Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #08 Winking: I want to date you
Title: Badlands Start Treating Us Good
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: Milwaukee Fire Department firefighter Laura Cadman really needs to get back in shape after her line-of-duty accident.
A/N: So, second installment, this time with added seriously frustrated Laura Cadman. Yay! I hope you like it?
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( I've Tried So Hard, Baby )
Badlands Start Treating Us Good
“Badlands, you gotta live it every day,
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay,
We’ll keep pushin’ till it’s understood,
and these badlands start treating us good.”
Bruce Springsteen, “Badlands”
Technically, she shouldn’t be here. She’s still on sick leave, even though she nearly begged the docs to at least let her go on light duty but apparently something as trivial as a compound fracture gets to keep you from doing your job far too long to be necessary around here. She’d love to say that it wasn’t like that in Corps but yeah, she’d be lying, and good Marines don’t lie.
So, anyway, technically she shouldn’t be here but her physical therapist told her she needs to put some muscle back on that leg and the fire house has such a nicely furnished weight room and, quite frankly none of the creepy guys giving her unambiguously creepy looks as the local gym around her corner. So, okay, it does have Evan Lorne, but he’s not creepy. In fact, he’s intelligent, hard-working and in possession of a very sexy sense of dry, witty humor. Pretty good catch, actually. Unfortunately, he’s also a constant reminder at how much she fails at basically everything in her life that’s related to emotions.
Huffing, she puts another set of weights on the machine before she sits down to start pushing it up with her legs. It’s been four weeks since they released her from the hospital and she’s been working almost every day to get back into shape and she still can’t push as much as she used to. She’s never gonna get back on the squad if she doesn’t manage to measure up soon.
Aw, shit, shit, shit, that fucking leg still hurts, goddammit.
Another frustrated huff escapes her, sounding too close for comfort like a fucking sob. This is bad, so fucking bad. She was just about to move on from rope rescue - “Well, you are the lightest among us, Molly Marine!” - to closed space rescue, just about to add another notch on her HURT squadron stick, on the way towards becoming a full-fledged rescue squad member, and then she took one false step and suddenly she can’t even do her usual ten-miler or push some weights without wanting to cry from pain and frustration. It’s just not fucking fair.
But then again, as a wise man once wrote, life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than… “Ah, figures.”
What the… Okay, play it cool, play it smooth. She dumped him and there’d been months of awkward encounters and uncomfortable silence between them but ever since he was the first person she saw after waking up from surgery after the accident that nearly killed her, things somehow became a little easier. She gives him a slightly annoyed look. “What figures?”
She can see how much he wants to say something like “Shouldn’t that be “what figures, Lieutenant”?” but yeah, just because things are slowly starting to get better doesn’t mean they don’t still keep pussyfooting around each other. So in the end, he leaves it at, “That you’d be in here. Only firefighter in the house who’d be blasting Springsteen for a workout.”
Pfft. So she likes the Boss. So what. He knew that about her. ‘Sides, “Death To My Hometown” pretty much fits her current mood in its angry, accusatory tone. And it’s just plain impossible to sit still while listening to it. Over and over and over again.
Okay. Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed up the volume that much. She rolls her eyes. “Got a problem with that, Lieutenant?”
Shit. That definitely wasn’t the right tone to use, judging from the way he clenches his jaw. One, two… “Nah.” Oh. Huh. That wasn’t the reaction she expected. “But I’m sure there isn’t just that one song worth listening to.”
Damn, he’s right. Of course he’s right. She lets off the lifting and allows herself to rest a moment, desperate not to look as if she needs it. “Look, I’m sorry…”
“’S okay, Laura, don’t worry.” There shouldn’t be that undercurrent of hurt and loss in those words. Or rather, she shouldn’t be able to hear it, even over Springsteen blasting out his anger at towns being destroyed by ruthless Big Business to the world. “Not like it’s a bad song, after all.” There. That’s better. Bit of casual mocking, bit of dry humor. Even a wink. That’s the Evan Lorne she knows, the one she couldn’t get into bed with fast enough, even though she was a candidate fresh out of the Academy, and he was almost an instructor of hers.
She tries to grin back, be the too cocky for her own good junior firefighter she used to be before that entire mess started. “Pretty damn fine song, if you ask me.”
