Work Text:
Places Not to Ravish My Girlfriend,
Even If She Did Come Back From A Near-Fatal Mission Three Days Late
By B. N. "Skipper" Griffith, aged 27 1/2
Gateroom: Everyone will get jealous. She will smell and taste like swamp. She will be in pain and punch me for obstructing a clear route to Dr. Keller. Dr. Keller will punch me for obstructing a clear route to Dr. Keller. If she doesn't get the fifty-pound pack off her back, she will fall over like a flipped turtle and it will not be sexy. Dr. Weir will not be impressed. Major Lorne will be too impressed.
Infirmary: Those beds are rickety.
Infirmary showers: No privacy, and that's the Bad Touch brand of exhibitionism. Dr. Keller will not be impressed if I reinjure her patient. No handrails. She will be in too much pain to stand up.
On the way back to her room: Secluded alcoves: not so secluded as you need them to be.
My girlfriend's bed, GOD DAMN IT: She fell asleep in her clothes. And it is probably better to let her CO keep watch, seeing as he is more interested in making sure she's all right since it was his fuckup that got her injured in the first place.
Mess hall, breakfast: Major Lorne will listen with avid interest to my excuse for failing to report for duty on time. He will not, however, be sympathetic.
Anywhere, anytime, from 0800 to 1600: Stupid Lorne. Stupid work. Stupid space vampires. Stupid commission.
Anywhere, anytime, from 1600 to 1645: Stupid Keller. Stupid checkups. Stupid Sheppard. Stupid debriefing.
Mess hall, 1645 to 1730: Stupid dinner.
On the way back to her room: You'd swear the people who built this place heard "alcove" and thought it meant "wall".
During dinner, half of Atlantis wanted to greet Trudie now that she was back. Dr. Weir even stopped by to pat her shoulder and say hello. Life was so uncertain out here that people were willing to celebrate any victory they got, and after the jailbreak she'd pulled, Trudie was a bit of a heroine.
It was nice to see her getting a bit of attention. When Skipper had arrived in Atlantis as junior military, Trudie'd been a wallflower in a lab who observed everything but wasn't much involved in the life of the city. She'd come out of her shell a little to play native guide when he was new, wide-eyed and a little intimidated, enough to get him to notice that when she stopped clutching file folders she had a pretty good body and when she stopped biting her tongue all the time she had a pretty wicked sense of humour. Now that she was on a team, pulling heroics of her own, he worried when she was out and celebrated her returns home the same way she did for him.
He doubted either of them would say what they had between them was romance, but at a posting like Atlantis you didn't like to be alone. It wasn't really love, but it wasn't nothing either.
Finally the crowd started thinning, and Trudie caught his attention by putting her hand on his. "Hey," she said. "Time to go?"
He smiled and picked up his tray. "Sure thing, baby."
They made their way back to her room slowly. The thing about being injured like that was, you had to do things in steps. Careful progressions. Dole out effort in little bursts, and rest afterwards. She started stumbling a little from tiredness, so he took her arm to guide her through the hallways. When Skipper did steer her into her room, she sat down on her bed, pulled off her shirt, and looked at him with the fatigued despair that meant she was too tired to do anything more.
It was, in the end, easier to lie back on the bed and let Trudie drape herself over him. Most of her injuries were mapped out with livid bruises, visible and angry, and squares of clean white gauze. The internal injuries worried him more, as much as an inexpert layman's fretting helped anything. His hand hovered over her back, over the kidneys that weren't damaged too badly, thank God.
She sighed a little, pillowing her head on his shoulder. Her eyes dipped half-shut as her fingers reached across and dug ever so slightly into the fabric of his shirt over his pectoral. She wanted him to be here; she was sore and tired and battered enough that she could just fall asleep, right here. Maybe, he thought with a little chagrin, he really should just let her.
"Can't get my hair out," she murmured quietly. Her hands twitched, as if to say, See? I'd try.
Who the hell had even put her hair up? he wondered. It just struck him as cruel and unusual punishment to put her through that. He kissed her forehead as his fingers began to search the herringbone braid for pins. She sighed again and squirmed, resettled, until she was settled more firmly to his side. Her breaths fanned onto the bare skin of his collar, and that wasn't just distracting, that was unfair, not that he was going to tell her to move.
He dropped the pins, one by one, into the little silver box on her bedside table that must hold a hundred of the things. Atlantis had a communal repository of two thousand bobby pins, a bequest of one Laura Cadman to the women of the city before she was rotated out. It was one of their mythical hordes, like the flat of Coke some of the scientists had lost in the mission's first year that people claimed was still hidden in the city somewhere. Trudie'd told him about it when he was still new and full of wonder.
