stringertheory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stringertheory) wrote2022-08-05 01:38 pm
stringertheory) wrote2022-08-05 01:38 pm
Hand of Fate
Title: Hand of Fate
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter, Daniel Jackson
Word Count: 3606
Categories: post-episode, drama, angst
Spoilers: Set after “The Curse” (4.13); spoilers for the series to that point.
Warnings: none
Summary: Daniel’s different after Chicago and Cairo, and Sam is determined to fix it.
Daniel was different after they returned from Cairo.
Once Osiris—and Sarah—had taken off, they’d gotten Daniel’s other friend, Steven, out of the Goa’uld temple and to a hospital in the city. Janet had commandeered a space in the ER to tend to his wounds herself, before making arrangements for him to be flown to a hospital back in Chicago once he was stabilized. The Egyptian authorities they’d liaised with had been happy to help, and Sam got the impression it was as much to get them out of the country as anything. They were nothing but cordial in their interactions, but every one of them had given off a very distinct air of disapproval that had left Sam puzzled. It wasn’t until Daniel had mentioned to Sam that he’d overheard the locals murmuring about ships in the sky and long-dormant curses that she’d understood the reason.
Given everything, all three of them had been completely exhausted by the time they started back to Colorado, so no one had been up for much conversation during the return flight. The quiet had persisted after they’d landed, while Sam drove Janet and Daniel to the base so they could collect their respective vehicles and head home. General Hammond had told them they could debrief the following day, so both had slipped out of Sam’s car and headed to their own with the barest of weary goodbyes.
At the next day’s debriefing, Daniel initially seemed fine. Sam could tell he was still tired, but she could say the same of herself and Janet. They’d all been though some serious jet lag, and it showed. Her first hint that something was off was when Daniel was giving his report to the general. He went through what had happened in Chicago and what they’d experienced in Cairo with an almost flat tone, as though he were reciting the technical specifications of a naquadah generator instead of relaying the details of tragedies.
His tone bothered Sam, like the sound of an engine out of tune, parts fighting against themselves. She watched him closely after that, looking for other indicators of where the problem lay. There was nothing about his body language that was different: he was sitting with his usual posture, and his face showed no signs of distress. His eyes seemed weary, though, and she wondered if that was all it was, if what she was sensing was just the results of fatigue.
A quick glance around the briefing room table told her that, if there was anything more to Daniel’s demeanor, no one else was picking up on it. Even Janet seemed unperturbed, and she was usually the first one to sense something being even the slightest bit off with any of them. But she was still recovering for their trip, too—and from the ribbon device—and Sam wasn’t sure she could trust Janet’s radar this time.
So when the general dismissed them and everyone dispersed back to their respective areas of the base, Sam went to Daniel’s lab.
She found him sitting at his desk, staring blankly at the wall. The papers he’d used for the debriefing had been abandoned on the lab table, and Sam glanced at them as she passed by. He’d clearly tossed them aside as he passed, as some of the material had spilled out; she could see Dr. Jordan’s obituary on top of the pile. Daniel didn’t look around as she walked in, didn’t move when she sat down across from him at the desk. He didn’t react at all, in fact, until the second time she called his name and he finally blinked a few times before his gaze slowly focused on her.
“Sam?”
“Hey.”
“Uh, hey. How long have been there?”
“Not long.” Long enough to know that she had been right and that something was definitely wrong.
“Sorry, I was a million miles away,” he said with a small shake of his head.
“I could tell.”
She paused, unsure how to broach the subject that needed broaching. She always struggled with offering emotional comfort, never quite sure the right way to handle things that didn’t come with schematics or manuals. Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like it had made Daniel fragile, though, so she decided to just be direct.
“What’s going on with you?”
“What?”
He seemed surprised, and Sam could tell it wasn’t because nothing was wrong and he therefore didn’t understand why she was asking. It was because something was wrong and he was surprised anyone had noticed. The thought left her angry and a little sad, and she grew determined to fix whatever was broken, or find someone who could.
“C’mon, Daniel. Something’s bothering you. It has been since Cairo.”
Daniel shook his head again, more empathically this time, like he was deflecting her words.
“Nothing,” he said shortly. “I—nothing.”
“Daniel.”
“I’ve just been thinking.”
“When are you not?” Sam teased, knowing his mind was like hers; it never stopped.
“And isn’t that the problem,” he muttered, dropping his chin. His tone was almost self-deprecating, almost bitter, and Sam frowned at him.
