Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #16 Raking one's hair: I can't be without you
Title: Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More)
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Women's Army Corps Lieutenant Laura Cadman never planned on getting attached to anyone. And then came Air Force Major Evan Lorne.
A/N: Apparently, I have a thing for Foreign Wars AUs. I'm sorry. This time, it's all The Lumineers' fault (cf. their song "Charlie Boy", the one quoted at the beginning). It's also an AU to my Protect and Survive and Minor Characters verse so if there are any OC names not sounding familiar... you probably haven't read any of those stories, yet. I hope it still makes sense and I hope I found the right way to work with the Vietnam War. I'd be very happy about constructive criticism.
Also, language warning. It might be the Sixties, but Laura refused to be a lady just for once.
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More)
“Charlie boy, don’t go to war, first born in forty-four
Kennedy made him believe we could do much more
Oooh
Lillian, don’t hang your head, love should make you feel good
In uniform you raised a man, who volunteered to stand.”
The Lumineers, “Charlie Boy"
If all she ever did was sit here and smoke and drink and flirt, she thinks as she crushes her cigarette stub into the nearest ash tray, just to light the next only ten seconds later, Vietnam in 1966 wouldn’t be so bad, actually. Okay, so you have the heat and the humidity and the mosquitoes and the VC attacks practically every morning on the ride from the billet to the base. But if she’d just stay at Le Van Loc officers club on Tan Son Nhut Air Base permanently, ‘Nam would be a pretty fine place indeed.
Unfortunately, she’s Lieutenant Laura Cadman, Women’s Army Corps, here with MACV and she takes pictures and writes stuff for a living, travelling all over the country. And six months into her twelve months tour, she wonders why the hell she ever thought volunteering for a spot in this hellhole would be a good idea. Not for the first time, either, mind you. Humorless, she snorts, then takes a far too long drag from her fresh cig.
Mom would be horrified; seeing her sitting here, smoking and drinking, surrounded by men without a proper chaperone, in trousers, she thinks and then promptly has to snort derisively again. Mom would probably stop speaking with her, if she saw her here. If she hadn’t done so already three years ago when she joined the WAC on a whim. Well, that had been a one of a kind…
“How often do I have to tell you that that’s a really filthy habit, huh?” Right. And there comes Ms. Career Air Force Nurse Captain Maureen Reece herself.
She turns around, leveling a withering look she had twenty-five years to practice on her bigger brothers on the woman in the immaculate Air Force uniform in front of her. “What exactly? The drinking or the smoking?”
Reece rolls her eyes as she climbs on the bar stool next to hers. “The cynicism.” Then she turns to the bartender and orders her usual.
Mh. She frowns. “Where’s your escort?”
That makes Reece snort and wave her hand in the direction of a table full of Navy nurses over from Da Nang. “Doing the rounds.” She follows the gesture, sees Reece’s pilot, Major Thomas Moore standing over the table and flirting with a force equal to an atomic bomb explosion. Next to him is a guy in his late thirties, maybe early forties, looking mildly annoyed. Ah, yeah, that would be Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Simon DeLisle. She narrows her eyes a little and has another look at the pair.
And yeah… she can see the telltale signs. She turns back to Reece. “Hard shift?”
Reece nods, taking the cigarette from her hand and taking a deep drag herself, then handing it back to her. “Category Five.” Which means that they won’t see Moore and his co-pilot at the bar until they made it to the Red Cross table in the back.
It’s their usual routine, as she came to learn when she did one of her first in-country pieces for Stars & Stripes on Moore, DeLisle and Reece and their C-7 Caribou MedEvac plane five months back. Reece goes straight to the bar, orders a shot of straight whiskey, no ice, Moore goes to flirt with everything female on two legs in the room and DeLisle takes care that he doesn’t overstep any bounds until the two join them at the bar.
And usually… usually, they get joined sooner or later by one of Moore’s Academy buddies, a Pararescue chopper pilot going by the name of Evan Lorne and sometimes even his straight-as-raw-spaghetti-laced co-pilot, Lieutenant Joe Simmons. Usually. When Lorne and Simmons aren’t off the map, just one step away from officially being listed as MIA.
She shakes her head and exhales the smoke she just drew in, kind of wishing she hadn’t refused the weed one of the Army Nurses - Keller, yeah, that’s her name - she sometimes hangs out with had offered her. She could use a good old-fashioned high, the way they’re saying is all the rage at colleges back stateside, right now. At least it would keep her damn hands from shaking. “Still haven’t heard anything from them, have you?”
Putting out her stub, she shakes her head. The temptation to light another one is nearly insurmountable but it would be her tenth today and even she knows that she needs to give her lungs a break now and then if she wants to keep up her Army career. “No.” She grimaces as she takes a sip of her gin and tonic. “Intelligence threatened to permanently ban me from their ops room if I kept snooping in, shooting me on sight and all.”
They both laugh but it sounds hollow, even Reece’s. She knows that Reece likes Lorne and even goody-two-shoes Simmons. And if she’s honest, she does, too. A lot, at least in Lorne’s case. She knows it’s stupid, especially because she’s pretty sure that Lorne can’t stand her and because she’s still trying to convince herself that she can’t stand him, either.
It’s all his fault, anyway. A week in-country, she was supposed to get to Da Nang, take pictures of Navy Nurses volunteering in a Vietnamese orphanage. Her original ride had taken off without her and it had been hitching a ride on a truck convoy through the jungle or with a slightly cranky Pararescue pilot in a chopper. The moment she’d climbed on board the Jolly Green Giant, she’d wished she’d taken the jungle trip.
Even today she’s pretty sure that the rocky flying Lorne had presented her with had had nothing do to with the VC leveling their AAA on the chopper and everything with making her feel as unwelcome as possible. She’d always prided herself on never getting airsick… until that day. She still shudders at how thoroughly sick she’d been after that flight and she still wonders how to get back at him for that.
After that, she’d thought she’d never see him again - Tan Son Nhut is big enough to stay out of each other’s way for an entire year, after all - and good riddance but somehow he’d managed to be there when she needed a ride so often that she’d started to wonder what on God’s green earth she’d done to receive such bad karma. And then he’d turned out to be an Academy buddy of Moore’s and it had been practically impossible to stay out of his way, if she wanted to keep seeing the one woman she’d managed to establish an actual connection with in this goddamned country. Reece still refuses to have any other than professional contact with the Army Nurses and oh, don’t get her started on the Red Cross girls in her earshot, seriously.
And now the idiot has gone and made VC fodder out of him and his crew. Damned, damned idiot. “Laura?” Mh? “Are you still with us?”
Um, what… “’Course she isn’t. Don’t you see that dreamy, far-away look in her eyes?”
Oh. Oh just great. Moore’s done with “the rounds” and doesn’t have anything better to do than comment on her zoning out. Which she totally didn’t do, nuh-uh. “Tom.”
