In the Event of My Demise
Oct. 22nd, 2022 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: In the Event of My Demise
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter, Jack O’Neill
Word Count: 5789
Categories: gen, drama, angst, friendship
Spoilers: Set after “Revelations” (5.22); spoilers for that and “Meridian” (5.21).
Warnings: none
Summary: Sam’s anger was stronger than her grief, and it kept her going, for a while. The tension between Sam and Jack following Daniel’s death finally comes to a head.
Sam’s anger was stronger than her grief, and it kept her going, for a while.
While Daniel’s loss had opened a bottomless chasm inside her, it was narrow at the surface, a crack easily papered over with the vast swathes of rage that had settled in her body. In fact, she was sure the former fed the latter—she’d learned long ago that sorrow to fury wasn’t much of a leap. The anger kept her functional when she knew the grief would have otherwise shut her down, so she held onto it, needs must. But the longer she kept hold of it, the worse it got.
She left the base as soon as she was allowed to.
Once the team got back from saving Thor and Freyr, General Hammond had kept them on base for another twenty-four hours. Sam hadn’t understood why, but she also hadn’t argued against it, already so on edge that she knew the slightest slip of her tongue would probably snowball into a court martial. So she held herself together through the post-mission physical and the debriefing, submitting to the examination and the general’s questions with a calmness she didn’t actually feel. She spent a few hours tinkering with things and avoiding everyone—but especially her teammates—and then signed out at security the second the clock hit 1700.
On the way home, she made one stop to get beer. It wasn’t her usual procedure, drinking away her feelings, but she needed some way to slow down her brain and short of getting Janet to sedate her, alcohol was the only option she had. She’d originally planned to just lock herself inside for the rest of the night and see whether she’d managed to buy enough beer for things to stop hurting for a little while. But when she got home the place was too still, too quiet, too empty, and her restlessness drove her back out the door and onto her bike.
She rode as though she could outrun her own thoughts, as if all she had to do was drive fast enough and reckless enough and they wouldn’t be able to find her again. Sometimes, that worked. But not tonight. Once it was getting dusky, in that grayed out space between light and dark where the danger on the roads was at its greatest, she turned back home. Her mind was still racing, but the jitteriness had at least lost its edge, and she was feeling marginally better by the time she turned into her neighborhood.
Then she pulled onto her street and saw Colonel O’Neill’s truck parked outside her house.
There was no reason for him to be there, none at all, and she was irrationally furious that he was. Too furious to risk being anywhere near him, she knew, and as she rolled her bike back into the garage, she decided to ignore him. She would sit inside and drink her beer and eventually he’d go away. Or he’d break in and she could shoot him. Either way there would be limited interaction, and that was for the best. For both their sakes.
But the colonel must have sensed something, because instead of waiting for her to let him in through the front door, he followed her into the garage, ducking under the door before it rolled shut behind her. It took every ounce of self-control Sam possessed to not throw her helmet at his head. He didn’t say anything, and she refused to look at him as she unlocked the door that led inside. She had half a mind to slam it in his face, but again he seemed to be on to her, his arm reaching past her to hold the door open even as she stepped through it.
Fighting the urge to growl in frustration, Sam stormed through the house, shedding her riding gear as she went. She was going to ignore him, dammit. She was going to ignore him and he was going to leave and she could go back to the drunken night she’d planned and forget for at least a few hours that she had to deal with tomorrow.
Reaching the kitchen, she yanked the fridge open with more force than was necessary, all the items in the door rattling and clanking loudly in protest. She pulled out a beer, pointedly not offering the colonel one as well. Instead, she pushed the fridge door closed again with her foot even as she popped the top off her bottle, hoping the very obvious snub would send him packing. But he was never easily dissuaded, and it didn’t look like this time would be any different.
