stormylullabye

Title: Cookies
Author:

stormylullabye
Fandom: SGA/SG-1
Characters: John, Cam
Word Count: 913
Rating: PG
Summary/Notes: Written for

lears_daughter, who a John and Cam friendship fic, set during The Return.

"I need a place to stay," John says when Cam opens the door. Cam just looks at the other man for a second, because that's why he has a damn key, but Cam nods after a moment and walks back down the hallway to his bedroom. He hears the door lock as he climbs back into bed, and then he’s asleep again.

He wakes up in the morning to the sound of someone banging around in the kitchen, and it takes him a minute to remember his doorbell ringing in the middle of the night and his best friend in two galaxies looking like he needed a place to curl up for a week or so.

“John?” Cam calls as he makes his way down to the kitchen. He stops short as he reaches the doorway, because John’s standing at the oven with a spatula and a baking sheet, scooping cookies from the sheet to a cooling rack. Every bit of counter space Cam has is covered in cookies, and Cam spares a thought for how damn quietly John can move when he wants to before he processes that this many cookies means John hasn’t slept. He probably hasn’t even sat down for very long.

“Damn,” is all Cam can come up with. It’s probably the one thing about John that Cam was most surprised to learn – that he bakes when he’s stressed out. He’d muttered something about his housekeeper and his mother when Cam had asked, and he’d recognized the need to not talk about it, so he’d left it well enough alone.

He waits until John’s scraped the burnt bits of cookie from the tray and stuck it back in the oven with new dough before he walks over. Cam plucks the spatula from John’s hand and John looks at him, surprised, like he hadn’t heard Cam coming down the hallway or talking to him. “Is it morning?”

“Sit down,” Cam says instead of answering.

“The cookies-”

“-will be fine,” Cam tells him firmly. “Sit down before you fall over.”

It’s like the words take the resistance out of John. He slumps a little and walks to the table, and by the time he’s sitting in the chair it looks like he never wants to stand again.

Cam gives John his space as he waits for everything in the oven to finish. There’s a cookbook open on the counter, and Cam recognizes his Momma’s recipe for peanut butter cookies. He waits out the time and removes the two trays in the oven in turn, and as Cam’s cleaning the trays, John blurts it out. “They kicked us out.”

Cam makes himself keep washing the trays. “Who kicked you out of what?”

“The Ancients,” John tells him, and there’s more story there, but John just keeps going. “After we helped them and everything, Helia and her buddies, and we brought them back to Atlantis and they shut it down and took it from us and made us leave.” He runs his hand through his hair and it sticks up even more, but Cam doesn’t say anything.

“So you’re back on Earth?” Cam’s trying to get his mind around it.

“Yeah.”

“For good.”

John closes his eyes and lets out a breath. “Unless something changes.”

Cam doesn’t really know what to say. He’s never seen John like this before, not even when he and Nancy were at their worst, not when his mom had died, nothing. “I’m sorry,” he says eventually, and John cracks his eyes open.

“Me too,” he says, and when he shuts his eyes again his shoulders slump down a little more.

Cam stands and walks over to shake John’s shoulder. “Bed,” he says firmly. There’s a good chance that John doesn’t even remember the last time he slept.

“Cookies,” John mumbles.

“Got it,” Cam assures him as he guides his friend to the guest bedroom. John’s out cold before Cam even shuts the door.

Cam sighs as he makes his way back to the kitchen and surveys his counters. He really hadn’t overestimated before; there are cookies everywhere, in piles and stacks and on trays, and Cam heads for the Tupperware and starts silently packing everything up. It takes a while to get everything into its own container, and when he’s done and looking at the little plastic bins, Cam can’t imagine ever having enough of a sweet tooth to eat all of them. There are hundreds of cookies on the counter.

The cookies aren’t the real problem, though, and Cam knows that. The problem is what to do with John, how to help him fit the pieces together. John had been there as much as he could after Cam’s accident, because that’s what friends do – they drag each other back from the edges. Even if John hadn’t stopped in to visit and called and done everything he’d done while Cam was laid up, he’d still be trying to figure out how to help, though. It’s not in John’s nature to ask for help, and he is right now, in his own way. And it’s not in Cam’s nature to refuse that kind of request, especially not from someone who’s pretty much family.

Cam sits down at the table and breaks open one of the containers he’d just packed up. The cookie is still warm in his hand, and the chocolate chips melt the rest of the way as he slowly eats it, contemplating what he should do next.