Well, look at that. Two days ago it was still “sir” and “Captain” and suddenly it’s “Tom”? She raises her eyebrows. “Which memo did I miss, guys?”
Confused looks all around… except on DeLisle’s face, as usual. Guy’s much too perceptive for his own good, she’s sure of that. If there’s anyone who knows what’s going on on the entire base, then it’s Simon “Air America” DeLisle. Scuttlebutt has it both he and Moore flew for the CIA for years and still no one, not even Lorne has outright denied it to her. So she figures it must be true. And if one of them is a spy, it’s gotta be DeLisle.
“What exactly are you referring to, Lieutenant?” She’s pretty sure Moore knows the answer but for the hell of it she decides to play along.
Anything to keep her from wondering where Lorne is and why his absence makes her hands shake and wish for dope. “Oh, you know… Tom.”
She can see a tiny grin on DeLisle’s face and it might be the lighting but is there a blush on Reece’s face? Moore, for his part… “You got a problem with that… Lieutenant?”
She knows she shouldn’t but she just can’t help it. She giggles. Outright, honest to God giggles. And even if it does sound a little hysterical, it feels good to giggle, let out some of that nervous energy that’s been building up ever since Lorne didn’t come back from his sortie three days ago. It was supposed to be a quick and dirty extraction of a two truck convoy out of Nha Trang Air Base that got caught in enemy fire on their ride back to Da Nang.
Some personnel paper-pusher guy from administration and for some reason or other, getting the orders to go out there had Lorne in such a tizzy that he didn’t even say good-bye before dashing off to the helipad. Reece and her pilot guys had been off on a MedEvac flight and by the time they’d been back, she’d been at her billet, desperately trying to fall asleep. She…
“Hey. Hey, Earth to Cadman!” Huh? She blinks, realizing Moore is waving his hand in front of her face.
She shakes her head, suddenly feeling like it’s all too loud in here, too full of tomorrow we might die so let’s make the hell out of it tonight, and she nearly gasps when she says, “I’m… I’m sorry, I need a bit of air. Be right back, guys, just a minute.” And with that, she clambers off her bar stool, leaving the MedEvac trio behind that’s probably gaping at her as she pushes her way to the exit…
Holy Mother of God.
For a moment, just a tiny moment, she thinks it has to be an illusion but then she remembers that she only had half a glass of gin and tonic and no other drugs and when she sees him standing right in front of her, in the middle of the door and brings herself to acknowledge that he’s really there, suddenly she remembers all the rides she hitched on his chopper and the evenings they spent at the Le Van Loc and the one night they spent at Nha Trang when he told her about his divorce and she told him about being an eternal disappointment to her parents and she realized that maybe, after all, Evan Lorne wasn’t such a bad guy at all.
Actually, that was the night she realized that maybe, after all, Evan Lorne was one of the very, very good guys. The kind of guy she usually tried to avoid because she just couldn’t help fall in love with them.
She blinks. He looks terrible. Like he came in directly from the helipad, blood and oil stained flight suit and all. Blood. Blood on his flight suit. She blinks again and for some reason the thought of Evan Lorne with blood on his flight suit makes her brush past him in a wild fury, just in the moment that he opens his mouth to say, “Laura…”
Later, she will never be able to say why exactly she just did that but the thing is, she just couldn’t stand there a minute longer and look at the blood stains - and even in the bad lighting she could be sure that it was blood, she’s been around medical units enough to recognize how it looks on fatigues - and then go on talking to him as if nothing ever happened. To be honest, until now, she never even allowed herself to think of him as wearing anything else than spotless fatigues or dress uniforms or flight suits, no matter how long the flight was and how hot and humid it was.
Outside, it’s night and the only lighting comes from the helipad and when she has recovered well enough to be more like her usual self than a heaving, half-sobbing mess, she realizes that there’s still a Jolly Green Giant on the pad, looking badly shot up. Bullet holes all over its hull, the rotors curiously drooping to one side, a gaggle of mechanics trying to move it out of the LZ.
For a moment, she actually wonders who of the pilots was stupid enough to get themselves shot up like that by the VC, until she realizes that this is Orion. Lorne’s bird. Stupid bird with a stupid star constellation name instead of something normal like Lola or Betty or whatever.
Oh no, Major Evan Lorne had to go and be different and she tries very hard to stay mad at him for whatever reason instead of remembering how he told her that he’d joined the Air Force because he’d wanted to be as close to the stars as he could, because he’d wanted to be a fighter pilot and how it stung when they put him in a helicopter pilot slot. That night at Nha Trang had truly been remarkable.
She takes a deep breath, takes a few steps towards the helipad, through the Heliport gate, feeling a little lost. After a few more steps, she finds herself sitting down on some crate or other, still watching the mechanics struggle with the damaged Jolly Green Giant. Whatever happened in the last three days, it must have involved a lot of shooting and pain and blood.
Not that Lorne’s usual sorties don’t involve a lot of shooting and pain and blood, mind you. But something… is different about this one. Okay, for one, usually the bullets don’t find the bird en masse like that and two, she’s pretty sure the rotors never looked askew like that. But that’s not the thing that… shocked her.
What really got to her was the look on Lorne’s face when he stood in that doorway. It might have been the lighting but now that she thinks back she thinks she saw… weariness in his eyes. Not the usual ‘Nam weariness that you get here sooner or later, that sometimes makes it hard to get up in the morning and stop drinking in the evening but a bone deep, painful exhaustion, like something happened that drained him of all the energy that usually gets him going.
It’s a little scary how well she knows him after six months of being his passenger now and then. She got to know his entire crew, yes, but Lorne… well. She knows that when he’s particularly pissed off with something she did or said, his flying gets rockier and she knows how he likes his alcohol - straight, no-nonsense and only when he’s not on duty or on call. She knows her smoking disgusts him - there’s been more than one occasion when he took the cigarette right from her hand and put it out, apparently totally not impressed by her fuming and glaring - and she knows that she’s the only reporter, Army or otherwise, he lets hitch a ride on his bird. She knows they actually keep an extra canteen of water on their bird because she’s practically infamous for never filling up on water when she should.
Damn, she thinks, something’s not right here. Something’s definitely very, very wrong. Something…
“I’m pretty sure smoking is absolutely forbidden at the heliport.”
What the… she didn’t even notice that she lit up that tenth cigarette, after all. And she didn’t even realize that Evan Lorne just crept up on her. She almost drops the cigarette but remembers just in time how those things like to turn into hard currency in times of war - her father had a few interesting stories about that, especially about his time in Germany in late 1945 - and tries to level another withering glare at him. “What are you going to do, sir? Call the cops?”