He suspected her of falling asleep, really. The braid finally came loose of its moorings, revealing a pin he'd missed. It was easy to pick apart and lay out, though he'd been frequently assured that fingercombing was never as welcome as he thought it was (at least with Trudie). Instead he kissed her forehead again, and she murmured and tried to burrow into him.
All right; he was going to do this right, goddamnit. With the more convenient hand he popped the catch on her bra, then stroked her arm. "Come on, Trudie girl," he said. "Let's get you ready for bed."
She didn't articulate a reply, but her hand slid down his torso and took a slightly clumsy grip on his hip. "Mm?" He tried moving just a little, to get the leverage to roll her over, and she opened her eyes muzzily to squint down at her hand, then up at him a little. He eased out from under her. She was vaguely suspicious but still pliant when he took the bra from her shoulders and pitched it into the hamper. When he sat her on the side of the bed so he could unlace her boots for her, she squinted at him again.
"So," she said after a minute, "we fucking?"
Skipper was a credit to his ancestry and upbringing. He refrained from choking, drew the boot off with all due gentleness, and said, "Only if you're up for it."
She let him pull the other boot off too, and clarified, "That means you get naked too."
There was the Platonic idea of sex, which was more than anything unrestrained and joyful. It was the congruences that bodies found at the limits of their abilities; it was forgetting who you were for the moment, losing what you knew in the simple fact of pleasure. This was not that ideal, but it wasn't just a shadow on a cave, either. His blood ran a little warmer when he saw her looking down at him, bare-breasted and valiant. "It was on my agenda, actually."
"You're laughing at me."
He smiled at the habitual complaint, took hold of her knee and kissed the inside of it. "Only a little."
She scowled at him (as was right and just in the traditions of the land) and started unbuttoning her pants with clumsy fingers. He had to help her take them off, stripped her socks for completeness's sake; while waiting for her to do the buttons, he'd disposed of his shirt.
"I didn't shave my legs," she told him, her voice still blunted with fatigue. If she hadn't just been run over by an only sort-of metaphorical freight train, it would have been a joke and a challenge, and she'd be laughing and shooting the shit with him, but right now everything was dulled and slowed down, despite her efforts to keep up.
"A fault for which I'll never forgive you," he said easily, and hooked her calf over his shoulder. Her hand came out and cupped his head, briefly, as he pressed his lips to the inside of her knee again. She sighed—a brief moment of exasperation: this will ache like a bitch if I don't do something—and flailed for her pillow, set it behind her. Then she dropped her foot to the floor and leaned forward, elbows braced on her knees. Skipper rose on his knees to kiss her, which was enough to start his head buzzing and to reveal that the position took way too much effort for both of them.
Things worked a lot better when he just bent her onto her back, so she had a bed under her; she raised her head so he could fix the pillow, laid her arms above her head in a position of languorous surrender. He planted an elbow on either side of her (his feet still on the floor—but he'd had worse workouts, and he was not about to move her more than he had to) and kiss her, sloppy and warm, until she laughed and whispered, "Stop teasing, you."
"Can't help it," he said back, and put chaste lips to her nose. "It's in my nature." Cheek. Forehead. Other cheek. Let her catch his mouth. He'd spent a week there reporting in every morning, with a little tiny surge of disappointment when her name was still marked in on Major Lorne's whiteboard, under OUT. He'd always hoped that he'd wake up and find she'd come back in the night.
Because thinking she'd be home by morning helped him sleep when he went to bed.
So then he stopped teasing, let her have the kiss she wanted, sweet and gentle, and let his mouth travel over the parts of her body not too badly hurt to touch. By the time the position went from 'minor inconvenience' to 'real fucking pain' she moaned, almost closer to a whimper, and put a hand on his head again.
His life in the Air Force had been semi-nomadic, and he hadn't yet found anyone he wanted to settle down with, or anyone he'd ask to follow after him. It meant he'd had a lot of lovers and not always a lot of time with anyone. It was nice to stop, sometimes, and find someone you really got to know, past the steep learning curve of a first time. She was trembling, oh so slightly, when he sank to his knees again. He slid a hand around her thigh, pressed his cheek to it and dropped a kiss on her skin; she lowered the hand opposite and he reached up, threaded fingers with her. She hardly needed encouragement anymore to spread her legs for him, angle her hips to give him access to her cunt. The willingness in the motion, the blatant presentation, stirred his cock a little as he kissed down her leg.
It was a curious sort of possessiveness, having without the need to keep. I taught her to do that, he thought, and put his mouth on her. He muscles in her thighs quivered, from the effort of keeping them spread open. She didn't do that before she met me. His calling card was a little more oblique than the bruises mottling her torso. A little more permanent.
Her breath was catching now, a rise-fall with the edge of desperation. He could feel her changing under his lips, getting aroused. "So," she said, her voice ragged. "If you want to... I'm probably only going to come once, so why don't you stop."
