Fic: Minor Characters: And We’ll Join The Dreamers And Renegades (Stargate)
Title: And We’ll Join The Dreamers And Renegades
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Stargate, Sam Carter, Sam asking Maureen why she still deals with Tom
Summary: Sam Carter always wondered why a certain US Marine never accepted command of her own team. She gets her answer in one late night in the infirmary. Maybe a tag to "Trio".
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme, attempt #4. Argh. Late, late, late, etc. Anyway. This is part of my Minor Characters 'verse, taking place during S4 of SGA, directly after "Trio" (which totally is not one of my favorite episodes but provided the perfect backdrop for this fic, so I hope mackenziesmomma forgives me for making this SGA rather than SG1). Which means that there are massive spoilers for anything Minor Characters up to this point (which is a lot *coughs) but at least I could combine two of my favorite things: writing "late night in the Atlantis infirmary" fic with "Sam Carter talking to younger female officers" fic (of which there isn't nearly enough out there. Why do people not write this???). So... I hope there are still people out there who like this?
And We’ll Join The Dreamers And Renegades
“Hey, have you heard the radio news
They say that soon all hell will break loose
Me, I am trying to do my part
But really changing the world seems so hard
Hey man, I’m tired of working all day
I’m turning into a daysleeping walking cliché
Hey man, let’s wait until daylight fades
And we’ll join the dreamers and renegades.”
Milow, “Dreamers And Renegades”
Go and take that Atlantis posting, they said. It’ll be good for your career, they said. You won’t get to spend the night in the infirmary half as often as on an active gate team, they said. No one said anything about breaking your fucking leg by trying to climbing out of a hole you fell into, and yet she’s here in the infirmary with a cast on her leg and getting stir crazy.
It’s an hour into the graveyard shift and most of the staff has left so there aren’t many people around to talk to. John brought her a stack of the most important mission reports of today and other recent paperwork - she will not attach “kindly” to this because he very obviously enjoyed burying her under paper where she couldn’t escape - but there are only so many versions of “and then we had a really interesting encounter with the local wildlife” you can read in one evening and there are no more interesting books left to read for her in either her quarters or the Atlantis open library. And yeah, of course she could just go to sleep, but for some reason the day’s events have left her weirdly wired and bouncy. She’d never tell anyone outright but man, is she bored.
She eyes the crutches next to her bed, yet again. The fracture wasn’t bad enough to rate surgery but due to it being untended for a relatively long period, Keller made her stay the night at the infirmary, “just to make sure everything’s alright” and then promptly left herself. They gave her the crutches for short trips, like to the bathroom and explicitly stated that she wasn’t to take leisurely strolls around or anything but seriously, what use is being the commander of an entire installation like Atlantis if you can’t take a leisurely stroll around your own damn infirmary once in a while?
And hey, maybe one of the graveyard shift people has something interesting to read in their desk drawers.
So she drags herself out of bed, leaning on her crutches and starts to hobble out of the private room they put her in. Only to realize that she doesn’t really know where she wants to go in the first place. Smart, Carter, she thinks, real smart. One wouldn’t even guess you got a PhD and made it to full bird… oh. Huh. Apparently, she isn’t the only overnight guest at the infirmary, after all.
There’s someone standing in the door of the private room two doors over from hers and… ah, must be Morsberg, that German guy on Moore’s team. If she remembers it correctly, he’s this week’s surgeon on night duty and apparently, he’s talking to someone. She must have caught the tail end of the conversation, because she hears him say, “He’ll be fine in a couple days, don’t worry. Tough bastard like him, nothing short of missing both his lungs is keeping him longer in a hospital bed than three days.” She can hear small, female laughter ring from inside the room and catches him grinning before adding, “Just call if you need anything,” and turning to leave, his back towards her.
Okay, now she’s curious. Nothing in the mission reports John gave her indicated someone else being forced to stay overnight in the infirmary so it must have happened just two or three hours ago. Carefully not to draw notice of the retreating figure of Morsberg, she slowly makes her way over to the doorway he was just occupying and risks a look inside… oh. She doesn’t even know why but she hadn’t expected that.
There are two people inside. One, Thomas Moore of all people, lying in a hospital bed, on his left side, with an IV drip feeding into his right hand and the tubes for artificial ventilation in his nose, apparently sleeping and the facing the second person in the room, Maureen Reece. Reece is curled up in a chair, her drawn up knees leaning against the left side railing of Moore’s bed, her head propped up by her elbow resting on that same railing, and she’s writing something down on a writing pad.
For two people who are supposed to be military superior and subordinate, the scene looks oddly intimate and well-rehearsed, as if this isn’t the first time that Reece is sitting at her commanding officer’s hospital bed in the middle of the night.
Okay, yeah, it most probably isn’t. She’s been on a gate team long enough herself and has been around other gate teams for years; enough to know that keeping vigil at an injured team member’s bed is an absolute common occurrence and seeing as Reece and Moore have been on the same team for something like four or five years, it shouldn’t seem as something out of the ordinary for her. And yet…
Ah. There it is. Moore coughs, an ugly, wracking sound that at least explains the oxygen tubes, and Reece doesn’t even look up, just reaches out and rubs Moore’s back with her free hand, while never even stopping to write whatever she’s working on. He keeps coughing and Reece moves her free hand from his back to the hand in which the IV’s butterfly needle sticks, carefully squeezing his fingers before propping up her head again. That’s exactly what’s been bugging her, right there.