“What are you thinking about?” she quietly asked.
“About how the people I love keep getting hurt. How they keep dying.”
Sam hadn’t been expecting that particular topic, but at least it was something she might be able to handle. She knew about loss. She sighed his name, the sound full of understanding and regrets.
“Daniel…”
“Do you believe in fate, Sam?”
She blinked at him. “No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I. Or at least I try not to. But sometimes things just feel so damn destined that I can’t help but wonder.”
“Nothing is pre-determined, Daniel.”
Physics didn’t allow for it; observe something and you could know where it was, but not where it was going. If fate did exist, it wouldn’t look like anything they could measure.
“But everything’s connected,” he argued.
“Yes, but—”
“Sarah was the last relationship I had before Sha’re.”
The statement seemed to come out of left field, and Sam was still tracing its trajectory to figure out where Daniel was going when he continued.
“It didn’t end well. None of my relationships in Chicago did. I was at the height of my academic disgrace and, trying to protect the last colleagues who would even speak to me, I just left. It wasn’t long after that that Catherine recruited me, and I never went back.”
He was smiling, a faint, crooked, rueful thing that it hurt Sam’s heart to see. When he met her eyes, she was stunned to see the depth of pain in them.
“It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault?” she asked, a little confused.
“All of it.”
“Chicago? Daniel, you weren’t even there when everything happened. You only found out after the fact.”
He was shaking his head. “No, all of it. Everything.”
Sam frowned at him. “What do you mean ‘everything’?”
“Everything that’s happened, it’s my fault. I caused it.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “Maybe I’m the curse.”
“Daniel—”
“I mean, what kind of crazy person pursues a career in the thing that killed their parents?”
Sam—halfway to asking Daniel, again, what he was talking about—snapped her mouth shut in astonishment. Daniel wasn’t looking at her now, but the self-loathing on his face was crystal clear. She mentally fumbled for what to say that could derail this guilt trip, but of course Daniel had words at the ready.
“The last two women I loved both got taken by the Goa’uld, Sam. What are the odds of that?” He shot her a sardonic grin. “And not minor, nobody Goa’uld; actually named deities. That has to be a galactic record.”
He wasn’t wrong; it did seem like a hell of a coincidence for both Sha’re and Sarah to have been taken as hosts. But then again, Sam didn’t believe in coincidence, either. There were always factors to explain why things happened, and why they sometimes happened in similar ways. Always.
“Daniel, none of that was your fault. You aren’t responsible for the universe.”
“I am in this universe,” he firmly countered, jabbing a finger toward the floor.
Sam wasn’t sure whether to reach for “causation vs. correlation” or to cite chaos theory, or to just try what the colonel might and tell Daniel that the world didn’t revolve around him. She wasn’t sure any of them would work at the moment.
“Daniel—”
“I opened the Gate, Sam.”
Oh. So this was the black hole he had been orbiting: the Gate.
“It all comes back to that,” he continued, tone resigned. “If I hadn’t figured out the Gate, if we hadn’t gone through to Abydos and killed Ra, Apophis might never have shown up there and Sha’re and Skaara might never have been taken.” He sat up, realization in his eyes. “Actually, if you account for Sarah, I can go back even further. If I had never gotten into archaeology, or if I had never focused on Ancient Egypt, then we would never have opened the Gate. Or maybe all of that was the same, but I never pursued my theories that aliens were involved in building the pyramids and therefore I never became a laughingstock and I stayed in Chicago.” He gave a small shrug. “You can pick your favorite variation, but I’m the common thread in all of them.”
Despite her concern for Daniel, Sam was a little miffed by his implication that they never would have figured out the Gate without him. She was sure she would have cracked it, eventually, and the sting of the unintended insult made her respond more sharply than she might otherwise have.
“Daniel, that’s absurd,” she bluntly said. “Even if you had never gotten involved, we still would’ve figured out how to open the Gate. You aren’t the lynchpin of fate.”
“What if I am?” His tone had taken on an edge, something between sarcasm and sorrow. “What if I’m the reason for every injury you and Jack and Teal’c have gotten? What if I’m the reason that Apophis snatched that poor lieutenant through the Gate? What if—what if I’m the reason Ernest got trapped on Heliopolis?”
“Come on, Daniel,” Sam scoffed. “You can’t honestly believe you’re to blame for something that happened before you were even conceived.”
