Snow Blind
Rating: PG (but mention of slash)
Spoilers: For Season 9, Avalon Pt 1.
Pairing: Cameron/OC
Summary: Some memories are difficult to see clearly.
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Some of Cameron’s memories of the crash are fuzzy and dark while others are so clear and bright they’re almost painful to look at. Sometimes when he’s tired and lying on bedsheets that have known his skin and his skin alone, he closes his eyes and he sees. He sees white and snow. He figures for the most part that he’s remembering Antarctica but sometimes it feels like a different whiteness. The kind of whiteness that comes when the snow is so white that it hurts your eyes until you can’t see anymore. After the crash, he couldn’t move his arms or legs but he managed to tilt his head enough to see a reflection of his co-pilot who was sitting behind him.
Lieutenant Adam Jordan Banks. One night Cameron dreamt he saw the blood trickling from Adam’s lips. There was a tightness in his chest and he woke up screaming. Now whenever he dreams of Adam, he dreams that the snow is so blindingly white that all he can see of Adam is the faint silhouette. There’s no blood anymore and it’s like Adam is sleeping. He also used to dream about the last time they made love but now Adam’s face is becoming washed out and faint in his memories. He needs a photograph to even remember the colour of the man’s eyes. He feels guilty about this and wonders sometimes if he was punished for some misdeed. The Reverend would always shake his head and look at Cameron and Adam in disappointment, as if they were naughty schoolboys rather than grown men serving their country. Dying for their country. The Reverend could have reported them to their superiors but he never did. Maybe, like all good pseudo-father figures, he was giving them the chance to do the ‘right’ thing.
Cameron likes to think that the ‘right’ thing was keeping Adam happy until the day he died. It was difficult at times to see what had been right about Adam’s death. They’d done their job, the entire squadron had, but their lives were washed away in the whiteness of battle. It hadn’t mattered how good they were. Except that it did. In the hospital, a lot of the nurses and doctors tried to talk to him but their faces and words got lost in the whiteness. His mother’s prayers shone from his bedside, a soft whisper in the snow. Then there was a man sitting beside his bed. A man hunched over in a bomber jacket with soft hair. He looked like Adam with glasses but his voice was something different – soft and serious whereas Adam was brash and loud.
The man said, “None of us would be here today if it wasn't for what you did.”
Cameron was on too many pain-killers to recognise the speaker’s face and he didn’t hear much more before he slid back into a cacoon of whiteness. But it was enough to know that Adam’s death had a purpose and Cameron held onto that thought in colour.
The End.