He did, after a second, and put his chin on her thigh to gaze up at her, his hand cupping her hip.
"Yeah, shut up," she said. "I know my sex-talk sucks."
"I never said so," he told her mildly. "Don't see anything wrong with what you said," It wasn't a fight worth having. Hell, before he'd started sleeping with her she hadn't been willing to talk in bed at all. He wasn't one to criticize progress, since he generally appreciated pointers when he was about to crush her to death.
Or when he was about to make her come, which meant they were coming up in the world of storm-warnings. He kissed the fingers twined with his before letting go, so she could sit up and they could get under the covers, and he could shuck his pants and briefs, palm a condom from her bedside table. She took the pillow, of course, and wedged it under her head. He debated options, then gave himself enough of a stroke to move from half-hard to erect enough to roll the condom on.
She reached over and squeezed his hand, made him look up at her.
"I'm sorry," she said softly. "Thank you for taking care of me. And I'm sorry I'm being all bitchy about this. I'm just all sore and grumpy."
"Happens," he said, and squeezed her hand. "S'I recall, I was not all sunshine and light during the Grievous Manly Wound."
She laughed softly, almost nothing more than an exhalation. "We didn't even try to have sex then."
"No, because I was wounded. In a manly and grievous fashion." He smiled, the joke shared between them. She'd seen him at—not his worst, but maybe his most pathetic.
She smiled back, then tried to sit up a little. "Oh! Drugs."
"Drugs!" he said. "Right."
"On the desk," she said.
Her dosages were set out in daily ration packages, next to a half-empty water bottle. He shook the day's compartment into a little cup while trying not to get lubricant from the condom onto the pills, which was a silly cause but he was sometimes overfastidious that way. She took the pills one at a time, with rationed sips from the bottle, while he sat behind her and kissed her neck. Then he took cup and bottle away from her and left them on the bedside table.
She shook her head a little to free her hair and smiled. "Okay," she said, sounding a little more alive. "Bitchy's over. I'm good." It wasn't the drugs acting fast; it was just that she was seeing the end of her day. She didn't have to keep carrying the load: her endurance didn't have to get her through any more. She had enough energy for sex; then she was down for the count.
She'd escaped an enemy camp while concussed, two days ago. She deserved as much rest and relaxation as she could get and he could give her.
"You," he murmured, sliding into bed and slipping his arms around her, "are absolutely valiant." She shot him a glance, flattered and puzzled and curious, then dropped her head with a tiny moan when he nuzzled her neck.
She'd come home. She'd be alive in the morning. This tiny little island of people would hold together a little longer. Her hand slid across his back and her skin tasted like salt and she didn't know she was flexing her knees, bringing her hips up to him, asking for the kinds of things she'd never say.
When he slid into her, the pleasure was sharp and sweet, like getting an answer you'd given up on hearing, and she moaned, low and pleased. Huffed out breath when he rubbed a hand against her clit and flexed her knee again, so that he groaned a little and answered her, gentle thrusts until she urged him harder. He dropped kisses on her neck, calling cards over the bruises of somebody else's hands.
"And beautiful," he said, drawing the thread back again, tight and snug inside her, rocking them into pleasure. She made a small and desperate sound. He found her mouth, long enough for a fleeting kiss. "Valiant, and beautiful, and brave."
Her hands dragged over his back, until they were planted brazenly over his ass. Admission of want. He dropped his head and gave it to her, everything she wanted, until she drew in a shocked breath and cried out with pleasure. He felt his own orgasm coming, and rocked against her body while he came.
It was delicious, in a way, just to lie there, his body warm and sated and feeling sweet. Not for too long; he pulled out and draped himself over her side, and had to muster up a moment of vague dissatisfaction before he could really care that the condom had stayed behind.
Trudie made a little sleepy sound when he pulled it out. When he moved to put it in the trash she rolled over, taking her pillow with her, in one last act of defiance against unconsciousness.
It cannot have been that much of a wet spot, you sissy, he thought at her.
Damn her, she looked adorable when she slept. Even if she did have a black eye. Sighing, he gave up on resentment. She didn't move at all when he leaned over and kissed her ear; true to her word, she was out like a light.
He hesitated for a minute, then drew the blankets over her and smoothed them out, then sat beside her. He was sated and langorous, but not really sleepy. It wasn't even 1900 yet, according to the clock on her bedside. If he lay down he'd toss and turn and wake her up again. He could go find something to work on, but she slept better with the lights off and he didn't want to disturb her.
At least she'll get enough sleep, he thought, playing with the ends of her hair.
"I'm glad you're safe," he said.
She just slept on, secure and uninterrupted.
Then he got up, and dressed. Hopefully she'd sleep right through till morning and get all the rest she needed.
He locked her door on the way out.