She has, of course, sat at the bedside of one or more of her team mates countless times - worried, tired, way too often scared out of her mind - and she has used physical touch as a way of encouragement for the bedridden, too. But never, never with Jack. Never with the guy who was her superior officer.
Never with the guy whom she’d loved for the better part of her service life.
Okay, she knows she should just return to her room and try to sleep - or at least her leg seems to think so because boy, simple fracture or not, it still hurts after standing around for longer than a minute - but then again, she’s their commander and she needs to take care of them and whatever weird thing is going on between them. Plus she’s just damn curious about a few things regarding the two of them and this seems like a good moment to clear a few of them up.
Having made her decision, she hobbles into the room, surprised that Reece is still not looking up and clears her throat to see how deeply Reece has engrossed herself in whatever she’s writing down there. And yeah, that at least yields a result, as Reece looks up and turns around, almost instantaneously blushing as soon as she realized who the late caller is. “Oh, ma’am, sorry, I uh, I didn’t see you there.” Then, as if she seems to have registered the leg in a plaster cast, she gets up vacate her chair, adding, “Uh, sorry. Would you like to sit down, ma’am?”
She can’t decide whether Reece’s sudden diligence is due to her status as Reece’s commander, due to the near mythological status Cam once told her she has with younger female armed forces personnel or due to Reece feeling very much caught in the act of conduct bordering on a violation of the UCMJ. Either way, it’s almost amusing to see a US Marine blush while trying to look inconspicuous very hard.
But yeah, no laughing at subordinates, as every mentor she ever had told her, so she leaves it at a noncommittal smile and shaking her head. “No, it’s alright, I’m fine. I just wanted to check up on the unfortunate soul being stuck here same time as me.” Reece doesn’t look too impressed and if she’s honest, she wouldn’t be either. She rolls her eyes at herself. “And I was bored to tears.”
That makes Reece smile, just a tiny “she’s my commander, I’m not supposed to find her discomfort funny” smile, as she leans back against Moore’s bed, her arms and legs crossed, and she wonders whether Reece, a linguist by degree, if she remembers it right, knows what she’s communicating with that. “So,” she says, gesturing towards the figure on the bed with her chin, “what’s he got himself into this time?”
She has known Thomas Moore for a few years, like one Academy grad who works for the SGC knows another. She knows he graduated as one of the top three of the class of ’94, just like Evan Lorne, did a few years in special ops running highly classified black ops, just like Jack did and has been with the SGC since 2003, with a curious stint away from the SGC in 2004 and 2005 before coming to Atlantis. And the three things she remembers about him most are: he’s one of the very few people who ever breached more than the first two backdoors to Area 51 from a non-DOD network, he has a tendency to be an insufferable asshole, and he seems to be such a big fan of infirmary beds that he seems to land himself in one every other week.
Reece, on the other hand, she doesn’t know really well beyond her service jacket but Reece apparently knows Moore well enough not to take offense at the rather flippant phrase. She just shrugs and even manages not to turn around to check on Moore when he coughs again. “Jumped into an ice cold pond to save a villager’s kid, got dragged under a couple times, nearly drowned, the usual.” Reece sounds all casual about it and she’d almost believe her if there hadn’t been the clenching of her jaw and flexing of her fingers. Years of dealing with all kinds of unpredictable situations have left her with a pretty fine tuned radar to micro-expressions and Reece just telegraphed a pretty clear message. “Anyway, uh, they said he got a pretty good dose of hypothermia and there was some residual water in his lung but… it’s nothing he hasn’t been through before.”
Yeah, she bets that. And she bets Reece is trying to tell herself that it’s just a fluke, nothing to worry about. At least that’s what she would tell herself if one of her team mates would be lying in a hospital bed battling what is probably pneumonia. She wouldn’t however, itch to constantly reassure and comfort one of them by touching them as much as Reece is obviously itching to.
Alright, this is ridiculous. She really tried not to ask so Reece wouldn’t have to tell but Reece is making that incredibly hard. “You know what, Captain? I think I’ll take that chair, after all.”
Uh-huh, definitely not what Reece had probably been hoping for but she has to give the Marine credit for being a professional about it and turning around the chair so she can lower herself into it easier while Reece is scooting up to sit on Moore’s bed instead, fitting neatly into the space he created with slightly curling up on his side. Reece is apparently wholly oblivious to the image it projects. This isn’t getting any better.
Okay, how to go about this? “Captain… can I ask you a question?” Yeah, that’s innocent enough, right?
“Why I still put up with Thomas Moore as my CO?” Or not. “Oh, sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to…”
“It’s fine, Captain. That’s actually exactly what I wanted to ask.” She could have tried to sugarcoat it, sure, but she learned very early on that honesty is a trait troops respect very highly in a commander.
So, to be honest, she’s a little surprised when Reece doesn’t look like she appreciates the question, at all. Instead, she frowns and sets out to speak, closes her mouth and then says, sounding as if she’s trying really hard for casual even though she’d rather go with annoyed, “You know what’s weird, ma’am? That people never ask me “Why are you staying with him?” in regard to Sergeant DeLisle or Stabsarzt Morsberg.”
That’s true. And if she’s honest, people never asked her why she’s staying with Daniel or Teal’c. They asked about Jack because probably everyone who saw them together for longer than a few minutes during their active gate team years knew exactly what was going on, and they asked about Cam because let’s be honest, he can be a bit of a pain in the ass, and way too many people asked that about Vala, never being able to realize what a wonderful, brave, brilliant person Vala Mal Doran is. Unfortunately, the realization leaves her with a pretty lame explanation. “They’re… just not as unique?”