“Yeah.” Apparently, her pretense worked. “Say… how are you, generally?” Or maybe it didn’t.
So yeah, he’d made it sound casual, like a co-worker asking another in a throw-away line, the thing you don’t expect a real answer to. Only she still knows him too well to overhear the underlying question, knows him well enough to know what he’d been thinking when he asked her that. For a moment, she considers answering honestly, telling him about the pain her leg is still giving her and the frustration of still not measuring up to her pre-incident self eating away at her and the fear of maybe never being allowed to get back on the job nearly paralyzing her at night.
But then she remembers that he’s her ex and that he’s her ex for a reason and she just shrugs and says, “Doing fine,” as if that answers everything.
She half hopes that he won’t accept that but then again, even when they’d been sleeping with each other, he’d been wise enough not to press too hard whenever something had been eating at her, just as she’d been careful to refrain from poking and prodding too deep when she’d sensed that he was having a hard time about something. It just hadn’t been that kind of relationship, and she’d been happy with that. Until she hadn’t been anymore, but that’s a different story altogether.
As it is, in the end, he simply nods and walks over to the treadmill. He doesn’t comment on the fact that “Death To My Hometown” just started again, just starts easing into his workout routine by setting out in a light trot, and it’s kind of embarrassing how easily she can predict the next steps. Also how hard she suddenly finds it to stop throwing him little furtive looks because damn, he definitely didn’t get any less hot in the last couple of months.
She’d always known that, of course, because they’d still encountered each other every damn shift - she should have asked to be assigned another watch but then she’d have had to explain to Sheppard why she’d dumped Evan after she’d been officially done with her candidacy and could have gotten a relationship waiver with no problems at all, and that hadn’t exactly been something she’d wanted to do - but yeah, she’d been avoiding the weight room in the last seven months for a reason. For some reason, it’s mostly easy to purposely overlook the fact that Evan Lorne never lost the edge that several years of serving in the military gave him - even if it was the Air Force - when he’s wearing station uniform or bunker gear but it’s positively impossible to do so when he’s wearing workout clothes. Damn man manages to look sexy as hell in something as unremarkable as common shorts and t-shirts, and she doesn’t even know why that is.
Jesus fucking Christ, she needs to get the hell out of here.
For once actually listening to her sense of self-preservation, she gets up, wipes down the weight machine and plugs her iPod out of the station mid-song, not even taking care to look casual when she moves towards the exit. It almost works, right up until the point when she reaches the door and hears the treadmill stop behind her. She should just keep walking but in the end, the point of no return’s been over and done the moment he walked in, hasn’t it?
“Wanna know what I think, Laura?” She already does, that’s the entire problem. She knows, which is why she isn’t even surprised to hear him say that in an uncharacteristically low and kind of worried voice. “I think you’re not doing fine. In fact, I think you’re anything but doing fine, and I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”
There’d be no repercussions if she just walked out on him now, without even looking back. He wouldn’t rat her out to Sheppard, and he most probably wouldn’t even go back to going out of his way to avoid her, like he did in the last seven months. She could just leave and they’d probably never speak of this again, just keep on working their way back to being something akin to friends.
So really, there’s no logical explanation whatsoever for her slowly turning around and taking a deep breath and preparing herself to lie to him full in his face.
And really, she’d have done it. She’d have gone through with it. If only her voice hadn’t refused to cooperate. If only she’d been able to look him into the eye. If only she hadn’t suddenly been only seeing blurry shapes of colors due to her eyes watering. She would have lied to him and told him it was all bullshit if only her body would have let her.
As it is, all her body lets her do is slump down against the nearest wall and give a small, embarrassing cry when her leg bends the wrong way for a moment and make herself as small as possible with pulling her legs towards her chest as close as possible and hugging her legs and putting her forehead down on her knees in a fight against breaking down in tears worth Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn.
And, of course, just as futile.
So yeah, she doesn’t break down in an all out crying fest, with tears streaming down her cheeks in droves and her voice catching in big ugly sobs and her throat burning with anger and disappointment, like she did the first time of attempting her usual Sunday afternoon ten-miler after the incident. But the tears are still there, lurking in the back of her eyes, threatening to spill over any moment, and she’s so wrapped up in trying to at least get some damage control done that she doesn’t notice the quiet presence next to her at first.