So she took a swig and waited for him to say something, to provide an explanation for why he was intruding on her personal time. But he just stood by the kitchen island and watched her, hands shoved in his pockets and face inscrutable. Part of her wanted to see how long it would last, them standing there not speaking. That part of her balked at being the one to give in and break the silence. But she also knew that the longer the stalemate lasted, the longer he would be in her house, and her desire to get rid of him quickly overrode her stubbornness.
“Why are you here, sir?” she asked, her voice as cold as the bottle in her hand. She wasn’t facing him, staring resolutely at the living room wall instead, but she saw him shift slightly out of the corner of her eye.
“We need to talk.”
She let out a huff of sardonic laughter. “Now you want to talk?”
“Carter—”
“Why?”
“What?”
He sounded genuinely confused, and she took another drink as she turned to him, catching the puzzled frown he wore.
“Why do you suddenly want to talk now, sir?”
His stoic demeanor slipped a little, and he looked away, glancing around the room. “You were avoiding me, on base. I figured we should talk about it. Not on base.”
“Trying.”
His eyes came back to hers. “What?”
“I was trying to avoid you, sir.” Sam pointedly gestured between them.
He was frowning again. “You’re angry.”
“Oh, top marks for observation skills, sir,” she retorted, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her tone.
“Careful, Carter,” he growled.
He had straightened to his full height, one hand coming out of its pocket and his gaze darkening slightly as he gave her a warning stare. It was his command posture, the one he always shifted into when he felt any of them had gone too far. And she had, but it was on purpose. She was out of line, but so was he, and she wasn’t going to let him hide behind rank to avoid the conversation he’d started.
“No, sir.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“I have every right to be angry, sir, and you don’t have the right to tell me not to be.”
“No, but you’re being insubordinate.”
“In my own house,” she ground out. “Where you weren’t invited.”
“Carter—”
He said her name in a tone caught somewhere between sigh and reprimand, almost like he was annoyed at having to be annoyed with her. But he’d done it to himself, butting in where it had been made clear he wasn’t welcome, and she wasn’t going to hold back now.
“Daniel’s dead,” she snapped, “and all you’ve done is act like nothing happened, like nothing’s changed.”
The colonel went rigid, his face going blank. “We aren’t having this conversation.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Carter—”
“You came to my house, sir. You decided we needed to talk—well, fine. This is the conversation we need to have.”
The tension was coming off of him in waves, a clear indication of his discomfort and irritation. It was the sort of signal Sam would normally have heeded, backing away and dropping the subject. But he also wasn’t leaving, wasn’t walking away, and there was too much she needed to get off of her chest.
“The problem is that you won’t talk about it,” she continued, the words spilling out of her in a rush, like a dam had broken somewhere inside her. “Daniel died and you’re going around like everything is business as usual, as if his death meant nothing to you.”
The colonel flinched ever so slightly, but Sam barreled on.
“For god’s sake; you kept us on active duty as if we didn’t just watch one of our teammates—one of our friends—slowly and brutally die! But he did, and you won’t even let us have a memorial service for him. Hell, you won’t even let us talk about having a memorial service. Now maybe you don’t need to mourn Daniel; you did get to say goodbye, after all. But the rest of us didn’t. We just had to take your word for it that he wanted to die and then accept your complete disregard for our grief when he did.”
The colonel had grown increasingly uncomfortable as she talked, his eyes drifting from hers as he shifted on his feet. He grimaced faintly when she finally stopped for breath.
“He’s not dead, he’s—” He ineffectually flapped his hand in the air.
Suddenly, Sam was angry beyond all control. Her heart was aching and all of her doubts and self-loathing, which had been simmering just beneath the surface, were scraped raw. Before she even realized what she was doing, she had thrown her beer across the room. The bottle shattered against the built-ins with a satisfying, clarifying crash, glass and liquid flying everywhere. The rational part of her mind, which had opted to stay out of the whole situation, reflected that it would be a bitch to clean up later. The livid part of her was gratified to see the colonel jump at the impact.
“He’s gone!” she yelled. “He’s gone and it doesn’t matter where he is or what he is now because it just means that he’s not here!”