She shouldn’t have talked to him like that, even when he has no part of her chain of command whatsoever but something about him always brings out the worst in her, like she wants him to detest her. And sometimes she suspects that it’s the same for him. Tonight, however… he just sighs and waves his hand at her. “Scoot over, will you?”
Surprised, she moves a little to her right and he sits down. Without further ado, he takes the cigarette from her hand - she just hates how little resistance she is able to muster up, every damn time - but instead of throwing it on the ground and putting it out like he usually does, he takes a nice long drag himself. She nearly expects him to keel over coughing, seeing as she could have sworn that a guy like Lorne never even thought about lighting himself one but he just sits there, blowing out the smoke and staring at the mechanics who managed to find a truck to help them tow his bird over to maintenance.
After a fairly long break of just sitting there and staring he says, “So no dope, after all.”
Oh just great. Of course he had to go there. She has never even touched the damn stuff and everyone still believes she smokes it like Lucky Strikes. She glares at him, snatching away the cig from his fingers. “Yeah, surprise, sometimes even I know how to behave.”
He just raises his eyebrow, almost as if he’s surprised at her reaction but even in the harsh lighting out here she can see that weird exhaustion in his eyes again when he tells her, “Pity. I could have used some.”
Not sure how serious he just was - people would never believe her but even she isn’t above admitting that Lorne has his moments of pretty good humor - she doesn’t answer right away. And in the end, that damn passive-aggressive streak wins again. “You could always ask your CO.”
It’s not that she does it on purpose, really. It’s just that she can’t help it. She knows that Lorne is loyal to his CO, whatever the man’s faults are - and according to the rumor mill, there are many, many of them - and it’s really a bad idea to insult that guy to Lorne’s face. But it just makes Lorne laugh a little without humor and say, “Don’t believe everything they tell you about Sheppard.”
It’s amazing, she thinks, how a man who’d berate her for smoking and order the barkeep to stop giving her alcohol after that one assignment that nearly got her killed and that she really just wanted to fucking drink away would be so adamant in defending the guy who’s probably still an officer only because he saved some brass guy’s life back in World War II or maybe Korea or something. She takes a drag from her cigarette and moves just in time to bring it out of his range when he reaches for it again. “What about that thing with the State Department officer?”
He snorts and crooks his finger to beckon her to give him the cig. When she hands it over unwillingly, he says, “Okay, you could believe that.”
You know, it would be a lie if she said that his answer doesn’t surprise her. Because whoa, it absolutely does. Of all the things people tell about Sheppard, she’d thought that an ongoing love affair with State Department officer Whatshername - Weird or Wire or… yes, Elizabeth Weir - was about one of the last things to be true.
Or maybe it’s not an affair because State Department officers just don’t strike her as the kind of people who’d have something as sordid as a love affair, most of all not with the black sheep of the US Air Force. So she finds absolutely nothing to reply and they just sit there, next to each other, sharing the cig and again, she wonders what made Lorne abandon his usual self and hang out with her of all people, probably the antithesis to everything he values in a woman or something.
And damn her curiosity, professional or otherwise but she really, really wants to know what the hell went down so after a few more moments of silence, she attempts to sneak up on him. “How’s your crew?”
“Holding it together, I hope,” he says and she wonders why they aren’t here as well. Usually, Lorne’s crew - aside from Simmons, there are two Sergeants, Meyers, the medic and McPherson, the crew chief - are thick as thieves and she’s pretty sure that if Lorne were a bit more off the rulebook, he’d have attempted to smuggle his Sergeants into Le Van Loc at least twice now. She also has never seen him walk right into the club after a sortie before. Usually, he takes his time, doing post-flight, debriefing, making sure his crew’s okay. Something…
Oh, this is starting to get really ridiculous. She huffs. “Okay, spill it.”
That gets her a rather uncomprehending look. “Spill what… Lieutenant?”
Ah, playing dirty, that one she knows. Reminding them of their difference in rank as a diversionary tactic. Yeah, she can work with that. “What happened out there? You were supposed to be back three days ago…”
“Have you been counting, Cadman?” Dammit, he’s not supposed to be amused by this. “Good God, you have been counting.” Not. Funny. “I can’t believe it. Moore was right. You really were pestering Intelligence…”
Alright, that’s it. She’s not going to sit around her listening to him ridiculing her. “Good night, sir. I really don’t have to…”
“Hey!” Oh. Oh no. She’s not going to… “Hey… Laura. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry.”
It’s funny, actually. It’s not even Evan Lorne of all people saying sorry to her, it’s that he uses her first name. It’s only the second time ever, after that weird moment in the doorway and somehow that actually makes her turn around, albeit with expectantly raised eyebrows and her arms folded in front of her chest. He rubs his neck. “Look, I just… I always thought… well.”
What? What did he always think? If she thought she hated him for making her puke her guts out after that first flight, she apparently was wrong. Very wrong. Because she really hates him for making her turn around with sounding so unlike himself, so… so lost.
And maybe that’s why she doesn’t do her thing, doesn’t go on asking him and prodding him about what he meant, just walks back and sits down, careful to keep the least bit distance between them because somehow, she’s starting to feel unable to control herself.
Again, they’re sitting next to each other for a while, without speaking, just finishing that cig and milking it for what it’s worth, until he says, “Charlie. Charlie Williamson, that was his name.” She frowns, not sure what to say to that when she notices how his tight his hands are clutching each other. “My brother-in-law.” Still not getting it - or maybe refusing to get it - she makes a kind of helpless gesture with her hands and he keeps going on, in a voice that makes her wonder if he realizes that she’s still here. “The personnel guy we were supposed to get out from under enemy fire.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Evan, I…”
He lets it pass, her slip into calling him by his first name, probably not even noticing it. “Did you know that they’re already calling our Academy class the first class to fight and die in Vietnam?” She shakes her head, for some reason dumbstruck and he gives her another humorless laugh. “Moore, Charlie and I… we were what my sister likes to call the class of 1959’s Golden Trio. We were supposedly the best, the brightest… and Charlie wasn’t even supposed to be here. The damn idiot actually volunteered.”
She doesn’t like the direction where this is headed, doesn’t like how desperate he sounds, how cynical, how helpless, how so not like himself. “If you don’t want to talk about it…”
“My sister and he, they’re going to have their second kid, any day now. He got in-country three months ago. He didn’t have to go. They don’t need so many personnel people over here but he said he couldn’t let Moore and me do our part and sit back stateside on his ass and do nothing. Can you believe that?” Actually, she can. Lorne and Moore, they’re both top at what they’re doing in ‘Nam and she can even imagine what it must feel like to be the one left behind, the one to be told “Hey, we don’t need you, you can stay home, it’s all good”.
She clenches her hands, afraid she’ll reach out to take his if she doesn’t control them. “What happened?”