Unique. Yeah, unique is one way to describe Thomas Moore. She’s pretty sure Jack must have used it at least once during his tenure as commander of the SGC - or maybe it was more in the direction of “fucking kindergartner, Jesus fucking Christ” - and she’s pretty sure… “They can be just as annoying when they choose to, trust me.” Right. She has yet to see it but for some reason, she believes Reece. “No, people only ask me “Why are you staying with him?” in regard to Major Moore, and frankly, that’s not fair.”
Maybe it isn’t but people aren’t blind, either. She’s pretty sure Reece got the offer to command her own team at least three times in the last four years and every time, Reece found a way to politely decline the offer without harming her career or making it look weird but yeah, she thinks she’s been in Reece’s position just a couple years too many to believe all her excuses. She knows what’s it like to know with searing clarity that staying so close to someone you’re attracted to a lot more than you’re allowed to is the last thing you should be doing and the one thing you just can’t leave be.
She’s pretty sure, though, that Reece would just give her another well-worded noncommittal excuse if she confronted her with that point blank and she’s not in the mood for bullshit from any of her subordinates, so she decides to play along. “Why are you staying with them, then?”
Reece rubs her neck, still obviously very aware of the much too close presence of her commanding officer. “I uh… I actually wondered that myself, couple of times.” Yeah, she definitely has. Every self-respecting gate team member has at least once asked themselves why the hell they’re still staying with the bunch of weirdoes they’re walking through the event horizon on a regular basis with. God knows she has.
She can’t help grin a little. “What did you come up with?”
Reece just shrugs. “Lots of things. Everything from “because someone has to” to “honestly, no idea” but when I get right down to it, it’s… it’s just…” Okay, she hadn’t expected that. She had expected something between the standard “because someone has to” and “honestly, no idea” but she hadn’t expected Reece to get visibly uncomfortable and communicate very clearly that neither of those alternatives are what she settled with. She also hadn’t expected that whatever Reece had settled with would be something that made her squirm like that. Suddenly she feels sympathy for the Marine.
She shakes her head, tries to sound apologetic. “I’m sorry, Captain, I shouldn’t have asked. You were right, it wasn’t fair, and I guess it’s not really my business, so…”
“The last time I left a team, that team ceased to exist.” Huh?
She was about to get up, following her apology but Reece’s matter of fact statement puzzled her enough to sink back into her chair and frown at the Captain, asking, “Beg your pardon?”
“SG10.” Reece is trying very hard to sound casual about it. So hard, in fact, that she’s sure that whatever happened to the team wasn’t casual. “They never got a replacement for me and three months after I left for Atlantis, another member was killed in action.” Yep, that’s it, right there. She can almost smell all the survivor’s guilt still emanating from the Captain, even though it must have been three or four years. “That left only Major Moore and Sergeant DeLisle. Who, in turn left the SGC for a pretty short stay at AFSOC about which they still refuse to speak and then a stint at Area 51, that apparently was so boring that there isn’t anything to talk about in the first place.” Ah, so that’s why both Moore and his Sergeant temporarily vanished from the SGC’s radar. And yeah, she starts to remember… it had been a bad time, and they’d lost a lot of people and she thinks that the one SG10 lost was a doctor, another Academy graduate… “So, you see, when I left a team the last time…”
Right. It makes sense, from the slightly twisted point of view of an SGC officer. Reece left SG10 and things went down the drain after that. She gets it. Because she’d been in the same place, more often than she cares to admit. However, “It doesn’t mean that it’ll go the same way if you accept your own gate team now.”
At that, Reece gives her a sigh, part resigned, part annoyed. “I know that, ma’am. Really, I do. But after last time… I’m just not… I’m just not ready to take any chances.”
She wonders whose fault that is. She wonders whether it’s due to the fact that Reece thinks her presence in Moore’s team works as some kind of good luck charm to Moore, keeps him from getting killed or if she considers herself the good luck charm for the entire team, as she claims. She wonders if that’s the only thing keeping Reece on the team or if it’s something deeper, some twisted way of punishing herself by constantly being around the guy she definitely has non-UCMJ approved feelings for, some weird way of denying herself what she could have if she just accepted a position outside of Moore’s chain of command… if she and John have a bigger problem with Moore’s team than they initially thought.
Moore’s team’s been on their radar for a while now but they’d decided not to do anything about it since it hadn’t seemed to affect anyone’s performance and they’d figured that if Reece didn’t consider herself ready to command her own team, she definitely wasn’t ready so they would just put her in command of small first contact or trade agreement missions for a while for her to gain the necessary confidence but… maybe they’d been wrong.
It’s late, though, and her leg is starting to bother her, and she finally feels tiredness creeping up on her so she decides to keep this as a problem to ponder for another day. They have enough problems as it is and a Marine Captain in love with her Air Force commanding officer who as of yet hasn’t let it cloud her judgment under fire is still very low on her list of priorities. She smiles. “Just give us a heads up soon as that changes. Would be a shame if someone like you never got the command post she deserved.”
Aw, now isn’t that cute? Reece just blushed again, a lot deeper than she did when she’d felt caught by her commander and she nearly laughs when the Captain mumbles, “Of course, ma’am. Thanks, ma’am.” That reaction is definitely due to her alleged legendary status among especially the female armed forces personnel at the SGC.
“You’re welcome, Captain. Now…” she works hard to get up, waving away Reece when she hops down from Moore’s bed to offer a hand and finally manages to get back to her crutches, “please excuse me. Even Colonels need to sleep and I’d rather not be caught out of bed by the infirmary personnel.”