There was moment of quiet, where all Sam could hear was her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. The colonel’s expression had gone flat, and he was watching her with a shuttered gaze when he finally responded.
“That’s what happens when we lose people; they’re no longer around.”
The words were distinctly casual, drawled out as if they were doing nothing more than talking about the weather. The colonel had both hands back in his pockets, and he was leaning back on his heels slightly as he watched her. He would have been the picture of nonchalance if not for the rigid way he was holding himself. Sam stared him down, torn between incredulity and rage.
“What in the hell is wrong with you, sir?”
His mouth curled slightly, just at the corner, in a grim facsimile of a smile. “D’you know how many people I’ve lost, Carter?”
More than anyone should, but that wasn’t the point. Sam slammed her hands down on the island counter, reveling in the stinging of her palms. “It’s Daniel!”
“He chose it!” the colonel shouted back.
The outburst took Sam by surprise, and she startled slightly, taking a half step back. For the first time since he’d arrived at her house, the colonel wasn’t masking his emotions, and she was shocked by the depth of fury in his eyes. It was far more than her attitude alone would have provoked in him, and she wondered what it meant.
“You’re angry, too,” she stated, her own anger dissipating at the revelation.
“Of course I’m angry!” he shot back. He stalked away a few steps, dragging a hand over his face before he turned back to face her. “Daniel didn’t just die; he chose to die! We could have saved him and he decided he’d rather die!”
It was like a bolt of electricity went through her. Suddenly the colonel’s irrational behavior since Daniel’s death made perfect sense. His refusal to talk about it, his insistence that Daniel wasn’t actually dead while simultaneously leaning on the adage that they lost people every day, even his ready acceptance of a dangerous mission for the Asgard—it was all because he was mad at Daniel.
Standing there in her living room, hands balled into fists at his sides, the colonel gave her a hard look. “I don’t know about you, Carter, but I don’t like just giving up.”
Sam didn’t either—none of SG-1 did—and she’d always thought it had made them a force to be reckoned with. But she also understood how death could look like relief, something to be welcomed instead of feared. And she was too knowledgeable about the effects of radiation poisoning not to be acutely aware of exactly how Daniel had suffered, would have known every horrific detail even if she hadn’t watched the majority of it occurring in real time. Even with her dad doing his best with the healing device, there were no guarantees Daniel would have fully recovered from his near-death state. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting to live that way.
“You said it’s what he wanted,” she quietly reminded the colonel.
“He said it was better,” he sourly replied, “that he thought he could do more if he left, but the bottom line is that he’s gone and he chose to be.” He met her gaze again, and she could see weariness creeping into his eyes. “So yes, Carter. I’m angry.”
It occurred to Sam that she should have realized the colonel wasn’t as unaffected by Daniel’s death as he’d appeared to be. She’d seen him shove his emotions behind a veil of indifference before; it was his go-to move. He pushed his feelings down and people away and that was how he got through everything. He wasn’t alone in that.
She studied him for a minute before she went back to the fridge. More calmly this time, she retrieved two beers from it and opened them, setting one on the edge of the counter nearest the colonel. He appeared to silently sigh before he walked over and picked it up, one eyebrow rising upward as he took in the label.
“Splurging, Carter?”
“I figured I deserved it, sir,” she said as he took a drink.
“That you do.” Leaning against the counter, he turned to survey the mess of her first bottle, tilting his own toward it. “Bit of a waste, that one.”
“Not really, sir.”
“Oh?” he innocently asked.
Sam was going to simply say that throwing it had felt good enough to warrant the loss, but she decided to be honest. He’d seen her expression and would know better, anyway. “Better than me hitting you.”
His lips quirked this time, but he kept a straight face. “Technically, I could still write you up for that.”
“Technically, you were still an intruder at that time, sir.”
He turned to give her an amused look. “And now?”
“I think sharing my splurge beer with you counts as an invitation, sir.”
“A very tasty one.”