It takes her another moment or two to snap out of it enough to realize that she’s not the only one sitting on the weight room floor with her back to the wall anymore. He’s sitting next to her, leaning against the wall, his legs outstretched on the ground, ankles crossed. On first glance, he looks completely at ease, if a little serious but you know, not like he’s going to lose it any minute. Not like her.
He doesn’t say anything, at least for the first few minutes and she wonders why the fuck he just did that. But then again, it’s not the first time he does something like that; just sitting down next to her, all silent, just… waiting. Or maybe pondering, she really doesn’t know. He has done it before, three or four times while they were having their casual not really casual sleeping with each other spending off-duty days with each other but not calling it a relationship thing, and he’s done it again during the time she was laid up in the hospital.
Usually, he’d just ring her up, poke his head into her room to ask her how things were, give her a little update on things at the station whenever neither Teyla nor Jennifer could make it that day, but there was this one evening when he came in, still in his dirty bunker gear, dragging his step and sagging down heavily into the chair next to her bed. There’d been soot all over his face and he hadn’t even take off the Nomex gloves, just buried his hand in his hands and sat there until she’d quietly asked, “Bad day, huh?” He’d nodded and in the end he had told her about it, not much, really but it had been scary how easy it had been for her to understand that he was telling her about that old firefighter adage of “Sometimes, “I had a bad day at work” means “I almost didn’t make it home”” having been true that day.
Okay, so their roles had actually been reversed that evening but the pattern’s always the same. He’d silently wait with great patience until she lost hers - bastard knows she’s not one to be patient to begin with - and he’d only speak once she made herself known. Almost as if… he was waiting for her to be ready to acknowledge his presence or something.
Only it’s not going to happen today, that much she knows. She’s not ready to tell anyone about how bad things really are, not even herself, honestly, and no amount of sitting next to her will change that. It’s not that it’s personal, it’s never been that. It’s that it taps too deeply into who she is, who she wanted to…“You know, I had something like that happen to me, too.”
Huh?
She doesn’t want to react but damn, she has already looked up before she remembers that it should have been better not to acknowledge his presence but yeah, too late for that now. At least he’s not even the least bit snug about getting her to react, just lightly touches the outside of his left leg. “Remember that scar? Yeah, that’s its story, and don’t tell me you never considered asking about it.”
For two people just casually fucking each other once in a while when they weren’t fighting fires or watching Sox games or beating up each other at playing pool, they sure do know each other way too well. Because he’s damn right. She had been dying to ask him about it whenever she ran her hand along that long, ugly surgical scar all the way from his lower thigh to mid-calf. “Anyway, it was about ten years ago, when I was stationed at Eglin. Pretty nasty incident at the AAC involving unsafely stored ammunition, and, long story short, it got me three months of cooling my heels in a hospital bed and an only narrowly avoided medical board hearing.”
Well… she’d always had a feeling there was some nasty story behind that scar, nastier than behind all of the other ones that always looked mostly like run of the mill firefighter’s scars. Couple of healed over burn marks, mostly on his forearms, some old lacerations that pretty sure had needed stitches in his face and another smaller, barely visible surgical scar on his right wrist. She’d never asked after any of their stories, mostly because they were easy to read, anyway. And he’d never asked about any of her scars, so.
So she probably owes him an answer. It’s just that she feels a little tired, a little wrung out and she can’t bring herself to say something flippant or just brush him off, like she usually would have and instead finds herself laying down her head, her right cheek touching her knees, softly asking, “Why three months?”
He gives a small humorless laugh and leans his head back against the wall, his eyes closed. Then he leans forward, rubs his hand through his hair and then along the back of his neck, shrugging. “Complications.”
That’s all he says and probably all he’s gonna say on the matter, at all. It’s okay, really. She can see that there was more to it, from the way he tries so very hard to make it look all casual but yeah, that’s not where they stand right now. She goes for a different thing instead. “How’d you get over it?”
He gives her another shrug and one of those little jaw clenches that mean that he didn’t especially like the question. Surprising how easy to read he’s still to her. “Lots of hard work, and I mean lots of hard work.”