That makes Reece grin and she bids her good night, turning her chair back and returning to it when she hobbles out of the room. And then stops at the door when she hears the rustling of sheets behind her. Damn, she knows she should just keep on hobbling to her room but something… makes her turn around, making sure she can see into the room but can’t be spotted by the occupants, and she finds a spot just in time to see Moore slightly open his eyes and say in a raspy, low, slightly labored, slightly sleepy voice, “S that Colonel Carter?”
Oh. Uh-oh. He hadn’t been asleep, after all. Not really, anyway. She just really hopes that he was too much out of it to have realized what the entire exchange had been about. Even thought she’d like to deny it, Thomas Moore isn’t the dumb idiot he wants to make everyone believe he is.
Reece for her part just replies with a kind of weary, “Yeah,” resuming her former stance of curling up in her chair and leaning her drawn up knees against Moore’s bed.
She wonders if either of them are aware of how intimate with each other they look, when Moore rasps, “What’d she want?”
“Nothing, just checking up,” Reece says, shaking her head, her voice sounding weirdly lenient.
Moore just grins a little sleepily. “Carter’s a damn fine CO.” Wow. That’s… some unexpected praise. Not that Moore ever openly disrespected her, like he sometimes likes to do with his Academy buddy Lorne but yeah, Jack was absolutely right with being frustrated about the underhanded way Moore could be a pain in the ass when he thought commanding officer were making stupid decisions or were poking their noses into things that weren’t their business. Which was just a little bit funny since Jack wasn’t that different in his time as commander of SG1.
“Sure is.” Huh. That’s a little thin for someone who blushed as openly as Reece about a bit of praise from her. Or…
“You still got that hero worship thing going on.” Right. Moore definitely isn’t the moron he likes to play. He isn’t even as oblivious to non-verbal reactions as he pretends. Even though he must be semi out of it due to antibiotics and painkillers, he still saw something in Reece even she hadn’t heard at first.
“No, I don’t.” Yep, he totally did. The lady doth protest too much. That’s almost cute, seeing as the lady in question is a US Marine and all that.
“Do, too.” Shit, she nearly laughed at Moore’s absolutely smug facial expression.
“Do not.” Yeah, right.
“Do…” Before Moore can continue the little childish bickering war he started, he’s wracked by another coughing seizure, sounding pitiful even to her ears.
Reece, for her part, gets up from her chair way too fast to support Moore who sat up, still being shaken by a really nasty cough. That totally does not sound like “a little bit of pneumonia, nothing to worry about” and she almost feels sorry for Moore, as Reece murmurs sounding painfully soft, “Easy there, sir.”
That kind of surprises her, seeing as from the way they’re acting with each other, she’d thought that… “Told you. No sir off duty.” Right. Okay. It doesn’t surprise her at all that Reece keeps trying to call Moore “sir” after that. Classic attempt at putting some distance between you and the object of your unsanctioned affection. Only it’s not working when you’re doing it while gently helping your CO to lie back.
And not leaving his bed once he’s lying down, either but settling down in a spot painfully close. Oh God, she starts feeling like a damn voyeur when Reece says, sounding almost regretful, “We’re never off-duty in Atlantis.”
“Bull…” And there’s another round of coughing, thankfully not as bad as the last one.
Reece leans forward a little. “Hey, you need anything?”
“Just a new set of lungs, if it’s not too much trouble.” Leave it to male special forces officers to make inappropriate jokes at exactly the wrong time.
It’s to Reece’s credit that all she does is laugh softly and pat his shoulder while getting off that damn bed and telling him, “You’ll be fine, Tom. Just get back to sleep.”
She expects Moore to make another quip, tell her he’s not tired or some such nonsense but she gets something completely different when Moore turns on his side again and murmurs, “You stay, right?”
For a moment, she wants to go back in and ask where the hell Thomas Moore is and what they did with him because she swears, she would never have expected a man of Moore’s type to be able to sound so small and insecure. What the hell just happened?
“Where else would I go, anyway, huh?” Yeah. Definitely not the first time they’re doing this, and probably not the first time Moore asked that, either. Something’s going on here and she’s not sure if she likes it.
Moore takes a rattling breath, rasping, “Night, Kid.”
“Night, Tom.” She can’t see Reece’s face when she bids Moore good night but she can see the contented little grin on Moore’s face when he closes his eyes and buries into his pillow, Reece gently patting his thigh, just a nice, friendly, totally platonic gesture. Something she would have given Jack, if she’d ever thought about touching him in the infirmary. Something she’d have done to avoid stroking his cheek or kissing his forehead. Holy Hannah, she really needs to talk to John. And probably to Lorne, too.
Maybe the problem is a little bigger than she thought at first. Maybe they really do have a problem on their hands here. Just a Marine in love with her Air Force Co would have been easy to deal with. The Air Force CO actually reciprocating that feeling and still doing nothing to get the Marine off his team? All kinds of problems. Goddammit. Why can’t people just be a little smarter and logical about this whole personal feelings on the job business?
Ah hell, it’s late and if she stands around here any longer, the night nurse probably will get suspicious, so she decides to call it a night and get back to her room, firmly set on sitting down her department heads to develop a strategy geared towards interpersonal relationships in the workplace as soon as she can. The earlier, the better but right now, she’s just about done with the day and finally tired enough to want nothing more than to return to her bed, take her painkillers and hope for nothing to happen while she sleeps off everything that happened today. Hopefully, that is not too much to ask. Just for once. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Stargate, Sam Carter, Sam asking Maureen why she still deals with Tom
Summary: Sam Carter always wondered why a certain US Marine never accepted command of her own team. She gets her answer in one late night in the infirmary. Maybe a tag to "Trio".