She almost reflexively commented on his choice of words, but the quip died in her throat. This wasn’t the place nor the time, and she didn’t think she had it in her to banter, cautiously or not. Setting down her beer, she braced her hands on the counter and slumped against them, abruptly exhausted.
“Daniel’s dead,” she said, the words having a weighty finality to them that they hadn’t had before, now that the colonel wasn’t avoiding them.
His expression sobered and he nodded, staring down at the bottle in his hands. “Yes, he is.”
“I’d started to feel like we’d always make it out of things,” she reluctantly admitted. “Not that I think we’re invincible or anything, just that we’re, y’know…” She trailed off, trying to find the right words.
“Too stubborn to die?” the colonel offered.
Sam sighed. “Yeah.”
“Well, this time Daniel was too stubborn to live,” he replied, with a hint of bitterness, “so I guess that record still stands.”
“I don’t think you could have saved him, sir.”
“I couldn’t, but Jacob was trying, there was a good chance—”
Sam was already shaking her head. “Even Dad admitted that it didn’t look good, that Selmak probably wouldn’t have been able to heal Daniel completely.”
“Mostly healed and alive is better than kind-of-but-not-exactly dead,” the colonel argued.
“I don’t really think there’s a ‘mostly healed’ when it comes to radiation sickness, sir,” Sam countered in a small voice.
They both went quiet, each lost in their own painful memories of Daniel’s rapid decline. It had been the helplessness that had been the worst part, their inability to fix the issue, to solve the problem, to heal the hurt. She’d seen it in all of them, none more so than Janet. Sam hadn’t been all that shocked when Janet had admitted a willingness to put Daniel out of his misery; it was the one thing she could’ve done that would have ended his suffering, and with no other outcome it made sense she’d at least considered it. In fact, if they hadn’t had that slimmest of chances at being able to heal him, Sam thought Janet might have actually done it. But by the time that chance had proved futile, Daniel had already been lost to them.
“It took too long for Dad to get here,” Sam said, repeating what she’d been telling herself over and over. “It was too late.”
“There was nothing else any of us could have done.”
The colonel said it with a firm sense of certainty, like he’d run through every single one of the scenarios himself and found no other options. And she could agree with him on one point: there was nothing the rest of them could have done.
“I could have.”
She saw him frown in confusion for a second before his expression cleared as he realized what she meant. The sympathy in his eyes might have undone her if it could have gotten past the contempt she felt for herself.
Afterwards, none of them had talked about her botched attempt at using the healing device on Daniel. Janet had, briefly, offering comfort by stressing that it had been their only option to help him and that they’d had to try it. And Sam had just nodded in acceptance, not wanting to add her own surliness and self-loathing to the unbearable burden Janet was already carrying.
But in truth, Sam regretted having ever touched the healing device. It had been stupid of her, and desperation was a brutal teacher.
She never had managed to get the device to work properly in tests, not that she’d had much practice. After the brass had expressed some initial mild interest in the healing device, all of the R&D resources had been allocated to figuring out the hand device instead. Logically, Sam understood the reasons. The hand device was the weapon, it was the thing they needed to win the war. And she had managed to get it to work, after a fashion, even if that research would likely never result in any practical application. But it was a point-and-shoot situation, like every firearm or missile they’d ever manufactured, so of course it was the primary focus.
The healing device was different. It was finickier to use and, unlike the hand device, almost impossible to grasp the mechanics of intuitively. And since operating it required physical damage of some sort that needed repairing, testing it came with a host of ethical quandaries the hand device didn’t. If Sam screwed up with the hand device, she might make a bigger hole than she meant to in the target she was aiming at. If she messed up with the healing device, she’d kill someone. So even with the types of injuries the SGC saw, the executive decision had been made to not attempt any use of the healing device on wounded personnel. The device had been locked up in a safe and ignored.
And so Sam had never learned to use it, and mostly she’d never felt guilty about that. Until Daniel.
