She hardly remembered the past six hours. Equipment and uniforms moving around her. A makeshift base rising before her eyes. An outpost for the new generation forming almost of its own power on the pillars of an outpost of the Ancients. The world had turned upside down; all in a day's work. But this was more foreign for the team than they realized, at least for the human members. For all of their experience offworld, for all of their constant knowledge of the possibility of an earth invasion, at heart they had continued to take their safe haven for granted. They had walked out of Cheyenne Mountain and gone back to their neglected little homes and not watched the skies for Goa'uld ships. Not listened for the sounds of Zat fire. Now the battleground of work and the safe ground of home were all blurred into one.
Military uniforms moved around her. Orders echoed off ancient ice. Sensors hummed. Cameras flashed. Daniel scrawled in a primitive notebook. Teal'c took quiet command of the guard. Jack's eyes watched her. Always watched her. Haunted her.
They had to drag her out of the cave. She remembered quietly refusing the first fifteen times it was suggested she go, and continuing to pace the maze of the outpost, soaking up every nook and cranny, every detail. Her mind was running at hyperspeed. She didn't clearly remember shouting at the last request. She didn't want to remember socking a well-intended airman in the jaw when he took ahold of her arm.
She remembered Daniel getting in her face with gentle insistence and a deep understanding she didn't want to see.
She had returned to the ship with Jack's eyes on her back. She had returned to her resources at Cheyenne Mountain with his eyes in the black behind her lids.
Daniel had been silent beside her. Teal'c had stayed behind.
Her boots hit the surface of home base with a reassuring firmness and a foreign heaviness. She kept walking. Her mind was racing like she would never rest again. Everything they had learned, everywhere they had been--there had to be a way to piece it all together. The answer had to be right in front of them. Jack had given them so little, really, before they had been able to find the weapons they needed to hold off the Goa'uld invasion. So much of the knowledge had come from their own store. They were so close. She could do this. She had to do this. If Daniel couldn't find the needed information to help O'Neill in the Ancients' outpost writings, she would find Atlantis herself. And that would be the answer. It had to be.
She stripped off her mission gear. She washed the smell of old metals from her skin. She pulled on the rumpled clothes from her locker. She shrugged into her lab coat. She lost herself in knowledge.
She was deeply focused, oblivious to the expanse of the lab, comfortable in the dim light, tracing coordinates on a map of Antarctica and comparing them to stars, when Daniel's voice carried to her from the doorway. "Sam?"
"Yes, Daniel?" She turned to look at him, pencil in her hand, and an underlying rush in her voice she hadn't meant to throw at him.
His image hit her like a truck. Her comfortable oblivion quavered. Her blinders slipped. She felt sick.
Tousled hair and tired eyes and glasses slightly askew. A hand in a wrinkled pocket and a shoulder against a door casing. Standing in her doorway was a man who had already lost too much in his life, doggedly taking in his stride the possible loss of another dear friend and still standing by the others as he struggled. And it was all too real. Sam put down her pencil and tried to breathe, found she was shaking. "Did you find something?" she asked.
Daniel shook his head. "No, no, not yet... I just... Sam, I know you don't want to waste a moment away from your work, and I certainly don't want to hold you back, but...could I just ask you to take a look at something for me for a minute? You see, Jack scribbled something on a napkin yesterday that I couldn't make sense of at the time, but I kept it in my pocket. And now that I've seen the writings at the outpost, I'm beginning to think I might make some sense of it after all. I don't know if it has anything to do with what I'm thinking it might, but if it does, it would really help to have a scientific eye looking over the sequencing with me for just a few minutes. I think it has something to do with planetary shifts or...timing of the shifts in conjunction with--well, I don't want to influence your opinion."
"I doubt that would matter, Daniel. I can offer my knowledge, but the interpretation is all your department."
Daniel nodded, but his brow furrowed, maybe with something more than the problem at hand. "Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. And if you're...involved. I mean, if you'd rather wait..."
"No. No, I mean if you think...if you think it might mean something. I'll, umm..."
--*Jack's eyes on her back. "Don't you dare leave us now..."*--
"I'll be--" --*Fingers on ice. "...before Daniel and Teal'c showed up, what I was going to say..."*--
"I'll, uh...just give me a few minutes. And...I'll meet you in your office. Okay?"
Daniel saw it, knew something was off. For someone who could appear so lost on the surface, Daniel Jackson was unnervingly quick when it came to fundamental human emotion. Even Jack had recognized that. "Well--I mean, yeah. Yeah, sure, okay. Just...I'll--I mean you'll be there when you're there. And *I'll*...well, I'll be there...too. Okay."
Sam nodded. Swallowed hard. Didn't speak.
"Okay," Daniel repeated. Looking unfinished and displaced. He squinted at her through his crooked glasses for a moment, then turned and vanished down the hall.