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme, attempt #4. Argh. Late, late, late, etc. Anyway. This is part of my Minor Characters 'verse, taking place during S4 of SGA, directly after "Trio" (which totally is not one of my favorite episodes but provided the perfect backdrop for this fic, so I hope mackenziesmomma forgives me for making this SGA rather than SG1). Which means that there are massive spoilers for anything Minor Characters up to this point (which is a lot *coughs) but at least I could combine two of my favorite things: writing "late night in the Atlantis infirmary" fic with "Sam Carter talking to younger female officers" fic (of which there isn't nearly enough out there. Why do people not write this???). So... I hope there are still people out there who like this?
And We’ll Join The Dreamers And Renegades
“Hey, have you heard the radio news
They say that soon all hell will break loose
Me, I am trying to do my part
But really changing the world seems so hard
Hey man, I’m tired of working all day
I’m turning into a daysleeping walking cliché
Hey man, let’s wait until daylight fades
And we’ll join the dreamers and renegades.”
Milow, “Dreamers And Renegades”
Go and take that Atlantis posting, they said. It’ll be good for your career, they said. You won’t get to spend the night in the infirmary half as often as on an active gate team, they said. No one said anything about breaking your fucking leg by trying to climbing out of a hole you fell into, and yet she’s here in the infirmary with a cast on her leg and getting stir crazy.
It’s an hour into the graveyard shift and most of the staff has left so there aren’t many people around to talk to. John brought her a stack of the most important mission reports of today and other recent paperwork - she will not attach “kindly” to this because he very obviously enjoyed burying her under paper where she couldn’t escape - but there are only so many versions of “and then we had a really interesting encounter with the local wildlife” you can read in one evening and there are no more interesting books left to read for her in either her quarters or the Atlantis open library. And yeah, of course she could just go to sleep, but for some reason the day’s events have left her weirdly wired and bouncy. She’d never tell anyone outright but man, is she bored.
She eyes the crutches next to her bed, yet again. The fracture wasn’t bad enough to rate surgery but due to it being untended for a relatively long period, Keller made her stay the night at the infirmary, “just to make sure everything’s alright” and then promptly left herself. They gave her the crutches for short trips, like to the bathroom and explicitly stated that she wasn’t to take leisurely strolls around or anything but seriously, what use is being the commander of an entire installation like Atlantis if you can’t take a leisurely stroll around your own damn infirmary once in a while?
And hey, maybe one of the graveyard shift people has something interesting to read in their desk drawers.
So she drags herself out of bed, leaning on her crutches and starts to hobble out of the private room they put her in. Only to realize that she doesn’t really know where she wants to go in the first place. Smart, Carter, she thinks, real smart. One wouldn’t even guess you got a PhD and made it to full bird… oh. Huh. Apparently, she isn’t the only overnight guest at the infirmary, after all.
There’s someone standing in the door of the private room two doors over from hers and… ah, must be Morsberg, that German guy on Moore’s team. If she remembers it correctly, he’s this week’s surgeon on night duty and apparently, he’s talking to someone. She must have caught the tail end of the conversation, because she hears him say, “He’ll be fine in a couple days, don’t worry. Tough bastard like him, nothing short of missing both his lungs is keeping him longer in a hospital bed than three days.” She can hear small, female laughter ring from inside the room and catches him grinning before adding, “Just call if you need anything,” and turning to leave, his back towards her.
Okay, now she’s curious. Nothing in the mission reports John gave her indicated someone else being forced to stay overnight in the infirmary so it must have happened just two or three hours ago. Carefully not to draw notice of the retreating figure of Morsberg, she slowly makes her way over to the doorway he was just occupying and risks a look inside… oh. She doesn’t even know why but she hadn’t expected that.
There are two people inside. One, Thomas Moore of all people, lying in a hospital bed, on his left side, with an IV drip feeding into his right hand and the tubes for artificial ventilation in his nose, apparently sleeping and the facing the second person in the room, Maureen Reece. Reece is curled up in a chair, her drawn up knees leaning against the left side railing of Moore’s bed, her head propped up by her elbow resting on that same railing, and she’s writing something down on a writing pad.
For two people who are supposed to be military superior and subordinate, the scene looks oddly intimate and well-rehearsed, as if this isn’t the first time that Reece is sitting at her commanding officer’s hospital bed in the middle of the night.
Okay, yeah, it most probably isn’t. She’s been on a gate team long enough herself and has been around other gate teams for years; enough to know that keeping vigil at an injured team member’s bed is an absolute common occurrence and seeing as Reece and Moore have been on the same team for something like four or five years, it shouldn’t seem as something out of the ordinary for her. And yet…
Ah. There it is. Moore coughs, an ugly, wracking sound that at least explains the oxygen tubes, and Reece doesn’t even look up, just reaches out and rubs Moore’s back with her free hand, while never even stopping to write whatever she’s working on. He keeps coughing and Reece moves her free hand from his back to the hand in which the IV’s butterfly needle sticks, carefully squeezing his fingers before propping up her head again. That’s exactly what’s been bugging her, right there.
She has, of course, sat at the bedside of one or more of her team mates countless times - worried, tired, way too often scared out of her mind - and she has used physical touch as a way of encouragement for the bedridden, too. But never, never with Jack. Never with the guy who was her superior officer.