The image of Daniel lying in the isolation room, bloody sores hidden beneath bandages that made him look like one of the mummies he used to study, would haunt her until the day she died. But it was the image of him earlier on, when his visible symptoms were still at a minimum, convulsing on his cot while she held the healing device over him that ruled her nightmares.
She wrapped her arms around herself as the colonel shook his head.
“Carter—”
“Do you have any idea how infuriating it is that I can rig a ha’tak to self-destruct, that I can blow up a sun, that I can—can blast a hole in the firing range wall with the hand device, but when it mattered, when I was actually needed, I couldn’t save my friend?”
She was shaking by the time she finished, all the pent up guilt and horror she’d felt since that fateful moment in the isolation room unleashed on her body in a tidal wave. She felt like she should be crying—shouldn’t she be crying?—and she didn’t understand how her eyes were still dry.
“You tried,” the colonel responded in a mollifying tone.
“Drastic measures,” she caustically returned. “It wasn’t until Daniel was heading downhill fast that we even contemplated it. Because I can’t use the damn thing and trying to was a risk. If I had been able to use it, I could have healed him as soon as we got back and he wouldn’t have died. He wouldn’t have even felt anything.”
“You did what you could.”
“I made it worse!” she cried. “For all we know, if I’d left it alone Daniel might have still been okay enough for Dad to have actually healed him! Maybe he gave up, maybe he died because I screwed up!”
“He didn’t give up.”
“He’s dead, sir,” Sam flatly replied.
The colonel shook his head and sighed. “No, he was very clear that he wasn’t giving up, that that’s not what he was doing.”
“You called it giving up, sir,” she scoffed.
“Yeah, and I’m allowed to be contradictory,” he airily responded. “Benefits of command. But Daniel was adamant that he wasn’t giving up, and we both know he’d be pissed if he heard you talking this way, so since he isn’t here to berate you for it, I’ll do it for him. So stop blaming yourself, Carter. This wasn’t your fault and you aren’t responsible for any of it.”
Rationally, she knew he was right. But her emotions weren’t rational at the moment and she couldn’t let it go. Because the potential of the device was there inside her—undeveloped and ignored—and its waste had led to Daniel dying. Even worse, she knew the potential would never be more than that, that she would never actually be able to use the healing device. And she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself for that.
She sneered at the wall. “Daniel saved people and I destroy things. That’s why he’s gone: because he saved the Kelownans and I couldn’t save him.”
The colonel grimaced, looking like he was going to say something, but Sam cut across him.
“I told him it was important,” she blurted out. “Daniel—I told him that we’d gotten some of the naquadriah and that I thought it could be important. I don’t even know if he could hear me by that point, but it was one of the last things I said to him.”
“Well, it is important, right?” the colonel asked in a perplexed tone, clearly not following Sam’s train of thought. She gave him a dark look.
“Sir, you know as well as I do that while we may focus on the defensive and hyperdrive capabilities of the naquadriah at first, that won’t be the end of it. We’ll make our own bombs.” She laughed, brittle and hollow. “That I’ll be making them.” She twisted her bottle on the countertop, slowly circling it in the pool of its own condensation. “The one device we’ve found in all of our travels that has a positive effect and that only I would be able to wield? I can’t use it. But everything else? The guns, the lasers, the explosives? I’m on it!”
Across from her, the colonel mirrored her earlier position, bracing his hands on the edge of the counter and leaning against them. “Dammit, Carter—”
“My specialty is destruction, and even Daniel’s death is going to give me more fuel for that fire.”
The colonel pushed himself away from the counter in a jerky move. “Jesus, Carter. It isn’t like you have become Death, the destroyer of worlds; get a grip.”
That managed to bring her up short, and she looked at him in surprise. “Oppenheimer, sir?”
He looked annoyed by her surprise. “C’mon, Carter; give me a little credit.”
She bobbled her head, part acknowledgment, part apology. “Y’know, I thought a lot about the Manhattan project while we were working on the first naquadah-enhanced warheads,” she confessed. “I had the odd sensation of history repeating itself.” She clenched her teeth. “It wasn’t the history I’d wanted to be a part of.”
