her Laura before. For some reason, that’s the only thing really making it into her brain.
Until her mind latches unto that other thing he mentioned. She tries to smile. “Looks worse than it feels.”
“Laura…” He did it again. She hazily wonders why that is. “I’ll have to…”
“Oh God.”
“I’m sorry, really, I…” Even with all the pain his slight touch to her left side caused, she’s still somehow able to detect the somewhat panicky note in his voice. She thinks he sounds as if he’d been hurt. “I’m not… Carson but I did listen to his anatomy lessons and that… that doesn’t look good. If I’d had to hazard a guess… I think you might have hurt your spleen.”
Huh? Since when did he become… oh right, anatomy lessons for off-world qualified personnel. Yeah, she remembers those, too. “Evan…”
Shit.
But it just slipped out and… “What is it?”
“I don’t… feel so good.” She really doesn’t. Until a few seconds ago, it had just been the pain but now there’s also dizziness and sweat and she’s starting to feel cold, so cold… so…
Something strange happens. Had he been professional until now - except that thing with her first name - there’s now some strange look in his face, his eyes, something urgent and shocked that’s not exactly helping to make her feel better. She thinks she never saw that kind of look in his face before. This just can’t be good.
“No.” Huh? Just that one single word and why is he suddenly… hugging… why… “You are not going to die today, Laura.” Well, no, she hadn’t planned on this exactly and… “Not before I… before we…” She feels him embracing her, hugging her close to him and in a way it’s a good thing that she can’t feel more pain than she already does because he’s embracing her really tight and it’s not like she doesn’t give her best to do the same to him. “Not today, Laura.”
She hears him whispering close to her ear and confusing grips her. Confusion at his tone and the conviction and all that will in his voice and she tries to grip him harder, presses her lips to his shoulder, tries to tell him that she’s got that deep, deep desire to do her best, that she will not disappoint him, not before she hasn’t found out what he means with “Before I…” and…
“Fuck, you’re as white as a sheet and… there’s not even a real pulse…” She wonders at that. She’s still alive and she tries to tell him so but he’s not listening anymore, he’s moving her again and after a few painful, labored minutes, she can see the ceiling above her, spinning. “Listen to me, Laura, don’t fall asleep. There’ll be help soon because we’re past our check-in time…”
Help? She’s not so sure now if that will be of any use. She can hear Carson in her head, telling them what happens once someone with internal bleeding goes into shock. There’s dizziness and nausea and tiredness, so, so much tiredness… “Do not fall asleep on me, Lieutenant, that’s an order.”
She tries to smile at him, tries to say something but somehow, her lips and tongue won’t obey her anymore. There’s his face above hers now, starting to blur but she can see his pain and hurt and still hear him, why can she still hear him say, “Hold on, just a little while longer. I just… don’t go, Laura. Don’t go. They’ll be here, any minute now…”
Tired. She’s so, so tired and she wants to sleep, just sleep and the black is creeping into her vision, just as she hears him say, “Colonel Sheppard? Sir? Did you bring… Lieutenant Cadman… shock… slipping into…”
And everything fades and fades and fades away…
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It was supposed a simple recon mission to an abandoned ship for Laura Cadman and Evan Lorne, and then it went FUBAR. And not in a good way.
A/N: Okay, this is all ancient_leah's fault since she persuaded me to take part in this project. Just thought I'd mention that.
Also, it wasn't exactly planned to start off the project with something as this but apparently, I was in a really bad drama queen mood because this kind of wrote itself, after pingulotta bestowed her extensive medical knowledge on me. Thanks so much for that :D And so much thanks to ancient_leah for bouncing ideas. Every story needs its first step and for this one, I had exceptionally helpers :)
You can see the rest of the table here.
Kiss Away the Pain
“I can be your hero, baby.
I can kiss away the pain.
I would stand by you forever
You can take my breath away."
Enrique Iglesias, “Hero”
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
It never is, sure, but this was never supposed to end in blood and pain. A simple recon mission to a clearly abandoned ship, to see if there was anything to get from that ship and then it turned into a goddamn suicide mission.