He takes a deep breath, almost looking as if he just remembered that he’s in Vietnam and that she’s sitting next to him and that he was supposed to tell her where he was in the last three days. “The chopper was downed. By the time we got there, only three people were still alive and we tried to get them out by hovering and winching them up but the VC shooters got lucky and we had to emergency land in a clearing nearby. They nicked a fuel line and we nearly went down in a blaze of glory.”
Oh.
Oh God.
He’d nearly exploded with his chopper and she’d never gotten to tell him… tell him…
Tell him a great big heap of bullshit, yes. Something she won’t ever tell him because if she’s honest, she can’t even articulate it to herself, let alone anyone else. “But you didn’t?”
“But we didn’t,” he agrees and goes back to talking about the landing, in a kind of storyteller voice she only knows from that one night in Nha Trang and thought - hoped - she’d never hear again. “We got to the clearing and Simmons and Meyers got to the convoy to get the survivors to us while McPherson and I went to defend the chopper and try to get reinforcements.”
“Which, apparently, didn’t work.”
He snorts. “Nope. Between us and the convoy trucks, we didn’t have even one functional radio left.”
Well. That actually explains a couple things. “So what did you do?”
He shrugs, trying to look nonchalant. “Kept trying to defend the perimeter, keep the wounded alive and patch up the bird.”
Right. “And… that worked?”
Now he rolls his eyes, gesturing to the chopper that now nearly arrived at the maintenance shed. “Course it did. We could get the radio operational after a couple hours and at first we thought we’d get rescued but apparently, all they could manage was have a bird drop us a box of spare parts and medical supplies.” He snorts again, but this time there’s actual humor to it, to her surprise. “Okay, that and err… that.”
For a moment, she struggles to recognize the item in his hand - a flat, quadrangular little package - until it clicks and she seriously hopes that he can’t see how her face is heating up. Three years in the Army and six months at war and she still can’t help blushing at a condom. Thank God the face he makes is hilarious enough that she can cover up her rather virginal reaction with giggling and saying, “Sheppard did the drop, didn’t he?”
Chuckling, he nods and packs away the condom into one of his leg pockets. “He did. Said he thought he wasn’t sure how many patches we’d need for all the busted lines and that he had to improvise. But knowing Sheppard…” He shrugs and grins.
And then, from one moment to the next, all the levity they just experienced for one wonderful moment is gone and there’s the exhaustion and the despair back and he almost chokes on the words when he says, “Charlie’s dead, Laura. He was alive when we found them but he just… how am I gonna explain that to my sister? How am I gonna explain that to my nephews?”
She has no idea why he came to her with that, why he didn’t talk about it with his crew, with Moore, with just about anyone else but here he is and he’s quite clearly in pain and even though some liked to call her the Iron Maiden at college because she refused to see it as the quickest way to make a satisfying match and actually wanted to get an education and even though Reece keeps accusing her of being way too cynical for a twenty-five-year-old, she does have feelings and she does have feelings for Evan Lorne and that’s probably why she decides to throw the rulebook out the window and hug him right here on their crate at the edge of the helipad.
There’s no reacting at first but after a few seconds she feels him clutching at her, burying his face in her neck and she realizes that this is the first time ever she sees Major Evan Lorne lose his cool. Flying through a hail of bullets and being chased by RPGs never even scratched at his calm and despite his tendency to express displeasure at something she did or said by resorting to sick making flying, she always felt the safest in his bird. And suddenly he’s holding her tight, as if he needs someone to support him because it probably just now registered that he failed to bring his brother-in-law home unscathed.
She doesn’t really know how to react, not having lost anyone as close as Lorne must have been with his brother-in-law. Her brothers managed to get exemption from the draft on various health reasons and moving to Canada, respectively and she carefully avoided making too many friends down here, especially among the grunts. She never had anyone she needed to take care of so they would make it home safely.
“He wasn’t supposed to be here,” he murmurs into her neck and she moves to hold him tighter, make the anguish go from his voice and his entire bearing.
She doesn’t say anything or maybe she murmured back some “It’s okay”s and “I’m here”s but she’ll never be sure, just as she’ll never be sure whether she put a kiss or two to his temple or not but she’ll always remember how she buries her hand in his hair, how it feels in its not-quite-grooming-standard-length sweat-and-grime-cakedness, how it smells of gun powder and jungle and pain.
She’ll always remember how she never hears or feels him sob and yet sees tears streaking through the dirt on his face when he puts his forehead to hers.
It takes him a few moments to find the breath to say something and then he whispers, in a weird, ragged way, “I’m so glad you’re still here.”
She nearly laughs, a sad little laugh but then she remembers that she originally was slated for an assignment all across the country two days ago that she ended up practically selling to another reporter, off for some FOB reporting glory. She reaches up to touch his cheek, almost surprised to really find it wet. “My favorite taxi driver wasn’t in town.”
That makes him laugh, the same sad little laugh she almost gave him and he touches her cheek, still leaning with his forehead against hers. “And here I thought you didn’t even like me.”
“Same here, you idiot,” she tells him as she moves to embrace him again and he lets her, “same here.” Then she hugs him tight again, telling him in a whisper, “I’m glad you came back,” and she hopes that he gets all the things she doesn’t say, can’t say, not yet.
She hopes he gets that she’s glad he made it back because he’s one of the very few people making this hellhole bearable for her, that he’s one of the very few people she probably couldn’t make it through her tour without and she realizes that she just made the biggest mistake of all times.
She got attached in a war zone, not only to him but to him the most. And it’s been going on for a while now. And all she did against it was trying to push him away and trying to drink and smoke and sneer her feelings for him away. And she was so, so stupid.
Then, just when she’s about to disentangle herself from him, to walk out of this while she still can, save the last shred of detachment she still has left, he lifts his head again and his hands to her face and tells her, “I know, Laura. Goddammit, I know. Just don’t…”
Even with all her leftover brain cells screaming at her to get the hell out of Dodge, all she can tell him is, “No,” and miraculously, he understands. He understands the promise that neither of them could ever make sure to keep, not while they’re still down here, both going on sorties and assignments into combat zones nearly daily. He understands and he nods and he makes the same promise, anyway.
They don’t kiss, not in this night, at any case. They don’t head for the BOQ, either or into some dark corner. They just keep sitting there at the edge of the helipad until the sun comes up and he has to go to Sheppard for a debriefing and for arranging compassionate leave and she has to go and find a way to accompany her favorite MedEvac team for the time that he’s away.
They just sit on their crate and she cradles him when he falls asleep amidst telling her about the class of 1959’s Golden Trio and she doesn’t even care who’s going to see them. Maybe she’s just tired of ‘Nam ruining everything good about her and the people she cares about and maybe she just wants to hold on to the one thing, the one person that makes ‘Nam not such a bad place, after all. And she’s gonna do that, with every ounce of strength she still has left. What other choice does she have left, anyway?