Of course he’d say something like that. Would have been asked too much of him to go into any details or give her anything but a common place answer, and she’s not even being sarcastic here. For a guy like Evan Lorne, for the situation they’re currently in, it would have been asked too much of him, or her for that matter. Which is why she’s genuinely surprised when he adds, sounding anything but casual and very much serious, “Thing is: you gotta talk to someone. I know I’m not the right one for the job, not right now, but you have Keller and you have Teyla. Don’t do that Marine crap and try to be a stoic about it. Lord knows I tried that and trust me, it didn’t work.”
Thing is: he’s still doing it, and they both know it. And it’s not working. Because if he weren’t doing it, accidents in the line of duty were the last thing they’d talk about right now. It’s not about him, though, or about them, it’s about her, and that’s bad enough. Because she wishes so hard she could be all Marine about it right now. Instead, all she can do is put her forehead on her knees and rasp, “It’s all I am, Blues. All I’ve ever been.”
He’s quiet, at first, and she thinks she probably asked too much of him this time, swamping him with emotion they’d always carefully tried to keep out of their thing but in the end, she hears him quietly tell her, “I know, Laura. I know.” She knows he’s gonna tell her now that it’s everything all of them have ever been, that thing they do. But that’s bullshit because fighting fires and rescuing people really is the one thing she is and… “Right that moment you walked into the station’s garage for the first time, I knew that. God, you should have seen yourself…”
“Don’t.” Before she knows it, it’s out. It’s rude and out of place in that weird limbo of not really knowing what to do with each other they’re currently in but he’s right. He’s not the right person for her to talk about everything concerning her injury and her failure to bounce right back. There’s too much other stuff, too much emotional sandpaper rubbing the tender skin of that failed relationship raw again for her to be able to talk about something so essential with him.
She also wouldn’t be surprised if he’s angry with her or maybe disappointed. Hurt, of course. He’d have every right to it, just like he had every right to be hurt and angered by the way she dumped him, she never denied that. She expects him to be angry and hurt. Which is why it doesn’t in the least surprise her to hear him get up next to her. What does startle her is to hear him say, “Now you gonna be sitting around here all day or do some hard work, after all, Mo?”
Well. For a moment, she only dumbly looks up from her position on the ground, all the way to his outstretched hand first and then his slightly mockingly raised eyebrow and she can’t help but roll her eyes. “Really? That’s the best drill instructor you can do?”
It makes him crack a grin, one of those rare ones full of cockiness and bravado that she knows he’s fully capable of but almost never shows. He used to say that ever since she came to the fire house, they’ve got enough of that going around to outfit an entire battalion. “Watch me, Molly Marine.”
“In your dreams, Air Force,” she retorts, finally grabbing that hand and letting him haul her up, “in your dreams.”
So… wait, why did he just reduce the weight on the machine she was working on when he came in? What does he think, doing that? Does he really think she can’t… “Less weight, more repetitions. Trust me, Mo.” Right. Uh-huh. She nearly asks him when exactly he acquired that qualification as a physical therapist but then again, big long surgical scar from a compound fracture and three months in a hospital bed and still avoided a medical board hearing. “And yes, you may hear that damn song again.” She’s pretty sure she should be replying something to that, maybe reiterate how it’s a really good song and… “Once. You may listen to it one more time.”
Shit. She really should tell him where to stick that “order” but in the end, she just throws him her iPod, torn between satisfaction and horror when she catches him so off-guard that he nearly misses to fish it out the air and sits down sticking out her tongue while he plugs it back in to the stereo, Springsteen immediately blasting through the room again, going all, “But sure as the hand of God, they brought death to my hometown”. He just rolls his eyes and walks back to the treadmill and she starts pushing up that weight and that’s the moment in which she realizes that she hasn’t felt so light and optimistic as right now in a very long time.
So yeah, technically, she shouldn’t be here. But technically can really bite her ass because honestly, this weight room, right now, with exactly that company is the one place she needs to be in this very moment. She knows she’ll have to deal with all the implications and unspoken issues at some point but right now, being here gives her the edge that she needs and she’ll be forever grateful for that. One day, far into the future, she might even tell him so. Stranger things have happened. Right?