Never with the guy whom she’d loved for the better part of her service life.
Okay, she knows she should just return to her room and try to sleep - or at least her leg seems to think so because boy, simple fracture or not, it still hurts after standing around for longer than a minute - but then again, she’s their commander and she needs to take care of them and whatever weird thing is going on between them. Plus she’s just damn curious about a few things regarding the two of them and this seems like a good moment to clear a few of them up.
Having made her decision, she hobbles into the room, surprised that Reece is still not looking up and clears her throat to see how deeply Reece has engrossed herself in whatever she’s writing down there. And yeah, that at least yields a result, as Reece looks up and turns around, almost instantaneously blushing as soon as she realized who the late caller is. “Oh, ma’am, sorry, I uh, I didn’t see you there.” Then, as if she seems to have registered the leg in a plaster cast, she gets up vacate her chair, adding, “Uh, sorry. Would you like to sit down, ma’am?”
She can’t decide whether Reece’s sudden diligence is due to her status as Reece’s commander, due to the near mythological status Cam once told her she has with younger female armed forces personnel or due to Reece feeling very much caught in the act of conduct bordering on a violation of the UCMJ. Either way, it’s almost amusing to see a US Marine blush while trying to look inconspicuous very hard.
But yeah, no laughing at subordinates, as every mentor she ever had told her, so she leaves it at a noncommittal smile and shaking her head. “No, it’s alright, I’m fine. I just wanted to check up on the unfortunate soul being stuck here same time as me.” Reece doesn’t look too impressed and if she’s honest, she wouldn’t be either. She rolls her eyes at herself. “And I was bored to tears.”
That makes Reece smile, just a tiny “she’s my commander, I’m not supposed to find her discomfort funny” smile, as she leans back against Moore’s bed, her arms and legs crossed, and she wonders whether Reece, a linguist by degree, if she remembers it right, knows what she’s communicating with that. “So,” she says, gesturing towards the figure on the bed with her chin, “what’s he got himself into this time?”
She has known Thomas Moore for a few years, like one Academy grad who works for the SGC knows another. She knows he graduated as one of the top three of the class of ’94, just like Evan Lorne, did a few years in special ops running highly classified black ops, just like Jack did and has been with the SGC since 2003, with a curious stint away from the SGC in 2004 and 2005 before coming to Atlantis. And the three things she remembers about him most are: he’s one of the very few people who ever breached more than the first two backdoors to Area 51 from a non-DOD network, he has a tendency to be an insufferable asshole, and he seems to be such a big fan of infirmary beds that he seems to land himself in one every other week.
Reece, on the other hand, she doesn’t know really well beyond her service jacket but Reece apparently knows Moore well enough not to take offense at the rather flippant phrase. She just shrugs and even manages not to turn around to check on Moore when he coughs again. “Jumped into an ice cold pond to save a villager’s kid, got dragged under a couple times, nearly drowned, the usual.” Reece sounds all casual about it and she’d almost believe her if there hadn’t been the clenching of her jaw and flexing of her fingers. Years of dealing with all kinds of unpredictable situations have left her with a pretty fine tuned radar to micro-expressions and Reece just telegraphed a pretty clear message. “Anyway, uh, they said he got a pretty good dose of hypothermia and there was some residual water in his lung but… it’s nothing he hasn’t been through before.”
Yeah, she bets that. And she bets Reece is trying to tell herself that it’s just a fluke, nothing to worry about. At least that’s what she would tell herself if one of her team mates would be lying in a hospital bed battling what is probably pneumonia. She wouldn’t however, itch to constantly reassure and comfort one of them by touching them as much as Reece is obviously itching to.
Alright, this is ridiculous. She really tried not to ask so Reece wouldn’t have to tell but Reece is making that incredibly hard. “You know what, Captain? I think I’ll take that chair, after all.”
Uh-huh, definitely not what Reece had probably been hoping for but she has to give the Marine credit for being a professional about it and turning around the chair so she can lower herself into it easier while Reece is scooting up to sit on Moore’s bed instead, fitting neatly into the space he created with slightly curling up on his side. Reece is apparently wholly oblivious to the image it projects. This isn’t getting any better.
Okay, how to go about this? “Captain… can I ask you a question?” Yeah, that’s innocent enough, right?
“Why I still put up with Thomas Moore as my CO?” Or not. “Oh, sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to…”
“It’s fine, Captain. That’s actually exactly what I wanted to ask.” She could have tried to sugarcoat it, sure, but she learned very early on that honesty is a trait troops respect very highly in a commander.
So, to be honest, she’s a little surprised when Reece doesn’t look like she appreciates the question, at all. Instead, she frowns and sets out to speak, closes her mouth and then says, sounding as if she’s trying really hard for casual even though she’d rather go with annoyed, “You know what’s weird, ma’am? That people never ask me “Why are you staying with him?” in regard to Sergeant DeLisle or Stabsarzt Morsberg.”
That’s true. And if she’s honest, people never asked her why she’s staying with Daniel or Teal’c. They asked about Jack because probably everyone who saw them together for longer than a few minutes during their active gate team years knew exactly what was going on, and they asked about Cam because let’s be honest, he can be a bit of a pain in the ass, and way too many people asked that about Vala, never being able to realize what a wonderful, brave, brilliant person Vala Mal Doran is. Unfortunately, the realization leaves her with a pretty lame explanation. “They’re… just not as unique?”