“Not to blame, maybe, but I could still be the reason for it.”
She didn’t understand what he was getting at, and couldn’t understand how he’d gotten there in the first place. Daniel had always seemed predisposed to carry guilt; she’d chalked it up to how deeply he connected with people, how much he felt for them. Maybe it was a side effect of him having studied archaeology and anthropology so extensively, getting lost in the details of so many cultures. Maybe it was what had led him to those fields in the first place. At any rate, Sam knew that the sympathy he felt often turned to guilt when he couldn’t prevent or fix problems. But even with that in mind, whatever was affecting him now was going way above and beyond that norm.
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“Multiverse theory.”
Sam stared at him, taken aback. “Multiverse theory,” she flatly echoed.
“You explained it to us once,” he reminded her. “Each and every decision we have, every choice we make creates another possible universe, an infinite number of variations on all the ways things could happen, in every possible combination. Right?”
She nodded mutely.
“By that definition, my mere existence shaped this reality.” He vaguely gestured around them with the wave of one hand. “And for us to be here, right now, in this exact situation as these exact versions of ourselves, everything that came before us had to happen in a very specific way, right?”
“Yes.”
She thought she could see where he was going now, and it concerned her that she might not actually have an argument against it. She had come here to make things better.
“So that means that everything I went through had to happen to get me here. And everything that happened before I even existed had to happen just the way it did to ensure that I turned out exactly as this version of me.”
“I mean, ‘had to happen’ in the sense that if it had happened any other way, things would be different,” Sam pushed back, “but not ‘had to happen’ as in it was fated and there was no other way things could go.” She paused, a thought occurring to her. “Multiverse theory directly contradicts the concept of fate, actually, since there isn’t any one destined reality that must happen. Instead, all of them are happening all at once; we’re just only aware of the one we’re in.”
“But isn’t that all fate is?” Daniel countered. “That for things to be a certain way, lots of other things have to happen in a certain way, too?”
“I suppose you could define it that way.”
“And if we’re stuck in just one reality, then that is our fate.”
“Daniel, there is no such thing as fate. Things just happen and we wind up where we are after they do.”
“And we wound up right here, right now—or at least we could have—because of me. I mean, maybe the Gate had to be found in Giza because I had to go through it. And because the Gate was found, Ernest was lost.” He dragged a hand through his hair, looking at her with a remorseful gaze. “Sam, Catherine restarted the Gate program because we visited her in 1969 and I put the idea in her head. And we went to see her in 1969 because we had to get back to the future, and we wound up back in 1969 because the Gate program had been reopened, and—”
“Then it’s my fault, too.”
Daniel stopped mid-sentence to stare at Sam in confusion. “What?”
“If you’re at fault for everything that’s happened, then so am I. Even more than you are.”
“What do you mean?” Daniel asked with a frown.
Sam sighed. “Daniel, you figured out the Gate symbols, but I’m the reason the Gate could be dialed. I built the dialing program. You might have given me the idea about stellar drift, but I’m the one who calculated the differentials to account for it, and I’m the one who updated the program to adjust for it. The only reason we’ve been able to go anywhere other than Abydos is me. So if you’re responsible for Abydos, I’m responsible for everything else, and you’ll just have to get in line.”
Sam was amused to see that Daniel actually looked uncomfortable. It was clear that he’d accepted his own perceived guilt, but that he hadn’t anticipated anyone else coming along for the ride. Maybe and especially not Sam.
“None of that’s your fault, Sam.”
“You don’t say,” she dryly responded.
He glanced up at her with a wry smile. “I see what you mean.”
“There is no fate, Daniel,” she repeated. “People make choices, and those choices affect things. But we aren’t responsible for the choices of others, and there is no grand plan working to ensure things happen a certain way to get to a specific outcome. If that were the case, then we’d be able to predict the future.”
“And we can’t.”
“We can’t even accurately predict the weather. We just have to give probabilities.”
“It was supposed to rain today.”
“Only a 40% chance.”
“Good. I forgot my umbrella.”
Sam snickered quietly, but quickly returned to her serious demeanor to stare Daniel down. She waited until he met her eyes, and gave him a soft smile.
“None of this is your fault, Daniel.”
“I know,” he sighed. “I just—sometimes it feels like I keep living through the same things over and over again in a way that feels too deliberately similar to just be random.” He paused, eyes going distant again. “First it was Sha’re, now it’s Sarah. She’s out there, a prisoner in her own body, and I just can’t stop thinking about that.”