~*~
TBC in We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me).
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Women's Army Corps Lieutenant Laura Cadman never planned on getting attached to anyone. And then came Air Force Major Evan Lorne.
A/N: Apparently, I have a thing for Foreign Wars AUs. I'm sorry. This time, it's all The Lumineers' fault (cf. their song "Charlie Boy", the one quoted at the beginning). It's also an AU to my Protect and Survive and Minor Characters verse so if there are any OC names not sounding familiar... you probably haven't read any of those stories, yet. I hope it still makes sense and I hope I found the right way to work with the Vietnam War. I'd be very happy about constructive criticism.
Also, language warning. It might be the Sixties, but Laura refused to be a lady just for once.
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More)
“Charlie boy, don’t go to war, first born in forty-four
Kennedy made him believe we could do much more
Oooh
Lillian, don’t hang your head, love should make you feel good
In uniform you raised a man, who volunteered to stand.”
The Lumineers, “Charlie Boy"
If all she ever did was sit here and smoke and drink and flirt, she thinks as she crushes her cigarette stub into the nearest ash tray, just to light the next only ten seconds later, Vietnam in 1966 wouldn’t be so bad, actually. Okay, so you have the heat and the humidity and the mosquitoes and the VC attacks practically every morning on the ride from the billet to the base. But if she’d just stay at Le Van Loc officers club on Tan Son Nhut Air Base permanently, ‘Nam would be a pretty fine place indeed.
Unfortunately, she’s Lieutenant Laura Cadman, Women’s Army Corps, here with MACV and she takes pictures and writes stuff for a living, travelling all over the country. And six months into her twelve months tour, she wonders why the hell she ever thought volunteering for a spot in this hellhole would be a good idea. Not for the first time, either, mind you. Humorless, she snorts, then takes a far too long drag from her fresh cig.
Mom would be horrified; seeing her sitting here, smoking and drinking, surrounded by men without a proper chaperone, in trousers, she thinks and then promptly has to snort derisively again. Mom would probably stop speaking with her, if she saw her here. If she hadn’t done so already three years ago when she joined the WAC on a whim. Well, that had been a one of a kind…
“How often do I have to tell you that that’s a really filthy habit, huh?” Right. And there comes Ms. Career Air Force Nurse Captain Maureen Reece herself.
She turns around, leveling a withering look she had twenty-five years to practice on her bigger brothers on the woman in the immaculate Air Force uniform in front of her. “What exactly? The drinking or the smoking?”
Reece rolls her eyes as she climbs on the bar stool next to hers. “The cynicism.” Then she turns to the bartender and orders her usual.
Mh. She frowns. “Where’s your escort?”
That makes Reece snort and wave her hand in the direction of a table full of Navy nurses over from Da Nang. “Doing the rounds.” She follows the gesture, sees Reece’s pilot, Major Thomas Moore standing over the table and flirting with a force equal to an atomic bomb explosion. Next to him is a guy in his late thirties, maybe early forties, looking mildly annoyed. Ah, yeah, that would be Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Simon DeLisle. She narrows her eyes a little and has another look at the pair.
And yeah… she can see the telltale signs. She turns back to Reece. “Hard shift?”
Reece nods, taking the cigarette from her hand and taking a deep drag herself, then handing it back to her. “Category Five.” Which means that they won’t see Moore and his co-pilot at the bar until they made it to the Red Cross table in the back.
It’s their usual routine, as she came to learn when she did one of her first in-country pieces for Stars & Stripes on Moore, DeLisle and Reece and their C-7 Caribou MedEvac plane five months back. Reece goes straight to the bar, orders a shot of straight whiskey, no ice, Moore goes to flirt with everything female on two legs in the room and DeLisle takes care that he doesn’t overstep any bounds until the two join them at the bar.
And usually… usually, they get joined sooner or later by one of Moore’s Academy buddies, a Pararescue chopper pilot going by the name of Evan Lorne and sometimes even his straight-as-raw-spaghetti-laced co-pilot, Lieutenant Joe Simmons. Usually. When Lorne and Simmons aren’t off the map, just one step away from officially being listed as MIA.
She shakes her head and exhales the smoke she just drew in, kind of wishing she hadn’t refused the weed one of the Army Nurses - Keller, yeah, that’s her name - she sometimes hangs out with had offered her. She could use a good old-fashioned high, the way they’re saying is all the rage at colleges back stateside, right now. At least it would keep her damn hands from shaking. “Still haven’t heard anything from them, have you?”
Putting out her stub, she shakes her head. The temptation to light another one is nearly insurmountable but it would be her tenth today and even she knows that she needs to give her lungs a break now and then if she wants to keep up her Army career. “No.” She grimaces as she takes a sip of her gin and tonic. “Intelligence threatened to permanently ban me from their ops room if I kept snooping in, shooting me on sight and all.”
They both laugh but it sounds hollow, even Reece’s. She knows that Reece likes Lorne and even goody-two-shoes Simmons. And if she’s honest, she does, too. A lot, at least in Lorne’s case. She knows it’s stupid, especially because she’s pretty sure that Lorne can’t stand her and because she’s still trying to convince herself that she can’t stand him, either.
It’s all his fault, anyway. A week in-country, she was supposed to get to Da Nang, take pictures of Navy Nurses volunteering in a Vietnamese orphanage. Her original ride had taken off without her and it had been hitching a ride on a truck convoy through the jungle or with a slightly cranky Pararescue pilot in a chopper. The moment she’d climbed on board the Jolly Green Giant, she’d wished she’d taken the jungle trip.
Even today she’s pretty sure that the rocky flying Lorne had presented her with had had nothing do to with the VC leveling their AAA on the chopper and everything with making her feel as unwelcome as possible. She’d always prided herself on never getting airsick… until that day. She still shudders at how thoroughly sick she’d been after that flight and she still wonders how to get back at him for that.
After that, she’d thought she’d never see him again - Tan Son Nhut is big enough to stay out of each other’s way for an entire year, after all - and good riddance but somehow he’d managed to be there when she needed a ride so often that she’d started to wonder what on God’s green earth she’d done to receive such bad karma. And then he’d turned out to be an Academy buddy of Moore’s and it had been practically impossible to stay out of his way, if she wanted to keep seeing the one woman she’d managed to establish an actual connection with in this goddamned country. Reece still refuses to have any other than professional contact with the Army Nurses and oh, don’t get her started on the Red Cross girls in her earshot, seriously.
And now the idiot has gone and made VC fodder out of him and his crew. Damned, damned idiot. “Laura?” Mh? “Are you still with us?”
Um, what… “’Course she isn’t. Don’t you see that dreamy, far-away look in her eyes?”
Oh. Oh just great. Moore’s done with “the rounds” and doesn’t have anything better to do than comment on her zoning out. Which she totally didn’t do, nuh-uh. “Tom.”