She’s still not quite sure what happened but suddenly there was a boom and a lurching and a couple smaller booms and suddenly she was alone with Major Lorne. An unconscious Major Lorne. He must have hit his head when one of the smaller explosions had rocked the ship and they’d been cut off from both the bridge and the hatch they came through.
She remembers being hit in the side, too but apart from having the wind knocked out of her once and then a bit of queasiness afterwards she’s fine. And all she can do now is sit next to Major Lorne, take care that he doesn’t suddenly throw up and choke on his vomit and wait. Laura Cadman was never good with waiting.
It’s not that she’s freaking out - because Lieutenant Laura Cadman does not freak out - but she’s starting to get… restless. Her wrist chrono broke some at some point between the fourth and fifth time she bumped against a wall during an explosion and she can only guess for how long she’s been sitting here, hearing the ship around her creak and hiss and if she’s not mistaken, they’re trundling through space, with no way whatsoever to contact Atlantis. She estimates them stuck here for about thirty minutes.
Fuck, she thinks, if at least they’d get to a radio or to the bridge to stop the trundling or at least had a way of knowing how much oxygen they still have left. Or if fucking Major Lorne would just fucking wake up because seeing him lying there all still - she tells herself the only reason she’s leaning towards him and putting a hand under his nose now and then is that it’s part of first aid training to check for signs of breathing - is starting to make her feel… desperate.
Okay, maybe not desperate but if she could at least get moving, she’d feel a lot better. She’d be able to ignore the dull pain in her left side because she’d have something to do, something to occupy her, something to make her believe Atlantis is just an FTL jump away.
And she’d stop being worried sick about the guy who’s her superior like he was something entirely else. It’s not like there’s anything between them and it’s not like she’d actually want that but honestly, if he’d just wake up and order her around or at least try to create some plan with her, she could go back to convincingly tell herself he’s a just a superior.
God, that really… “Cadman?”
Oh. Oh, huh…
“Cadman… you alright?”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
She takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the pain that just got a little more intense. Just a bruise, she thinks. You’re not going to trouble him over something as insignificant as that. She rolls her head to the side, angling for a deadpan look. “I didn’t get a bump to the head, sir.”
His reaction is shaking and sounding like he’s coughing… oh, wait, he’s laughing. That’s… a good thing, right? “I can’t believe you… holy shit.” What… In a moment, she scooted over so that she’s sitting next to him when he’s clutching his head. “Holy shit mother of all headaches…” And just like that he leans away from her, retching his heart out. Amazingly fast thinking on his part, she’s got to give him that.
Not that it helped make her cease worrying, though. Headache, vomiting… definitely a concussion. “Sir, are you…”
“Fine, yes. Pretty sure this is a concussion. Not even really bad one, I think.” Oh since when did you become a doctor, she nearly asks but he seems to have read her thoughts anyway. “I can still see straight, no double images and I know exactly what happened before I blacked out, despite the headache. Trust me on this, Lieutenant.”
She doesn’t, which has nothing to do with her not accepting his authority and everything with the very bad feeling that suddenly starts to pool in her stomach. Something about this, she thinks, is going to go horribly wrong. Which is kind of ironic since until now she’d thought it couldn’t get much worse than being stuck on a ship out of control with only her concussed CO as company.
“Lieutenant?” She looks back at him. “Think you’re up for trying to find a way out of this debris?”
“Sure, sir,” she says and gets up carefully. She checked herself for any outward injuries earlier but mindful of Carson’s warning that you couldn’t trust your body until you didn’t try it out in every position you needed to complete the mission.
Okay, so he didn’t say it exactly like… argh. “Lieutenant?” Shit, the stupid bruise is suddenly giving her some real trouble, making her bend forward and brace a hand on the wall next to her. “Cadman, are you okay?”
For a guy with a concussion, Lorne’s startlingly fast on his feet all of a sudden. “I’m… it’s just…” God, that hurts. Enough that she doesn’t even fully realize for a moment that Lorne caught her in his arms, awkwardly embracing her to keep her upright.
“Where does it hurt, Lieutenant?” Everywhere? is the first thing she wants to answer but the pain is still taking away the breath she’d need for speaking, so she simply leans against him, pressing her face into his shoulder, her eyes squeezed shut and her breathing labored until she can locate the source of the pain.