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: Milwaukee Fire Department firefighter Laura Cadman really needs to get back in shape after her line-of-duty accident.
A/N: So, second installment, this time with added seriously frustrated Laura Cadman. Yay! I hope you like it?
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( I've Tried So Hard, Baby )
Badlands Start Treating Us Good
“Badlands, you gotta live it every day,
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay,
We’ll keep pushin’ till it’s understood,
and these badlands start treating us good.”
Bruce Springsteen, “Badlands”
Technically, she shouldn’t be here. She’s still on sick leave, even though she nearly begged the docs to at least let her go on light duty but apparently something as trivial as a compound fracture gets to keep you from doing your job far too long to be necessary around here. She’d love to say that it wasn’t like that in Corps but yeah, she’d be lying, and good Marines don’t lie.
So, anyway, technically she shouldn’t be here but her physical therapist told her she needs to put some muscle back on that leg and the fire house has such a nicely furnished weight room and, quite frankly none of the creepy guys giving her unambiguously creepy looks as the local gym around her corner. So, okay, it does have Evan Lorne, but he’s not creepy. In fact, he’s intelligent, hard-working and in possession of a very sexy sense of dry, witty humor. Pretty good catch, actually. Unfortunately, he’s also a constant reminder at how much she fails at basically everything in her life that’s related to emotions.
Huffing, she puts another set of weights on the machine before she sits down to start pushing it up with her legs. It’s been four weeks since they released her from the hospital and she’s been working almost every day to get back into shape and she still can’t push as much as she used to. She’s never gonna get back on the squad if she doesn’t manage to measure up soon.
Aw, shit, shit, shit, that fucking leg still hurts, goddammit.
Another frustrated huff escapes her, sounding too close for comfort like a fucking sob. This is bad, so fucking bad. She was just about to move on from rope rescue - “Well, you are the lightest among us, Molly Marine!” - to closed space rescue, just about to add another notch on her HURT squadron stick, on the way towards becoming a full-fledged rescue squad member, and then she took one false step and suddenly she can’t even do her usual ten-miler or push some weights without wanting to cry from pain and frustration. It’s just not fucking fair.
But then again, as a wise man once wrote, life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than… “Ah, figures.”
What the… Okay, play it cool, play it smooth. She dumped him and there’d been months of awkward encounters and uncomfortable silence between them but ever since he was the first person she saw after waking up from surgery after the accident that nearly killed her, things somehow became a little easier. She gives him a slightly annoyed look. “What figures?”
She can see how much he wants to say something like “Shouldn’t that be “what figures, Lieutenant”?” but yeah, just because things are slowly starting to get better doesn’t mean they don’t still keep pussyfooting around each other. So in the end, he leaves it at, “That you’d be in here. Only firefighter in the house who’d be blasting Springsteen for a workout.”
Pfft. So she likes the Boss. So what. He knew that about her. ‘Sides, “Death To My Hometown” pretty much fits her current mood in its angry, accusatory tone. And it’s just plain impossible to sit still while listening to it. Over and over and over again.
Okay. Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed up the volume that much. She rolls her eyes. “Got a problem with that, Lieutenant?”
Shit. That definitely wasn’t the right tone to use, judging from the way he clenches his jaw. One, two… “Nah.” Oh. Huh. That wasn’t the reaction she expected. “But I’m sure there isn’t just that one song worth listening to.”
Damn, he’s right. Of course he’s right. She lets off the lifting and allows herself to rest a moment, desperate not to look as if she needs it. “Look, I’m sorry…”
“’S okay, Laura, don’t worry.” There shouldn’t be that undercurrent of hurt and loss in those words. Or rather, she shouldn’t be able to hear it, even over Springsteen blasting out his anger at towns being destroyed by ruthless Big Business to the world. “Not like it’s a bad song, after all.” There. That’s better. Bit of casual mocking, bit of dry humor. Even a wink. That’s the Evan Lorne she knows, the one she couldn’t get into bed with fast enough, even though she was a candidate fresh out of the Academy, and he was almost an instructor of hers.
She tries to grin back, be the too cocky for her own good junior firefighter she used to be before that entire mess started. “Pretty damn fine song, if you ask me.”