Well, look at that. Two days ago it was still “sir” and “Captain” and suddenly it’s “Tom”? She raises her eyebrows. “Which memo did I miss, guys?”
Confused looks all around… except on DeLisle’s face, as usual. Guy’s much too perceptive for his own good, she’s sure of that. If there’s anyone who knows what’s going on on the entire base, then it’s Simon “Air America” DeLisle. Scuttlebutt has it both he and Moore flew for the CIA for years and still no one, not even Lorne has outright denied it to her. So she figures it must be true. And if one of them is a spy, it’s gotta be DeLisle.
“What exactly are you referring to, Lieutenant?” She’s pretty sure Moore knows the answer but for the hell of it she decides to play along.
Anything to keep her from wondering where Lorne is and why his absence makes her hands shake and wish for dope. “Oh, you know… Tom.”
She can see a tiny grin on DeLisle’s face and it might be the lighting but is there a blush on Reece’s face? Moore, for his part… “You got a problem with that… Lieutenant?”
She knows she shouldn’t but she just can’t help it. She giggles. Outright, honest to God giggles. And even if it does sound a little hysterical, it feels good to giggle, let out some of that nervous energy that’s been building up ever since Lorne didn’t come back from his sortie three days ago. It was supposed to be a quick and dirty extraction of a two truck convoy out of Nha Trang Air Base that got caught in enemy fire on their ride back to Da Nang.
Some personnel paper-pusher guy from administration and for some reason or other, getting the orders to go out there had Lorne in such a tizzy that he didn’t even say good-bye before dashing off to the helipad. Reece and her pilot guys had been off on a MedEvac flight and by the time they’d been back, she’d been at her billet, desperately trying to fall asleep. She…
“Hey. Hey, Earth to Cadman!” Huh? She blinks, realizing Moore is waving his hand in front of her face.
She shakes her head, suddenly feeling like it’s all too loud in here, too full of tomorrow we might die so let’s make the hell out of it tonight, and she nearly gasps when she says, “I’m… I’m sorry, I need a bit of air. Be right back, guys, just a minute.” And with that, she clambers off her bar stool, leaving the MedEvac trio behind that’s probably gaping at her as she pushes her way to the exit…
Holy Mother of God.
For a moment, just a tiny moment, she thinks it has to be an illusion but then she remembers that she only had half a glass of gin and tonic and no other drugs and when she sees him standing right in front of her, in the middle of the door and brings herself to acknowledge that he’s really there, suddenly she remembers all the rides she hitched on his chopper and the evenings they spent at the Le Van Loc and the one night they spent at Nha Trang when he told her about his divorce and she told him about being an eternal disappointment to her parents and she realized that maybe, after all, Evan Lorne wasn’t such a bad guy at all.
Actually, that was the night she realized that maybe, after all, Evan Lorne was one of the very, very good guys. The kind of guy she usually tried to avoid because she just couldn’t help fall in love with them.
She blinks. He looks terrible. Like he came in directly from the helipad, blood and oil stained flight suit and all. Blood. Blood on his flight suit. She blinks again and for some reason the thought of Evan Lorne with blood on his flight suit makes her brush past him in a wild fury, just in the moment that he opens his mouth to say, “Laura…”
Later, she will never be able to say why exactly she just did that but the thing is, she just couldn’t stand there a minute longer and look at the blood stains - and even in the bad lighting she could be sure that it was blood, she’s been around medical units enough to recognize how it looks on fatigues - and then go on talking to him as if nothing ever happened. To be honest, until now, she never even allowed herself to think of him as wearing anything else than spotless fatigues or dress uniforms or flight suits, no matter how long the flight was and how hot and humid it was.
Outside, it’s night and the only lighting comes from the helipad and when she has recovered well enough to be more like her usual self than a heaving, half-sobbing mess, she realizes that there’s still a Jolly Green Giant on the pad, looking badly shot up. Bullet holes all over its hull, the rotors curiously drooping to one side, a gaggle of mechanics trying to move it out of the LZ.
For a moment, she actually wonders who of the pilots was stupid enough to get themselves shot up like that by the VC, until she realizes that this is Orion. Lorne’s bird. Stupid bird with a stupid star constellation name instead of something normal like Lola or Betty or whatever.
Oh no, Major Evan Lorne had to go and be different and she tries very hard to stay mad at him for whatever reason instead of remembering how he told her that he’d joined the Air Force because he’d wanted to be as close to the stars as he could, because he’d wanted to be a fighter pilot and how it stung when they put him in a helicopter pilot slot. That night at Nha Trang had truly been remarkable.
She takes a deep breath, takes a few steps towards the helipad, through the Heliport gate, feeling a little lost. After a few more steps, she finds herself sitting down on some crate or other, still watching the mechanics struggle with the damaged Jolly Green Giant. Whatever happened in the last three days, it must have involved a lot of shooting and pain and blood.
Not that Lorne’s usual sorties don’t involve a lot of shooting and pain and blood, mind you. But something… is different about this one. Okay, for one, usually the bullets don’t find the bird en masse like that and two, she’s pretty sure the rotors never looked askew like that. But that’s not the thing that… shocked her.
What really got to her was the look on Lorne’s face when he stood in that doorway. It might have been the lighting but now that she thinks back she thinks she saw… weariness in his eyes. Not the usual ‘Nam weariness that you get here sooner or later, that sometimes makes it hard to get up in the morning and stop drinking in the evening but a bone deep, painful exhaustion, like something happened that drained him of all the energy that usually gets him going.
It’s a little scary how well she knows him after six months of being his passenger now and then. She got to know his entire crew, yes, but Lorne… well. She knows that when he’s particularly pissed off with something she did or said, his flying gets rockier and she knows how he likes his alcohol - straight, no-nonsense and only when he’s not on duty or on call. She knows her smoking disgusts him - there’s been more than one occasion when he took the cigarette right from her hand and put it out, apparently totally not impressed by her fuming and glaring - and she knows that she’s the only reporter, Army or otherwise, he lets hitch a ride on his bird. She knows they actually keep an extra canteen of water on their bird because she’s practically infamous for never filling up on water when she should.
Damn, she thinks, something’s not right here. Something’s definitely very, very wrong. Something…
“I’m pretty sure smoking is absolutely forbidden at the heliport.”
What the… she didn’t even notice that she lit up that tenth cigarette, after all. And she didn’t even realize that Evan Lorne just crept up on her. She almost drops the cigarette but remembers just in time how those things like to turn into hard currency in times of war - her father had a few interesting stories about that, especially about his time in Germany in late 1945 - and tries to level another withering glare at him. “What are you going to do, sir? Call the cops?”