“We’ll find her.”
Daniel gave her a incredulous look. “Really.”
Sam shrugged. “Like you said, she’s carrying around a named deity, and if what you told us about Osiris is anything to go by, I highly doubt she’s going to keep a low profile.”
“Oh, decidedly not.”
“And considering our track record with the Goa’uld, I’d say we’re destined to cross paths with Sarah again. And probably soon.”
Daniel gave her a faint smile. “Destined.”
He might have accepted that he couldn’t be blamed for what had happened, but it was clear that it was still hurting him. So Sam sat up straight, looked him in the eyes, and adopted the tone she used for lectures at the academy.
“You do understand that everything that happened in Chicago would have happened even if you never knew about it, right?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“But if you want to believe that you’re the reason for everything, and that everything that happens does so specifically to get you to wherever you currently are, then think about this: how did you find out about your professor’s death?”
Daniel gave her an odd look, like he was wondering where she was going with the question. “I saw it in a magazine.”
Sam nodded sharply. “So the only reason you went to Chicago is because your professor died and you saw the obituary in a magazine. And the only reason you saw that magazine is because the colonel was reading it. And the only reason the colonel was reading it was because it was something Teal’c enjoyed. I could keep going down that path, but you get the idea. So all of that had to happen to get you to Chicago.”
“But like you said, none of that mattered,” Daniel countered, the bitterness creeping into his voice again. “Sarah had already been taken over by Osiris before I ever got there. Everything that happened would still have happened even if I hadn’t gone.”
“Everything except one.”
“What?”
“You’re right: everything that happened would still have happened, up to a point. Sarah would still have been taken. Your professor and the curator and the technician would all still have died. And Osiris would still have gone to Cairo, recovered his ship, and left Earth, taking Sarah with him.”
“Exactly, so what are you—”
“And Steven Rayner would have died alone in that Goa’uld temple.”
Daniel froze, shock flashing across his face. Sam reached across the desk and laid one of her hands over his, where it was laying atop books and papers.
“The only difference in this story between you being a part of it or not is that you saved a man’s life,” she gently told him.
“Janet did that,” Daniel replied in a distant tone.
“But the only reason she could—the only reason the three of us were in that tomb—was because you went to Chicago. And you only went to Chicago because a whole lot of things had to happen in a very specific sequence.”
“So fate decided I needed to save Steven.” Daniel let out a huff of laughter. “Maybe if I explain that to him, he’ll forgive me for everything.”
Sam sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. She raised an eyebrow, ready to lecture Daniel again, but he caught the look and quickly held up his hands.
“For Chicago,” he clarified, further adding, “For before in Chicago, when I was still living there, I meant,” when Sam raised the other eyebrow.
“Pretty sure saving someone’s life grants you immediate forgiveness,” Sam told him in a light tone.
“Maybe.”
He didn’t sound completely convinced about being forgiven, but he did seem less burdened. Sam studied him for a few moments, noting how the tightness around his mouth had softened, how he no longer seemed to be withdrawing into himself ever so slightly, how the light was back in his eyes. She congratulated herself on a mission accomplished.
Daniel looked up a her with an almost apologetic smile. “I guess I was wallowing in self-pity and remorse there a little bit, huh?” he said in a wry tone.
“Understandable, given the circumstances,” Sam replied with a smile. “But that’s another knock against fate, you know?”
Daniel gave her a questioning look.
“If everything was fated, if it was all supposed to be this way no matter what, we wouldn’t have regrets.”
“Unless we were fated to have regrets,” Daniel countered, almost reflexively.
Sam rose from her chair to reach across the desk and whack Daniel on the shoulder. He flinched slightly at the contact, frowning at her and rubbing the spot as she dropped back into her seat.
“What was that for?”
“Stop ruining my poetic moment,” she replied with an exaggerated air of wounded dignity.
Daniel snorted. “My apologies.”
“Accepted.”
Sam dropped her insulted expression to grin at him. Daniel returned the grin, before it softened to something fonder.
“Sam—thank you. For this.”
“I really am sorry about your professor, Daniel.”
“I know.”
“And Sarah.”
“I know.”
“We’re going to find her.”
His gaze grew more intense then, and he stared into her eyes as if he were studying her like an artifact. She wondered if he was remembering how they’d said the same about Sha’re, and how they’d never managed to bring her home. Maybe he was wondering whether history would repeat itself. But after a moment he just nodded.