“Yeah.” Apparently, her pretense worked. “Say… how are you, generally?” Or maybe it didn’t.
So yeah, he’d made it sound casual, like a co-worker asking another in a throw-away line, the thing you don’t expect a real answer to. Only she still knows him too well to overhear the underlying question, knows him well enough to know what he’d been thinking when he asked her that. For a moment, she considers answering honestly, telling him about the pain her leg is still giving her and the frustration of still not measuring up to her pre-incident self eating away at her and the fear of maybe never being allowed to get back on the job nearly paralyzing her at night.
But then she remembers that he’s her ex and that he’s her ex for a reason and she just shrugs and says, “Doing fine,” as if that answers everything.
She half hopes that he won’t accept that but then again, even when they’d been sleeping with each other, he’d been wise enough not to press too hard whenever something had been eating at her, just as she’d been careful to refrain from poking and prodding too deep when she’d sensed that he was having a hard time about something. It just hadn’t been that kind of relationship, and she’d been happy with that. Until she hadn’t been anymore, but that’s a different story altogether.
As it is, in the end, he simply nods and walks over to the treadmill. He doesn’t comment on the fact that “Death To My Hometown” just started again, just starts easing into his workout routine by setting out in a light trot, and it’s kind of embarrassing how easily she can predict the next steps. Also how hard she suddenly finds it to stop throwing him little furtive looks because damn, he definitely didn’t get any less hot in the last couple of months.
She’d always known that, of course, because they’d still encountered each other every damn shift - she should have asked to be assigned another watch but then she’d have had to explain to Sheppard why she’d dumped Evan after she’d been officially done with her candidacy and could have gotten a relationship waiver with no problems at all, and that hadn’t exactly been something she’d wanted to do - but yeah, she’d been avoiding the weight room in the last seven months for a reason. For some reason, it’s mostly easy to purposely overlook the fact that Evan Lorne never lost the edge that several years of serving in the military gave him - even if it was the Air Force - when he’s wearing station uniform or bunker gear but it’s positively impossible to do so when he’s wearing workout clothes. Damn man manages to look sexy as hell in something as unremarkable as common shorts and t-shirts, and she doesn’t even know why that is.
Jesus fucking Christ, she needs to get the hell out of here.
For once actually listening to her sense of self-preservation, she gets up, wipes down the weight machine and plugs her iPod out of the station mid-song, not even taking care to look casual when she moves towards the exit. It almost works, right up until the point when she reaches the door and hears the treadmill stop behind her. She should just keep walking but in the end, the point of no return’s been over and done the moment he walked in, hasn’t it?
“Wanna know what I think, Laura?” She already does, that’s the entire problem. She knows, which is why she isn’t even surprised to hear him say that in an uncharacteristically low and kind of worried voice. “I think you’re not doing fine. In fact, I think you’re anything but doing fine, and I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”
There’d be no repercussions if she just walked out on him now, without even looking back. He wouldn’t rat her out to Sheppard, and he most probably wouldn’t even go back to going out of his way to avoid her, like he did in the last seven months. She could just leave and they’d probably never speak of this again, just keep on working their way back to being something akin to friends.
So really, there’s no logical explanation whatsoever for her slowly turning around and taking a deep breath and preparing herself to lie to him full in his face.
And really, she’d have done it. She’d have gone through with it. If only her voice hadn’t refused to cooperate. If only she’d been able to look him into the eye. If only she hadn’t suddenly been only seeing blurry shapes of colors due to her eyes watering. She would have lied to him and told him it was all bullshit if only her body would have let her.
As it is, all her body lets her do is slump down against the nearest wall and give a small, embarrassing cry when her leg bends the wrong way for a moment and make herself as small as possible with pulling her legs towards her chest as close as possible and hugging her legs and putting her forehead down on her knees in a fight against breaking down in tears worth Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn.
And, of course, just as futile.
So yeah, she doesn’t break down in an all out crying fest, with tears streaming down her cheeks in droves and her voice catching in big ugly sobs and her throat burning with anger and disappointment, like she did the first time of attempting her usual Sunday afternoon ten-miler after the incident. But the tears are still there, lurking in the back of her eyes, threatening to spill over any moment, and she’s so wrapped up in trying to at least get some damage control done that she doesn’t notice the quiet presence next to her at first.