Sam pulled off her lab coat and tossed it onto a chair. She combed her fingers through her hair and forced herself to breathe. Too much. Just too much.
She walked out of the lab and down the hall.
*****
"Sam?"
Daniel Jackson tapped tentatively on the open door of the science lab. "Anyone here?" Silence echoed back.
He glanced over his shoulder down the hallway, absurdly wondering if he had passed Carter on his return path and not noticed her. "Sam? I just was wondering if it would help if I brought the writings here to you, I think I can bring enough of it to..."
But the words were futile. She wasn't here. Which truly should have meant nothing. But it felt wrong. She was probably retrieving some reference material, refilling her water bottle, or taking a bathroom break. But when he'd left, he'd had the sense he should have said something else. And now it was fifteen minutes later, and she wasn't at his office and she wasn't in her lab.
He waited five minutes in the hallway, feeling time ticking at a snail's pace and tamped down on flashes of a friend suspended in ice.
No orders from Jack. No one directing Dr. Daniel Jackson from scholarship into action when his contributions were needed most.
Daniel offered cursory smiles to familiar faces passing in the hallway and tried to look busy. He felt the emptiness of the lab behind him. He went to look for Carter.
*****
*"I couldn't sleep at all last night."*
*"You should have called."*
*I would never call. But I've known I could for so long... And I didn't know that meant everything.*
"Sam?"
She squeezed her eyes closed. *Oh, Jesus. No. Not while I'm crying, I just need this minute, I just need this minute and then I can go back to work...*
"Sam?" Daniel's earnest voice. Soft and kind and much too gentle for the hard walls of the Air Force locker room and the hard walls she was struggling to erect. "Sam, are you okay?"
She was sitting on the bench, back to the door, elbows propped on her knees and forehead in her hands.
She didn't speak.
She felt his approach, the brush against her leg as he sat down close beside her. His hand settled its careful weight against her back.
*Go. Just go. I'm fine. I'll be there in minute.*
"I'm all right," she said. Her breath caught.
"No... I mean...you shouldn't be."
She tightened her fingers in her hair as her throat clogged with tears. *No, no, no, not now...* Her stomach cramped.
"Sam..."
*Stop, Daniel, I can't...*
"We left him," she whispered. Her shoulders pulled up against her ears, fighting a quiet sob. But the inward gasp of air was loud and painful and Daniel's arms moved around her, awkwardly enclosing her from behind.
"No. Sam, we didn't leave him. None of us left him. Teal'c is watching him. Teal'c would die before he let anyone or anything touch Jack. And we are here now for no other purpose than to *help* him. This is where he needs us. You know that."
"We left him freezing there, and we don't even know if he can see or hear what's going on, if he's in there and he's suffering and we can't see it, and he's...He's been slipping away an hour at a time for days and I can't...*I can't watch him die.*" Her words carried on a waterfall of broken sobs, wrenching the ache in her stomach. She couldn't remember this kind of fear. Hard wood beneath her and cold tile under her feet and the dull echo off institutional walls she called a second home. But it was all so cold and hollow and she was starting to really understand why.
*"You should have called."*
There was nothing more to say. The tears were stronger than she was. And, as usual, this was something Daniel could understand. The time when he shined. He didn't prompt her, didn't ask her to speak. He shifted beside her, pressed his body more firmly against her back. She felt his head come to rest between her shoulder blades. "We are going to help him." His voice was thick and strong beside her ear. There were tears there somewhere that didn't belong to her. "Do you understand that? We are going to help him. No one is going to die. No one is going to die."
Sam nodded, tile floor and the outline of her own black pumps swimming through a sea of tears, Daniel's breath on the back of her neck. Jack's eyes like a laser in her mind. "I know," she whispered. "I know that. I know that."
*I know.*
Nothing more to say. Silent breaths. She stood. And Daniel stood with her. "The writings are in your office?" she said, never quite making eye contact, voice hoarse but commanding. *I gave Jack an order. Because he couldn't give them anymore...* Her knees nearly let go.
"Yeah." Daniel pulled off his glasses. He swiped inefficiently at his eyes. "Yeah, they're in my office. I'll only keep you a minute, it's not complicated, it's just...if you could--"
"Let's go." She was moving again; catching her breath, letting the cool hallway air take the flush from her cheeks. And Daniel's steps were close behind, uneven and hurried. Major Carter. She had to stay Major Carter.
Because one of these days she had to call. She had to take the offer and call him in the middle of the night... And damned if she was going to let Jack or the Goa'uld or anyone else in the universe take that away from her.
They had work to do. She had to bring a team member home. She had to bring Jack...home.
Story Notes: CATEGORIES: Sam/Jack UST, Sam/Daniel Friendship
SPOILERS: Through "Lost City pt. 2"
SPOILERS: Through "Lost City pt. 2"
DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognisable characters, settings, etc, are the property of their respective owners. Any original characters and plots are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended. ... [ read more ]