Unique. Yeah, unique is one way to describe Thomas Moore. She’s pretty sure Jack must have used it at least once during his tenure as commander of the SGC - or maybe it was more in the direction of “fucking kindergartner, Jesus fucking Christ” - and she’s pretty sure… “They can be just as annoying when they choose to, trust me.” Right. She has yet to see it but for some reason, she believes Reece. “No, people only ask me “Why are you staying with him?” in regard to Major Moore, and frankly, that’s not fair.”
Maybe it isn’t but people aren’t blind, either. She’s pretty sure Reece got the offer to command her own team at least three times in the last four years and every time, Reece found a way to politely decline the offer without harming her career or making it look weird but yeah, she thinks she’s been in Reece’s position just a couple years too many to believe all her excuses. She knows what’s it like to know with searing clarity that staying so close to someone you’re attracted to a lot more than you’re allowed to is the last thing you should be doing and the one thing you just can’t leave be.
She’s pretty sure, though, that Reece would just give her another well-worded noncommittal excuse if she confronted her with that point blank and she’s not in the mood for bullshit from any of her subordinates, so she decides to play along. “Why are you staying with them, then?”
Reece rubs her neck, still obviously very aware of the much too close presence of her commanding officer. “I uh… I actually wondered that myself, couple of times.” Yeah, she definitely has. Every self-respecting gate team member has at least once asked themselves why the hell they’re still staying with the bunch of weirdoes they’re walking through the event horizon on a regular basis with. God knows she has.
She can’t help grin a little. “What did you come up with?”
Reece just shrugs. “Lots of things. Everything from “because someone has to” to “honestly, no idea” but when I get right down to it, it’s… it’s just…” Okay, she hadn’t expected that. She had expected something between the standard “because someone has to” and “honestly, no idea” but she hadn’t expected Reece to get visibly uncomfortable and communicate very clearly that neither of those alternatives are what she settled with. She also hadn’t expected that whatever Reece had settled with would be something that made her squirm like that. Suddenly she feels sympathy for the Marine.
She shakes her head, tries to sound apologetic. “I’m sorry, Captain, I shouldn’t have asked. You were right, it wasn’t fair, and I guess it’s not really my business, so…”
“The last time I left a team, that team ceased to exist.” Huh?
She was about to get up, following her apology but Reece’s matter of fact statement puzzled her enough to sink back into her chair and frown at the Captain, asking, “Beg your pardon?”
“SG10.” Reece is trying very hard to sound casual about it. So hard, in fact, that she’s sure that whatever happened to the team wasn’t casual. “They never got a replacement for me and three months after I left for Atlantis, another member was killed in action.” Yep, that’s it, right there. She can almost smell all the survivor’s guilt still emanating from the Captain, even though it must have been three or four years. “That left only Major Moore and Sergeant DeLisle. Who, in turn left the SGC for a pretty short stay at AFSOC about which they still refuse to speak and then a stint at Area 51, that apparently was so boring that there isn’t anything to talk about in the first place.” Ah, so that’s why both Moore and his Sergeant temporarily vanished from the SGC’s radar. And yeah, she starts to remember… it had been a bad time, and they’d lost a lot of people and she thinks that the one SG10 lost was a doctor, another Academy graduate… “So, you see, when I left a team the last time…”
Right. It makes sense, from the slightly twisted point of view of an SGC officer. Reece left SG10 and things went down the drain after that. She gets it. Because she’d been in the same place, more often than she cares to admit. However, “It doesn’t mean that it’ll go the same way if you accept your own gate team now.”
At that, Reece gives her a sigh, part resigned, part annoyed. “I know that, ma’am. Really, I do. But after last time… I’m just not… I’m just not ready to take any chances.”
She wonders whose fault that is. She wonders whether it’s due to the fact that Reece thinks her presence in Moore’s team works as some kind of good luck charm to Moore, keeps him from getting killed or if she considers herself the good luck charm for the entire team, as she claims. She wonders if that’s the only thing keeping Reece on the team or if it’s something deeper, some twisted way of punishing herself by constantly being around the guy she definitely has non-UCMJ approved feelings for, some weird way of denying herself what she could have if she just accepted a position outside of Moore’s chain of command… if she and John have a bigger problem with Moore’s team than they initially thought.
Moore’s team’s been on their radar for a while now but they’d decided not to do anything about it since it hadn’t seemed to affect anyone’s performance and they’d figured that if Reece didn’t consider herself ready to command her own team, she definitely wasn’t ready so they would just put her in command of small first contact or trade agreement missions for a while for her to gain the necessary confidence but… maybe they’d been wrong.
It’s late, though, and her leg is starting to bother her, and she finally feels tiredness creeping up on her so she decides to keep this as a problem to ponder for another day. They have enough problems as it is and a Marine Captain in love with her Air Force commanding officer who as of yet hasn’t let it cloud her judgment under fire is still very low on her list of priorities. She smiles. “Just give us a heads up soon as that changes. Would be a shame if someone like you never got the command post she deserved.”
Aw, now isn’t that cute? Reece just blushed again, a lot deeper than she did when she’d felt caught by her commander and she nearly laughs when the Captain mumbles, “Of course, ma’am. Thanks, ma’am.” That reaction is definitely due to her alleged legendary status among especially the female armed forces personnel at the SGC.
“You’re welcome, Captain. Now…” she works hard to get up, waving away Reece when she hops down from Moore’s bed to offer a hand and finally manages to get back to her crutches, “please excuse me. Even Colonels need to sleep and I’d rather not be caught out of bed by the infirmary personnel.”