It takes her another moment or two to snap out of it enough to realize that she’s not the only one sitting on the weight room floor with her back to the wall anymore. He’s sitting next to her, leaning against the wall, his legs outstretched on the ground, ankles crossed. On first glance, he looks completely at ease, if a little serious but you know, not like he’s going to lose it any minute. Not like her.
He doesn’t say anything, at least for the first few minutes and she wonders why the fuck he just did that. But then again, it’s not the first time he does something like that; just sitting down next to her, all silent, just… waiting. Or maybe pondering, she really doesn’t know. He has done it before, three or four times while they were having their casual not really casual sleeping with each other spending off-duty days with each other but not calling it a relationship thing, and he’s done it again during the time she was laid up in the hospital.
Usually, he’d just ring her up, poke his head into her room to ask her how things were, give her a little update on things at the station whenever neither Teyla nor Jennifer could make it that day, but there was this one evening when he came in, still in his dirty bunker gear, dragging his step and sagging down heavily into the chair next to her bed. There’d been soot all over his face and he hadn’t even take off the Nomex gloves, just buried his hand in his hands and sat there until she’d quietly asked, “Bad day, huh?” He’d nodded and in the end he had told her about it, not much, really but it had been scary how easy it had been for her to understand that he was telling her about that old firefighter adage of “Sometimes, “I had a bad day at work” means “I almost didn’t make it home”” having been true that day.
Okay, so their roles had actually been reversed that evening but the pattern’s always the same. He’d silently wait with great patience until she lost hers - bastard knows she’s not one to be patient to begin with - and he’d only speak once she made herself known. Almost as if… he was waiting for her to be ready to acknowledge his presence or something.
Only it’s not going to happen today, that much she knows. She’s not ready to tell anyone about how bad things really are, not even herself, honestly, and no amount of sitting next to her will change that. It’s not that it’s personal, it’s never been that. It’s that it taps too deeply into who she is, who she wanted to…“You know, I had something like that happen to me, too.”
Huh?
She doesn’t want to react but damn, she has already looked up before she remembers that it should have been better not to acknowledge his presence but yeah, too late for that now. At least he’s not even the least bit snug about getting her to react, just lightly touches the outside of his left leg. “Remember that scar? Yeah, that’s its story, and don’t tell me you never considered asking about it.”
For two people just casually fucking each other once in a while when they weren’t fighting fires or watching Sox games or beating up each other at playing pool, they sure do know each other way too well. Because he’s damn right. She had been dying to ask him about it whenever she ran her hand along that long, ugly surgical scar all the way from his lower thigh to mid-calf. “Anyway, it was about ten years ago, when I was stationed at Eglin. Pretty nasty incident at the AAC involving unsafely stored ammunition, and, long story short, it got me three months of cooling my heels in a hospital bed and an only narrowly avoided medical board hearing.”
Well… she’d always had a feeling there was some nasty story behind that scar, nastier than behind all of the other ones that always looked mostly like run of the mill firefighter’s scars. Couple of healed over burn marks, mostly on his forearms, some old lacerations that pretty sure had needed stitches in his face and another smaller, barely visible surgical scar on his right wrist. She’d never asked after any of their stories, mostly because they were easy to read, anyway. And he’d never asked about any of her scars, so.
So she probably owes him an answer. It’s just that she feels a little tired, a little wrung out and she can’t bring herself to say something flippant or just brush him off, like she usually would have and instead finds herself laying down her head, her right cheek touching her knees, softly asking, “Why three months?”
He gives a small humorless laugh and leans his head back against the wall, his eyes closed. Then he leans forward, rubs his hand through his hair and then along the back of his neck, shrugging. “Complications.”
That’s all he says and probably all he’s gonna say on the matter, at all. It’s okay, really. She can see that there was more to it, from the way he tries so very hard to make it look all casual but yeah, that’s not where they stand right now. She goes for a different thing instead. “How’d you get over it?”
He gives her another shrug and one of those little jaw clenches that mean that he didn’t especially like the question. Surprising how easy to read he’s still to her. “Lots of hard work, and I mean lots of hard work.”
