Work Text:
Deficit
Prompt: Not Enough
They were as close as brothers, because that was pretty much the protocol. You signed up, you got your ass kicked in boot camp, you joined a platoon and made a best buddy. Then, either he was KIA, or you were, and then if you were lucky you shipped out somewhere else, made a new one and told them war stories about how much you missed Bob, or Chip or fucking Drill Sergeant Himmler, if you were really playing it.
But with Jamie, 'brothers' didn't quite cut it.
The first time Adam asked him if he was okay was the night before they left for Pegasus. They'd both been knocking around the SGC for a couple of months, but he didn't really feel like he knew Markham at all. He was an Other Peoples' Person; the kind that seemed to leave a haze of popularity and pleasantness like pixie dust when he'd been around.
Adam was the sort that everybody liked, but no one ever noticed. They just didn't really have any excuse to mix, because Adam was always the observing satellite and Jamie was the centre of the Universe. But that night, in the quiet sighs of the dormitory, it was the silence from Jamie's bunk that pulled him out of orbit.
He hadn't expected three simple words to bring the other marine to his bunk, or for him to tell him precisely and in great detail why he couldn't sleep; he hadn't expected it to become a routine that would follow them into the Pegasus Galaxy and make him wish for shit to happen as often as possible. But for every time he sat quietly and allowed him to sound off, or punch the fuck out of soft furnishings, or just hung out with him after hours when the city was peaceful, 'brothers in arms' became less and less satisfactory. Until it wasn't enough at all.
But when Jamie fell asleep on the couch beside him, on the day they nearly died, it didn't seem too inappropriate to sidle a little nearer and tuck his shoulder under Jamie's head. And as he gazed at the space above the plasma screen on the rec room wall, he wondered if there could ever be enough words in the Universe to explain the way he felt when sleepy fingers curled around his own.