“Yeah, we will.”
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter, Daniel Jackson
Word Count: 3606
Categories: post-episode, drama, angst
Spoilers: Set after “The Curse” (4.13); spoilers for the series to that point.
Warnings: none
Summary: Daniel’s different after Chicago and Cairo, and Sam is determined to fix it.
Daniel was different after they returned from Cairo.
Once Osiris—and Sarah—had taken off, they’d gotten Daniel’s other friend, Steven, out of the Goa’uld temple and to a hospital in the city. Janet had commandeered a space in the ER to tend to his wounds herself, before making arrangements for him to be flown to a hospital back in Chicago once he was stabilized. The Egyptian authorities they’d liaised with had been happy to help, and Sam got the impression it was as much to get them out of the country as anything. They were nothing but cordial in their interactions, but every one of them had given off a very distinct air of disapproval that had left Sam puzzled. It wasn’t until Daniel had mentioned to Sam that he’d overheard the locals murmuring about ships in the sky and long-dormant curses that she’d understood the reason.
Given everything, all three of them had been completely exhausted by the time they started back to Colorado, so no one had been up for much conversation during the return flight. The quiet had persisted after they’d landed, while Sam drove Janet and Daniel to the base so they could collect their respective vehicles and head home. General Hammond had told them they could debrief the following day, so both had slipped out of Sam’s car and headed to their own with the barest of weary goodbyes.
At the next day’s debriefing, Daniel initially seemed fine. Sam could tell he was still tired, but she could say the same of herself and Janet. They’d all been though some serious jet lag, and it showed. Her first hint that something was off was when Daniel was giving his report to the general. He went through what had happened in Chicago and what they’d experienced in Cairo with an almost flat tone, as though he were reciting the technical specifications of a naquadah generator instead of relaying the details of tragedies.
His tone bothered Sam, like the sound of an engine out of tune, parts fighting against themselves. She watched him closely after that, looking for other indicators of where the problem lay. There was nothing about his body language that was different: he was sitting with his usual posture, and his face showed no signs of distress. His eyes seemed weary, though, and she wondered if that was all it was, if what she was sensing was just the results of fatigue.
A quick glance around the briefing room table told her that, if there was anything more to Daniel’s demeanor, no one else was picking up on it. Even Janet seemed unperturbed, and she was usually the first one to sense something being even the slightest bit off with any of them. But she was still recovering for their trip, too—and from the ribbon device—and Sam wasn’t sure she could trust Janet’s radar this time.
So when the general dismissed them and everyone dispersed back to their respective areas of the base, Sam went to Daniel’s lab.
She found him sitting at his desk, staring blankly at the wall. The papers he’d used for the debriefing had been abandoned on the lab table, and Sam glanced at them as she passed by. He’d clearly tossed them aside as he passed, as some of the material had spilled out; she could see Dr. Jordan’s obituary on top of the pile. Daniel didn’t look around as she walked in, didn’t move when she sat down across from him at the desk. He didn’t react at all, in fact, until the second time she called his name and he finally blinked a few times before his gaze slowly focused on her.
“Sam?”
“Hey.”
“Uh, hey. How long have been there?”
“Not long.” Long enough to know that she had been right and that something was definitely wrong.
“Sorry, I was a million miles away,” he said with a small shake of his head.
“I could tell.”
She paused, unsure how to broach the subject that needed broaching. She always struggled with offering emotional comfort, never quite sure the right way to handle things that didn’t come with schematics or manuals. Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like it had made Daniel fragile, though, so she decided to just be direct.
“What’s going on with you?”
“What?”
He seemed surprised, and Sam could tell it wasn’t because nothing was wrong and he therefore didn’t understand why she was asking. It was because something was wrong and he was surprised anyone had noticed. The thought left her angry and a little sad, and she grew determined to fix whatever was broken, or find someone who could.
“C’mon, Daniel. Something’s bothering you. It has been since Cairo.”
Daniel shook his head again, more empathically this time, like he was deflecting her words.
“Nothing,” he said shortly. “I—nothing.”
“Daniel.”
“I’ve just been thinking.”
“When are you not?” Sam teased, knowing his mind was like hers; it never stopped.
“And isn’t that the problem,” he muttered, dropping his chin. His tone was almost self-deprecating, almost bitter, and Sam frowned at him.
“What are you thinking about?” she quietly asked.
