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The infirmary smelled like every hospital O'Neill had ever hated. Antiseptic and recycled air and something underneath that, something that reminded you that people came here to lose things.
He found Kawalsky where he'd expected to find him.
The coffee cup was half-empty and cold-looking, held in both hands the way you hold something when you've forgotten you're holding it. Ferretti's chest rose and fell under the thin blanket, the monitors beside him making their small, steady case for his continued existence.
"Doc says he's going to make it."
Kawalsky looked up. "Yes, sir."
"You going to stay here all night?"
"Yes, sir."
O'Neill nodded. He'd known before he asked. He pulled a chair from against the wall and sat down, not right beside Kawalsky, just — in the room. Present. He looked at Ferretti for a while, at the bruising along his jaw, the bandaged arm outside the blanket.
The silence wasn't uncomfortable. That was the thing about men you'd nearly died with. Silence had a different texture.
"How long?"
Kawalsky's hands tightened slightly around the cup. "Sir?"
"How long have you two been close?"
He kept his voice even. Kept it open. He didn't look at Kawalsky when he said it — kept his eyes on Ferretti — because this wasn't an interrogation and he needed Kawalsky to know that. He was giving him the door and leaving it wide. Walk through it or don't. Your call.
The quiet stretched. O'Neill waited. He was good at waiting when it mattered.
"Shortly after Abydos, sir."
O'Neill nodded slowly.
Abydos. When they'd come back changed in ways the debrief forms didn't have boxes for. When something had shifted in all of them, a before and an after, the kind of line you only recognize once you're already on the other side of it.
He thought about that. About coming back from something like that and finding — something. Someone. He thought about how that might feel like an answer to a question you hadn't known you were asking.
"He's stubborn," O'Neill said finally.
Kawalsky let out a breath, quiet and careful. "Yes, sir. He is."
"Means he'll be difficult about physical therapy. Complain the whole way through. Drive the nursing staff absolutely crazy." He paused. "He'll be fine."
The monitors beeped. Ferretti breathed. Kawalsky looked down at the cold coffee in his hands, and O'Neill watched something shift in his posture — a fraction of an inch, barely anything. A man setting down a weight he'd been holding without realizing it.
"Sir—"
"You should get some sleep," O'Neill said. He stood, put the chair back against the wall. "At some point. I'm not saying tonight."
"No, sir."
"There's a decent couch in the waiting room. I'm told."
"I'll keep that in mind, sir."
O'Neill paused at the door. He looked back — at Kawalsky in the plastic chair, at Ferretti in the bed, at the two of them in the bad light of a room they were both hoping to leave.
"Good man, Ferretti," he said. Like it was just an observation. Like it was just something he was noting aloud.
Kawalsky's jaw worked once. "Yes, sir. He is."
O'Neill left them to it.