She shouldn’t have talked to him like that, even when he has no part of her chain of command whatsoever but something about him always brings out the worst in her, like she wants him to detest her. And sometimes she suspects that it’s the same for him. Tonight, however… he just sighs and waves his hand at her. “Scoot over, will you?”
Surprised, she moves a little to her right and he sits down. Without further ado, he takes the cigarette from her hand - she just hates how little resistance she is able to muster up, every damn time - but instead of throwing it on the ground and putting it out like he usually does, he takes a nice long drag himself. She nearly expects him to keel over coughing, seeing as she could have sworn that a guy like Lorne never even thought about lighting himself one but he just sits there, blowing out the smoke and staring at the mechanics who managed to find a truck to help them tow his bird over to maintenance.
After a fairly long break of just sitting there and staring he says, “So no dope, after all.”
Oh just great. Of course he had to go there. She has never even touched the damn stuff and everyone still believes she smokes it like Lucky Strikes. She glares at him, snatching away the cig from his fingers. “Yeah, surprise, sometimes even I know how to behave.”
He just raises his eyebrow, almost as if he’s surprised at her reaction but even in the harsh lighting out here she can see that weird exhaustion in his eyes again when he tells her, “Pity. I could have used some.”
Not sure how serious he just was - people would never believe her but even she isn’t above admitting that Lorne has his moments of pretty good humor - she doesn’t answer right away. And in the end, that damn passive-aggressive streak wins again. “You could always ask your CO.”
It’s not that she does it on purpose, really. It’s just that she can’t help it. She knows that Lorne is loyal to his CO, whatever the man’s faults are - and according to the rumor mill, there are many, many of them - and it’s really a bad idea to insult that guy to Lorne’s face. But it just makes Lorne laugh a little without humor and say, “Don’t believe everything they tell you about Sheppard.”
It’s amazing, she thinks, how a man who’d berate her for smoking and order the barkeep to stop giving her alcohol after that one assignment that nearly got her killed and that she really just wanted to fucking drink away would be so adamant in defending the guy who’s probably still an officer only because he saved some brass guy’s life back in World War II or maybe Korea or something. She takes a drag from her cigarette and moves just in time to bring it out of his range when he reaches for it again. “What about that thing with the State Department officer?”
He snorts and crooks his finger to beckon her to give him the cig. When she hands it over unwillingly, he says, “Okay, you could believe that.”
You know, it would be a lie if she said that his answer doesn’t surprise her. Because whoa, it absolutely does. Of all the things people tell about Sheppard, she’d thought that an ongoing love affair with State Department officer Whatshername - Weird or Wire or… yes, Elizabeth Weir - was about one of the last things to be true.
Or maybe it’s not an affair because State Department officers just don’t strike her as the kind of people who’d have something as sordid as a love affair, most of all not with the black sheep of the US Air Force. So she finds absolutely nothing to reply and they just sit there, next to each other, sharing the cig and again, she wonders what made Lorne abandon his usual self and hang out with her of all people, probably the antithesis to everything he values in a woman or something.
And damn her curiosity, professional or otherwise but she really, really wants to know what the hell went down so after a few more moments of silence, she attempts to sneak up on him. “How’s your crew?”
“Holding it together, I hope,” he says and she wonders why they aren’t here as well. Usually, Lorne’s crew - aside from Simmons, there are two Sergeants, Meyers, the medic and McPherson, the crew chief - are thick as thieves and she’s pretty sure that if Lorne were a bit more off the rulebook, he’d have attempted to smuggle his Sergeants into Le Van Loc at least twice now. She also has never seen him walk right into the club after a sortie before. Usually, he takes his time, doing post-flight, debriefing, making sure his crew’s okay. Something…
Oh, this is starting to get really ridiculous. She huffs. “Okay, spill it.”
That gets her a rather uncomprehending look. “Spill what… Lieutenant?”
Ah, playing dirty, that one she knows. Reminding them of their difference in rank as a diversionary tactic. Yeah, she can work with that. “What happened out there? You were supposed to be back three days ago…”
“Have you been counting, Cadman?” Dammit, he’s not supposed to be amused by this. “Good God, you have been counting.” Not. Funny. “I can’t believe it. Moore was right. You really were pestering Intelligence…”
Alright, that’s it. She’s not going to sit around her listening to him ridiculing her. “Good night, sir. I really don’t have to…”
“Hey!” Oh. Oh no. She’s not going to… “Hey… Laura. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry.”
It’s funny, actually. It’s not even Evan Lorne of all people saying sorry to her, it’s that he uses her first name. It’s only the second time ever, after that weird moment in the doorway and somehow that actually makes her turn around, albeit with expectantly raised eyebrows and her arms folded in front of her chest. He rubs his neck. “Look, I just… I always thought… well.”
What? What did he always think? If she thought she hated him for making her puke her guts out after that first flight, she apparently was wrong. Very wrong. Because she really hates him for making her turn around with sounding so unlike himself, so… so lost.
And maybe that’s why she doesn’t do her thing, doesn’t go on asking him and prodding him about what he meant, just walks back and sits down, careful to keep the least bit distance between them because somehow, she’s starting to feel unable to control herself.
Again, they’re sitting next to each other for a while, without speaking, just finishing that cig and milking it for what it’s worth, until he says, “Charlie. Charlie Williamson, that was his name.” She frowns, not sure what to say to that when she notices how his tight his hands are clutching each other. “My brother-in-law.” Still not getting it - or maybe refusing to get it - she makes a kind of helpless gesture with her hands and he keeps going on, in a voice that makes her wonder if he realizes that she’s still here. “The personnel guy we were supposed to get out from under enemy fire.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Evan, I…”
He lets it pass, her slip into calling him by his first name, probably not even noticing it. “Did you know that they’re already calling our Academy class the first class to fight and die in Vietnam?” She shakes her head, for some reason dumbstruck and he gives her another humorless laugh. “Moore, Charlie and I… we were what my sister likes to call the class of 1959’s Golden Trio. We were supposedly the best, the brightest… and Charlie wasn’t even supposed to be here. The damn idiot actually volunteered.”
She doesn’t like the direction where this is headed, doesn’t like how desperate he sounds, how cynical, how helpless, how so not like himself. “If you don’t want to talk about it…”
“My sister and he, they’re going to have their second kid, any day now. He got in-country three months ago. He didn’t have to go. They don’t need so many personnel people over here but he said he couldn’t let Moore and me do our part and sit back stateside on his ass and do nothing. Can you believe that?” Actually, she can. Lorne and Moore, they’re both top at what they’re doing in ‘Nam and she can even imagine what it must feel like to be the one left behind, the one to be told “Hey, we don’t need you, you can stay home, it’s all good”.
She clenches her hands, afraid she’ll reach out to take his if she doesn’t control them. “What happened?”