“About how the people I love keep getting hurt. How they keep dying.”
Sam hadn’t been expecting that particular topic, but at least it was something she might be able to handle. She knew about loss. She sighed his name, the sound full of understanding and regrets.
“Daniel…”
“Do you believe in fate, Sam?”
She blinked at him. “No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I. Or at least I try not to. But sometimes things just feel so damn destined that I can’t help but wonder.”
“Nothing is pre-determined, Daniel.”
Physics didn’t allow for it; observe something and you could know where it was, but not where it was going. If fate did exist, it wouldn’t look like anything they could measure.
“But everything’s connected,” he argued.
“Yes, but—”
“Sarah was the last relationship I had before Sha’re.”
The statement seemed to come out of left field, and Sam was still tracing its trajectory to figure out where Daniel was going when he continued.
“It didn’t end well. None of my relationships in Chicago did. I was at the height of my academic disgrace and, trying to protect the last colleagues who would even speak to me, I just left. It wasn’t long after that that Catherine recruited me, and I never went back.”
He was smiling, a faint, crooked, rueful thing that it hurt Sam’s heart to see. When he met her eyes, she was stunned to see the depth of pain in them.
“It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault?” she asked, a little confused.
“All of it.”
“Chicago? Daniel, you weren’t even there when everything happened. You only found out after the fact.”
He was shaking his head. “No, all of it. Everything.”
Sam frowned at him. “What do you mean ‘everything’?”
“Everything that’s happened, it’s my fault. I caused it.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “Maybe I’m the curse.”
“Daniel—”
“I mean, what kind of crazy person pursues a career in the thing that killed their parents?”
Sam—halfway to asking Daniel, again, what he was talking about—snapped her mouth shut in astonishment. Daniel wasn’t looking at her now, but the self-loathing on his face was crystal clear. She mentally fumbled for what to say that could derail this guilt trip, but of course Daniel had words at the ready.
“The last two women I loved both got taken by the Goa’uld, Sam. What are the odds of that?” He shot her a sardonic grin. “And not minor, nobody Goa’uld; actually named deities. That has to be a galactic record.”
He wasn’t wrong; it did seem like a hell of a coincidence for both Sha’re and Sarah to have been taken as hosts. But then again, Sam didn’t believe in coincidence, either. There were always factors to explain why things happened, and why they sometimes happened in similar ways. Always.
“Daniel, none of that was your fault. You aren’t responsible for the universe.”
“I am in this universe,” he firmly countered, jabbing a finger toward the floor.
Sam wasn’t sure whether to reach for “causation vs. correlation” or to cite chaos theory, or to just try what the colonel might and tell Daniel that the world didn’t revolve around him. She wasn’t sure any of them would work at the moment.
“Daniel—”
“I opened the Gate, Sam.”
Oh. So this was the black hole he had been orbiting: the Gate.
“It all comes back to that,” he continued, tone resigned. “If I hadn’t figured out the Gate, if we hadn’t gone through to Abydos and killed Ra, Apophis might never have shown up there and Sha’re and Skaara might never have been taken.” He sat up, realization in his eyes. “Actually, if you account for Sarah, I can go back even further. If I had never gotten into archaeology, or if I had never focused on Ancient Egypt, then we would never have opened the Gate. Or maybe all of that was the same, but I never pursued my theories that aliens were involved in building the pyramids and therefore I never became a laughingstock and I stayed in Chicago.” He gave a small shrug. “You can pick your favorite variation, but I’m the common thread in all of them.”
Despite her concern for Daniel, Sam was a little miffed by his implication that they never would have figured out the Gate without him. She was sure she would have cracked it, eventually, and the sting of the unintended insult made her respond more sharply than she might otherwise have.
“Daniel, that’s absurd,” she bluntly said. “Even if you had never gotten involved, we still would’ve figured out how to open the Gate. You aren’t the lynchpin of fate.”
“What if I am?” His tone had taken on an edge, something between sarcasm and sorrow. “What if I’m the reason for every injury you and Jack and Teal’c have gotten? What if I’m the reason that Apophis snatched that poor lieutenant through the Gate? What if—what if I’m the reason Ernest got trapped on Heliopolis?”
“Come on, Daniel,” Sam scoffed. “You can’t honestly believe you’re to blame for something that happened before you were even conceived.”
“Not to blame, maybe, but I could still be the reason for it.”