Of course he’d say something like that. Would have been asked too much of him to go into any details or give her anything but a common place answer, and she’s not even being sarcastic here. For a guy like Evan Lorne, for the situation they’re currently in, it would have been asked too much of him, or her for that matter. Which is why she’s genuinely surprised when he adds, sounding anything but casual and very much serious, “Thing is: you gotta talk to someone. I know I’m not the right one for the job, not right now, but you have Keller and you have Teyla. Don’t do that Marine crap and try to be a stoic about it. Lord knows I tried that and trust me, it didn’t work.”
Thing is: he’s still doing it, and they both know it. And it’s not working. Because if he weren’t doing it, accidents in the line of duty were the last thing they’d talk about right now. It’s not about him, though, or about them, it’s about her, and that’s bad enough. Because she wishes so hard she could be all Marine about it right now. Instead, all she can do is put her forehead on her knees and rasp, “It’s all I am, Blues. All I’ve ever been.”
He’s quiet, at first, and she thinks she probably asked too much of him this time, swamping him with emotion they’d always carefully tried to keep out of their thing but in the end, she hears him quietly tell her, “I know, Laura. I know.” She knows he’s gonna tell her now that it’s everything all of them have ever been, that thing they do. But that’s bullshit because fighting fires and rescuing people really is the one thing she is and… “Right that moment you walked into the station’s garage for the first time, I knew that. God, you should have seen yourself…”
“Don’t.” Before she knows it, it’s out. It’s rude and out of place in that weird limbo of not really knowing what to do with each other they’re currently in but he’s right. He’s not the right person for her to talk about everything concerning her injury and her failure to bounce right back. There’s too much other stuff, too much emotional sandpaper rubbing the tender skin of that failed relationship raw again for her to be able to talk about something so essential with him.
She also wouldn’t be surprised if he’s angry with her or maybe disappointed. Hurt, of course. He’d have every right to it, just like he had every right to be hurt and angered by the way she dumped him, she never denied that. She expects him to be angry and hurt. Which is why it doesn’t in the least surprise her to hear him get up next to her. What does startle her is to hear him say, “Now you gonna be sitting around here all day or do some hard work, after all, Mo?”
Well. For a moment, she only dumbly looks up from her position on the ground, all the way to his outstretched hand first and then his slightly mockingly raised eyebrow and she can’t help but roll her eyes. “Really? That’s the best drill instructor you can do?”
It makes him crack a grin, one of those rare ones full of cockiness and bravado that she knows he’s fully capable of but almost never shows. He used to say that ever since she came to the fire house, they’ve got enough of that going around to outfit an entire battalion. “Watch me, Molly Marine.”
“In your dreams, Air Force,” she retorts, finally grabbing that hand and letting him haul her up, “in your dreams.”
So… wait, why did he just reduce the weight on the machine she was working on when he came in? What does he think, doing that? Does he really think she can’t… “Less weight, more repetitions. Trust me, Mo.” Right. Uh-huh. She nearly asks him when exactly he acquired that qualification as a physical therapist but then again, big long surgical scar from a compound fracture and three months in a hospital bed and still avoided a medical board hearing. “And yes, you may hear that damn song again.” She’s pretty sure she should be replying something to that, maybe reiterate how it’s a really good song and… “Once. You may listen to it one more time.”
Shit. She really should tell him where to stick that “order” but in the end, she just throws him her iPod, torn between satisfaction and horror when she catches him so off-guard that he nearly misses to fish it out the air and sits down sticking out her tongue while he plugs it back in to the stereo, Springsteen immediately blasting through the room again, going all, “But sure as the hand of God, they brought death to my hometown”. He just rolls his eyes and walks back to the treadmill and she starts pushing up that weight and that’s the moment in which she realizes that she hasn’t felt so light and optimistic as right now in a very long time.
So yeah, technically, she shouldn’t be here. But technically can really bite her ass because honestly, this weight room, right now, with exactly that company is the one place she needs to be in this very moment. She knows she’ll have to deal with all the implications and unspoken issues at some point but right now, being here gives her the edge that she needs and she’ll be forever grateful for that. One day, far into the future, she might even tell him so. Stranger things have happened. Right?