“Left…” she takes another breath, not quite able to believe how hard it suddenly seems, “left side. Just a… bruise.”
“Don’t think so, Lieutenant.” Only marginally she realizes that he’s gently lowering her on the floor again, her back resting against the wall. When she hears him mumble “Sorry, Lieutenant.” she’s confused what exactly he’s sorry for but then she feels him opening her tac vest and she has to bite her tongueso that she doesn’t scream when he makes a particularly jarring move against her side. Then he very, very gently pushes up her uniform shirt. All she hears is a nearly swallowed gasp.
At that, she opens her eyes, wondering why her lids feel so heavy all of a sudden. What she sees in his face… “That bad, huh?”
In a corner of her mind that’s still strangely untouched by all that pain and queasiness, she wonders if he’s ever been as open as book as right now. Despite the haze of hurt that’s starting to overtake her thinking process, she can see clearly that he’s at war with himself, until he finally settles with, “I don’t think that’s just a bruise, Laura.”
She blinks. He never called her Laura before. They’ve been on a lot of missions together, been serving in Atlantis for more than three years, shared a lot of gate control room shifts, saw each other at nearly every rec event during all those years… and he never called her Laura before. For some reason, that’s the only thing really making it into her brain.
Until her mind latches unto that other thing he mentioned. She tries to smile. “Looks worse than it feels.”
“Laura…” He did it again. She hazily wonders why that is. “I’ll have to…”
“Oh God.”
“I’m sorry, really, I…” Even with all the pain his slight touch to her left side caused, she’s still somehow able to detect the somewhat panicky note in his voice. She thinks he sounds as if he’d been hurt. “I’m not… Carson but I did listen to his anatomy lessons and that… that doesn’t look good. If I’d had to hazard a guess… I think you might have hurt your spleen.”
Huh? Since when did he become… oh right, anatomy lessons for off-world qualified personnel. Yeah, she remembers those, too. “Evan…”
Shit.
But it just slipped out and… “What is it?”
“I don’t… feel so good.” She really doesn’t. Until a few seconds ago, it had just been the pain but now there’s also dizziness and sweat and she’s starting to feel cold, so cold… so…
Something strange happens. Had he been professional until now - except that thing with her first name - there’s now some strange look in his face, his eyes, something urgent and shocked that’s not exactly helping to make her feel better. She thinks she never saw that kind of look in his face before. This just can’t be good.
“No.” Huh? Just that one single word and why is he suddenly… hugging… why… “You are not going to die today, Laura.” Well, no, she hadn’t planned on this exactly and… “Not before I… before we…” She feels him embracing her, hugging her close to him and in a way it’s a good thing that she can’t feel more pain than she already does because he’s embracing her really tight and it’s not like she doesn’t give her best to do the same to him. “Not today, Laura.”
She hears him whispering close to her ear and confusing grips her. Confusion at his tone and the conviction and all that will in his voice and she tries to grip him harder, presses her lips to his shoulder, tries to tell him that she’s got that deep, deep desire to do her best, that she will not disappoint him, not before she hasn’t found out what he means with “Before I…” and…
“Fuck, you’re as white as a sheet and… there’s not even a real pulse…” She wonders at that. She’s still alive and she tries to tell him so but he’s not listening anymore, he’s moving her again and after a few painful, labored minutes, she can see the ceiling above her, spinning. “Listen to me, Laura, don’t fall asleep. There’ll be help soon because we’re past our check-in time…”
Help? She’s not so sure now if that will be of any use. She can hear Carson in her head, telling them what happens once someone with internal bleeding goes into shock. There’s dizziness and nausea and tiredness, so, so much tiredness… “Do not fall asleep on me, Lieutenant, that’s an order.”
She tries to smile at him, tries to say something but somehow, her lips and tongue won’t obey her anymore. There’s his face above hers now, starting to blur but she can see his pain and hurt and still hear him, why can she still hear him say, “Hold on, just a little while longer. I just… don’t go, Laura. Don’t go. They’ll be here, any minute now…”
Tired. She’s so, so tired and she wants to sleep, just sleep and the black is creeping into her vision, just as she hears him say, “Colonel Sheppard? Sir? Did you bring… Lieutenant Cadman… shock… slipping into…”
And everything fades and fades and fades away…