She didn’t understand what he was getting at, and couldn’t understand how he’d gotten there in the first place. Daniel had always seemed predisposed to carry guilt; she’d chalked it up to how deeply he connected with people, how much he felt for them. Maybe it was a side effect of him having studied archaeology and anthropology so extensively, getting lost in the details of so many cultures. Maybe it was what had led him to those fields in the first place. At any rate, Sam knew that the sympathy he felt often turned to guilt when he couldn’t prevent or fix problems. But even with that in mind, whatever was affecting him now was going way above and beyond that norm.
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“Multiverse theory.”
Sam stared at him, taken aback. “Multiverse theory,” she flatly echoed.
“You explained it to us once,” he reminded her. “Each and every decision we have, every choice we make creates another possible universe, an infinite number of variations on all the ways things could happen, in every possible combination. Right?”
She nodded mutely.
“By that definition, my mere existence shaped this reality.” He vaguely gestured around them with the wave of one hand. “And for us to be here, right now, in this exact situation as these exact versions of ourselves, everything that came before us had to happen in a very specific way, right?”
“Yes.”
She thought she could see where he was going now, and it concerned her that she might not actually have an argument against it. She had come here to make things better.
“So that means that everything I went through had to happen to get me here. And everything that happened before I even existed had to happen just the way it did to ensure that I turned out exactly as this version of me.”
“I mean, ‘had to happen’ in the sense that if it had happened any other way, things would be different,” Sam pushed back, “but not ‘had to happen’ as in it was fated and there was no other way things could go.” She paused, a thought occurring to her. “Multiverse theory directly contradicts the concept of fate, actually, since there isn’t any one destined reality that must happen. Instead, all of them are happening all at once; we’re just only aware of the one we’re in.”
“But isn’t that all fate is?” Daniel countered. “That for things to be a certain way, lots of other things have to happen in a certain way, too?”
“I suppose you could define it that way.”
“And if we’re stuck in just one reality, then that is our fate.”
“Daniel, there is no such thing as fate. Things just happen and we wind up where we are after they do.”
“And we wound up right here, right now—or at least we could have—because of me. I mean, maybe the Gate had to be found in Giza because I had to go through it. And because the Gate was found, Ernest was lost.” He dragged a hand through his hair, looking at her with a remorseful gaze. “Sam, Catherine restarted the Gate program because we visited her in 1969 and I put the idea in her head. And we went to see her in 1969 because we had to get back to the future, and we wound up back in 1969 because the Gate program had been reopened, and—”
“Then it’s my fault, too.”
Daniel stopped mid-sentence to stare at Sam in confusion. “What?”
“If you’re at fault for everything that’s happened, then so am I. Even more than you are.”
“What do you mean?” Daniel asked with a frown.
Sam sighed. “Daniel, you figured out the Gate symbols, but I’m the reason the Gate could be dialed. I built the dialing program. You might have given me the idea about stellar drift, but I’m the one who calculated the differentials to account for it, and I’m the one who updated the program to adjust for it. The only reason we’ve been able to go anywhere other than Abydos is me. So if you’re responsible for Abydos, I’m responsible for everything else, and you’ll just have to get in line.”
Sam was amused to see that Daniel actually looked uncomfortable. It was clear that he’d accepted his own perceived guilt, but that he hadn’t anticipated anyone else coming along for the ride. Maybe and especially not Sam.
“None of that’s your fault, Sam.”
“You don’t say,” she dryly responded.
He glanced up at her with a wry smile. “I see what you mean.”
“There is no fate, Daniel,” she repeated. “People make choices, and those choices affect things. But we aren’t responsible for the choices of others, and there is no grand plan working to ensure things happen a certain way to get to a specific outcome. If that were the case, then we’d be able to predict the future.”
“And we can’t.”
“We can’t even accurately predict the weather. We just have to give probabilities.”
“It was supposed to rain today.”
“Only a 40% chance.”
“Good. I forgot my umbrella.”
Sam snickered quietly, but quickly returned to her serious demeanor to stare Daniel down. She waited until he met her eyes, and gave him a soft smile.
“None of this is your fault, Daniel.”
“I know,” he sighed. “I just—sometimes it feels like I keep living through the same things over and over again in a way that feels too deliberately similar to just be random.” He paused, eyes going distant again. “First it was Sha’re, now it’s Sarah. She’s out there, a prisoner in her own body, and I just can’t stop thinking about that.”
“We’ll find her.”