He takes a deep breath, almost looking as if he just remembered that he’s in Vietnam and that she’s sitting next to him and that he was supposed to tell her where he was in the last three days. “The chopper was downed. By the time we got there, only three people were still alive and we tried to get them out by hovering and winching them up but the VC shooters got lucky and we had to emergency land in a clearing nearby. They nicked a fuel line and we nearly went down in a blaze of glory.”
Oh.
Oh God.
He’d nearly exploded with his chopper and she’d never gotten to tell him… tell him…
Tell him a great big heap of bullshit, yes. Something she won’t ever tell him because if she’s honest, she can’t even articulate it to herself, let alone anyone else. “But you didn’t?”
“But we didn’t,” he agrees and goes back to talking about the landing, in a kind of storyteller voice she only knows from that one night in Nha Trang and thought - hoped - she’d never hear again. “We got to the clearing and Simmons and Meyers got to the convoy to get the survivors to us while McPherson and I went to defend the chopper and try to get reinforcements.”
“Which, apparently, didn’t work.”
He snorts. “Nope. Between us and the convoy trucks, we didn’t have even one functional radio left.”
Well. That actually explains a couple things. “So what did you do?”
He shrugs, trying to look nonchalant. “Kept trying to defend the perimeter, keep the wounded alive and patch up the bird.”
Right. “And… that worked?”
Now he rolls his eyes, gesturing to the chopper that now nearly arrived at the maintenance shed. “Course it did. We could get the radio operational after a couple hours and at first we thought we’d get rescued but apparently, all they could manage was have a bird drop us a box of spare parts and medical supplies.” He snorts again, but this time there’s actual humor to it, to her surprise. “Okay, that and err… that.”
For a moment, she struggles to recognize the item in his hand - a flat, quadrangular little package - until it clicks and she seriously hopes that he can’t see how her face is heating up. Three years in the Army and six months at war and she still can’t help blushing at a condom. Thank God the face he makes is hilarious enough that she can cover up her rather virginal reaction with giggling and saying, “Sheppard did the drop, didn’t he?”
Chuckling, he nods and packs away the condom into one of his leg pockets. “He did. Said he thought he wasn’t sure how many patches we’d need for all the busted lines and that he had to improvise. But knowing Sheppard…” He shrugs and grins.
And then, from one moment to the next, all the levity they just experienced for one wonderful moment is gone and there’s the exhaustion and the despair back and he almost chokes on the words when he says, “Charlie’s dead, Laura. He was alive when we found them but he just… how am I gonna explain that to my sister? How am I gonna explain that to my nephews?”
She has no idea why he came to her with that, why he didn’t talk about it with his crew, with Moore, with just about anyone else but here he is and he’s quite clearly in pain and even though some liked to call her the Iron Maiden at college because she refused to see it as the quickest way to make a satisfying match and actually wanted to get an education and even though Reece keeps accusing her of being way too cynical for a twenty-five-year-old, she does have feelings and she does have feelings for Evan Lorne and that’s probably why she decides to throw the rulebook out the window and hug him right here on their crate at the edge of the helipad.
There’s no reacting at first but after a few seconds she feels him clutching at her, burying his face in her neck and she realizes that this is the first time ever she sees Major Evan Lorne lose his cool. Flying through a hail of bullets and being chased by RPGs never even scratched at his calm and despite his tendency to express displeasure at something she did or said by resorting to sick making flying, she always felt the safest in his bird. And suddenly he’s holding her tight, as if he needs someone to support him because it probably just now registered that he failed to bring his brother-in-law home unscathed.
She doesn’t really know how to react, not having lost anyone as close as Lorne must have been with his brother-in-law. Her brothers managed to get exemption from the draft on various health reasons and moving to Canada, respectively and she carefully avoided making too many friends down here, especially among the grunts. She never had anyone she needed to take care of so they would make it home safely.
“He wasn’t supposed to be here,” he murmurs into her neck and she moves to hold him tighter, make the anguish go from his voice and his entire bearing.
She doesn’t say anything or maybe she murmured back some “It’s okay”s and “I’m here”s but she’ll never be sure, just as she’ll never be sure whether she put a kiss or two to his temple or not but she’ll always remember how she buries her hand in his hair, how it feels in its not-quite-grooming-standard-length sweat-and-grime-cakedness, how it smells of gun powder and jungle and pain.
She’ll always remember how she never hears or feels him sob and yet sees tears streaking through the dirt on his face when he puts his forehead to hers.
It takes him a few moments to find the breath to say something and then he whispers, in a weird, ragged way, “I’m so glad you’re still here.”
She nearly laughs, a sad little laugh but then she remembers that she originally was slated for an assignment all across the country two days ago that she ended up practically selling to another reporter, off for some FOB reporting glory. She reaches up to touch his cheek, almost surprised to really find it wet. “My favorite taxi driver wasn’t in town.”
That makes him laugh, the same sad little laugh she almost gave him and he touches her cheek, still leaning with his forehead against hers. “And here I thought you didn’t even like me.”
“Same here, you idiot,” she tells him as she moves to embrace him again and he lets her, “same here.” Then she hugs him tight again, telling him in a whisper, “I’m glad you came back,” and she hopes that he gets all the things she doesn’t say, can’t say, not yet.
She hopes he gets that she’s glad he made it back because he’s one of the very few people making this hellhole bearable for her, that he’s one of the very few people she probably couldn’t make it through her tour without and she realizes that she just made the biggest mistake of all times.
She got attached in a war zone, not only to him but to him the most. And it’s been going on for a while now. And all she did against it was trying to push him away and trying to drink and smoke and sneer her feelings for him away. And she was so, so stupid.
Then, just when she’s about to disentangle herself from him, to walk out of this while she still can, save the last shred of detachment she still has left, he lifts his head again and his hands to her face and tells her, “I know, Laura. Goddammit, I know. Just don’t…”
Even with all her leftover brain cells screaming at her to get the hell out of Dodge, all she can tell him is, “No,” and miraculously, he understands. He understands the promise that neither of them could ever make sure to keep, not while they’re still down here, both going on sorties and assignments into combat zones nearly daily. He understands and he nods and he makes the same promise, anyway.
They don’t kiss, not in this night, at any case. They don’t head for the BOQ, either or into some dark corner. They just keep sitting there at the edge of the helipad until the sun comes up and he has to go to Sheppard for a debriefing and for arranging compassionate leave and she has to go and find a way to accompany her favorite MedEvac team for the time that he’s away.
They just sit on their crate and she cradles him when he falls asleep amidst telling her about the class of 1959’s Golden Trio and she doesn’t even care who’s going to see them. Maybe she’s just tired of ‘Nam ruining everything good about her and the people she cares about and maybe she just wants to hold on to the one thing, the one person that makes ‘Nam not such a bad place, after all. And she’s gonna do that, with every ounce of strength she still has left. What other choice does she have left, anyway?
~*~
TBC in We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me).