That makes Reece grin and she bids her good night, turning her chair back and returning to it when she hobbles out of the room. And then stops at the door when she hears the rustling of sheets behind her. Damn, she knows she should just keep on hobbling to her room but something… makes her turn around, making sure she can see into the room but can’t be spotted by the occupants, and she finds a spot just in time to see Moore slightly open his eyes and say in a raspy, low, slightly labored, slightly sleepy voice, “S that Colonel Carter?”
Oh. Uh-oh. He hadn’t been asleep, after all. Not really, anyway. She just really hopes that he was too much out of it to have realized what the entire exchange had been about. Even thought she’d like to deny it, Thomas Moore isn’t the dumb idiot he wants to make everyone believe he is.
Reece for her part just replies with a kind of weary, “Yeah,” resuming her former stance of curling up in her chair and leaning her drawn up knees against Moore’s bed.
She wonders if either of them are aware of how intimate with each other they look, when Moore rasps, “What’d she want?”
“Nothing, just checking up,” Reece says, shaking her head, her voice sounding weirdly lenient.
Moore just grins a little sleepily. “Carter’s a damn fine CO.” Wow. That’s… some unexpected praise. Not that Moore ever openly disrespected her, like he sometimes likes to do with his Academy buddy Lorne but yeah, Jack was absolutely right with being frustrated about the underhanded way Moore could be a pain in the ass when he thought commanding officer were making stupid decisions or were poking their noses into things that weren’t their business. Which was just a little bit funny since Jack wasn’t that different in his time as commander of SG1.
“Sure is.” Huh. That’s a little thin for someone who blushed as openly as Reece about a bit of praise from her. Or…
“You still got that hero worship thing going on.” Right. Moore definitely isn’t the moron he likes to play. He isn’t even as oblivious to non-verbal reactions as he pretends. Even though he must be semi out of it due to antibiotics and painkillers, he still saw something in Reece even she hadn’t heard at first.
“No, I don’t.” Yep, he totally did. The lady doth protest too much. That’s almost cute, seeing as the lady in question is a US Marine and all that.
“Do, too.” Shit, she nearly laughed at Moore’s absolutely smug facial expression.
“Do not.” Yeah, right.
“Do…” Before Moore can continue the little childish bickering war he started, he’s wracked by another coughing seizure, sounding pitiful even to her ears.
Reece, for her part, gets up from her chair way too fast to support Moore who sat up, still being shaken by a really nasty cough. That totally does not sound like “a little bit of pneumonia, nothing to worry about” and she almost feels sorry for Moore, as Reece murmurs sounding painfully soft, “Easy there, sir.”
That kind of surprises her, seeing as from the way they’re acting with each other, she’d thought that… “Told you. No sir off duty.” Right. Okay. It doesn’t surprise her at all that Reece keeps trying to call Moore “sir” after that. Classic attempt at putting some distance between you and the object of your unsanctioned affection. Only it’s not working when you’re doing it while gently helping your CO to lie back.
And not leaving his bed once he’s lying down, either but settling down in a spot painfully close. Oh God, she starts feeling like a damn voyeur when Reece says, sounding almost regretful, “We’re never off-duty in Atlantis.”
“Bull…” And there’s another round of coughing, thankfully not as bad as the last one.
Reece leans forward a little. “Hey, you need anything?”
“Just a new set of lungs, if it’s not too much trouble.” Leave it to male special forces officers to make inappropriate jokes at exactly the wrong time.
It’s to Reece’s credit that all she does is laugh softly and pat his shoulder while getting off that damn bed and telling him, “You’ll be fine, Tom. Just get back to sleep.”
She expects Moore to make another quip, tell her he’s not tired or some such nonsense but she gets something completely different when Moore turns on his side again and murmurs, “You stay, right?”
For a moment, she wants to go back in and ask where the hell Thomas Moore is and what they did with him because she swears, she would never have expected a man of Moore’s type to be able to sound so small and insecure. What the hell just happened?
“Where else would I go, anyway, huh?” Yeah. Definitely not the first time they’re doing this, and probably not the first time Moore asked that, either. Something’s going on here and she’s not sure if she likes it.
Moore takes a rattling breath, rasping, “Night, Kid.”
“Night, Tom.” She can’t see Reece’s face when she bids Moore good night but she can see the contented little grin on Moore’s face when he closes his eyes and buries into his pillow, Reece gently patting his thigh, just a nice, friendly, totally platonic gesture. Something she would have given Jack, if she’d ever thought about touching him in the infirmary. Something she’d have done to avoid stroking his cheek or kissing his forehead. Holy Hannah, she really needs to talk to John. And probably to Lorne, too.
Maybe the problem is a little bigger than she thought at first. Maybe they really do have a problem on their hands here. Just a Marine in love with her Air Force Co would have been easy to deal with. The Air Force CO actually reciprocating that feeling and still doing nothing to get the Marine off his team? All kinds of problems. Goddammit. Why can’t people just be a little smarter and logical about this whole personal feelings on the job business?
Ah hell, it’s late and if she stands around here any longer, the night nurse probably will get suspicious, so she decides to call it a night and get back to her room, firmly set on sitting down her department heads to develop a strategy geared towards interpersonal relationships in the workplace as soon as she can. The earlier, the better but right now, she’s just about done with the day and finally tired enough to want nothing more than to return to her bed, take her painkillers and hope for nothing to happen while she sleeps off everything that happened today. Hopefully, that is not too much to ask. Just for once. Wouldn’t that be nice?