Daniel gave her a incredulous look. “Really.”
Sam shrugged. “Like you said, she’s carrying around a named deity, and if what you told us about Osiris is anything to go by, I highly doubt she’s going to keep a low profile.”
“Oh, decidedly not.”
“And considering our track record with the Goa’uld, I’d say we’re destined to cross paths with Sarah again. And probably soon.”
Daniel gave her a faint smile. “Destined.”
He might have accepted that he couldn’t be blamed for what had happened, but it was clear that it was still hurting him. So Sam sat up straight, looked him in the eyes, and adopted the tone she used for lectures at the academy.
“You do understand that everything that happened in Chicago would have happened even if you never knew about it, right?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“But if you want to believe that you’re the reason for everything, and that everything that happens does so specifically to get you to wherever you currently are, then think about this: how did you find out about your professor’s death?”
Daniel gave her an odd look, like he was wondering where she was going with the question. “I saw it in a magazine.”
Sam nodded sharply. “So the only reason you went to Chicago is because your professor died and you saw the obituary in a magazine. And the only reason you saw that magazine is because the colonel was reading it. And the only reason the colonel was reading it was because it was something Teal’c enjoyed. I could keep going down that path, but you get the idea. So all of that had to happen to get you to Chicago.”
“But like you said, none of that mattered,” Daniel countered, the bitterness creeping into his voice again. “Sarah had already been taken over by Osiris before I ever got there. Everything that happened would still have happened even if I hadn’t gone.”
“Everything except one.”
“What?”
“You’re right: everything that happened would still have happened, up to a point. Sarah would still have been taken. Your professor and the curator and the technician would all still have died. And Osiris would still have gone to Cairo, recovered his ship, and left Earth, taking Sarah with him.”
“Exactly, so what are you—”
“And Steven Rayner would have died alone in that Goa’uld temple.”
Daniel froze, shock flashing across his face. Sam reached across the desk and laid one of her hands over his, where it was laying atop books and papers.
“The only difference in this story between you being a part of it or not is that you saved a man’s life,” she gently told him.
“Janet did that,” Daniel replied in a distant tone.
“But the only reason she could—the only reason the three of us were in that tomb—was because you went to Chicago. And you only went to Chicago because a whole lot of things had to happen in a very specific sequence.”
“So fate decided I needed to save Steven.” Daniel let out a huff of laughter. “Maybe if I explain that to him, he’ll forgive me for everything.”
Sam sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. She raised an eyebrow, ready to lecture Daniel again, but he caught the look and quickly held up his hands.
“For Chicago,” he clarified, further adding, “For before in Chicago, when I was still living there, I meant,” when Sam raised the other eyebrow.
“Pretty sure saving someone’s life grants you immediate forgiveness,” Sam told him in a light tone.
“Maybe.”
He didn’t sound completely convinced about being forgiven, but he did seem less burdened. Sam studied him for a few moments, noting how the tightness around his mouth had softened, how he no longer seemed to be withdrawing into himself ever so slightly, how the light was back in his eyes. She congratulated herself on a mission accomplished.
Daniel looked up a her with an almost apologetic smile. “I guess I was wallowing in self-pity and remorse there a little bit, huh?” he said in a wry tone.
“Understandable, given the circumstances,” Sam replied with a smile. “But that’s another knock against fate, you know?”
Daniel gave her a questioning look.
“If everything was fated, if it was all supposed to be this way no matter what, we wouldn’t have regrets.”
“Unless we were fated to have regrets,” Daniel countered, almost reflexively.
Sam rose from her chair to reach across the desk and whack Daniel on the shoulder. He flinched slightly at the contact, frowning at her and rubbing the spot as she dropped back into her seat.
“What was that for?”
“Stop ruining my poetic moment,” she replied with an exaggerated air of wounded dignity.
Daniel snorted. “My apologies.”
“Accepted.”
Sam dropped her insulted expression to grin at him. Daniel returned the grin, before it softened to something fonder.
“Sam—thank you. For this.”
“I really am sorry about your professor, Daniel.”
“I know.”
“And Sarah.”
“I know.”
“We’re going to find her.”
His gaze grew more intense then, and he stared into her eyes as if he were studying her like an artifact. She wondered if he was remembering how they’d said the same about Sha’re, and how they’d never managed to bring her home. Maybe he was wondering whether history would repeat itself. But after a moment he just nodded.
“Yeah, we will.”