No, she’d just wanted to go to space. Not that she’d give up the SGC for NASA, not by any stretch of the imagination. But going through the Gate came with a lot more baggage than could fit on the ISS. She’d learned to live with that, but it was an uncomfortable living arrangement.
“You build things, Carter,” the colonel told her. “That’s what you do. You don’t decide how and where they’re used.”
“I don’t get to bury the things I’ve done—or the things I’ve been used to do—inside the chain of command, either, sir,” she snapped back.
He looked up at her then, and she could see sorrow and guilt swimming in his eyes before he hid them behind a determined frown.
“Look, Carter, I’m not gonna list out all the people and planets you’ve saved with the things you’ve built and the things you’ve done, because you already know. But if you want to play the blame game, let’s do it. We can start with the fact that I never should have left Daniel at that lab in the first place. He should have been touring the city; that’s where he belonged.”
“And I should have been at the lab.”
She watched whatever head of steam the colonel had been building up fizzle out at her words.
“Well, I—”
“That’s where I belonged, in the lab with the project scientists, learning more about the naquadriah and what they were trying to build.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t know why I didn’t ask to stay; there wasn’t any reason for me to go on the tour of the city, and I know you would’ve let me stay if I’d asked.”
The colonel nodded, somewhat hesitantly. “I would have.”
“Maybe if I had been there, I could have stopped them from performing the test. I could have asked more pointed questions, gotten more information to ascertain the potential outcomes of what they were trying to do, and been able to explain the repercussions to them in a detailed enough way that they would have aborted the attempt.”
“Or maybe they wouldn’t have.”
The colonel had managed an admirable attempt at a neutral tone, but Sam knew him too well to miss the tension in his voice. She glanced over to see him staring intently at her, his face calm but his gaze unsettled. Within the space of a heartbeat, she realized he was contemplating that scenario—that everything had played out the same, except she had taken Daniel’s place—and what that would’ve meant. And she knew that, despite him not wanting to, he was weighing which one of them he would have preferred to lose. Because she was doing something similar, trying to decide whether it would have been better for the team to have lost her instead of Daniel. She didn’t think either of them actually wanted to know the answers.
He recovered faster than she did and gave her a faint, crooked smile. “And then it would have been you saving all those people. Like you do.”
Sam tried to return the smile, but turned away, unable to hold the colonel’s gaze. She wanted to believe the way that he did, wanted to think she would have done the same thing Daniel had done, but the truth was that she wasn’t sure. And that uncertainty was hard to look at.
She pushed past the thought. “At least if it had been me, Daniel wouldn’t have been able to futz around with the healing device,” she said, in a feeble attempt at a joke.
The colonel latched onto it, though. “No, he’d have been blowing up the proverbial intergalactic phone, demanding that our allies get their butts to Earth post haste to fix you.” He huffed out a laugh. “He’d have probably browbeat the Kelownans into renaming the country in your honor. Hell, the planet.”
Sam wrinkled her nose. “I don’t really have a good name for that.”
“He’d have translated it into Sumerian or Greek or Ancient or something,” the colonel suggested, with a wave of his beer. “And you could have added it to your very long service record: Has planet named after her.”
All of a sudden, the fact that they were talking about Daniel in the past tense hit Sam. He was, and they would never see him again. She would never again watch him argue with the colonel until they were both red in the face, only for them to turn back to back in the next second as they fought off an ambush. She would never sleep next to him in a tent on an away mission again, his faint snores a familiar lullaby. They would never have another needlessly philosophical conversation at some ungodly hour of the night, or sit together across from Teal’c in the commissary and playfully tease him about how much food was on his tray. There was a giant Daniel-sized hole in their team, and it suddenly felt like the floor had disappeared beneath her feet.
Her laugh was half sob, and the colonel turned to her in surprise.
“Daniel’s dead,” she said, the tears she’d been expecting finally pouring out of her, hot and fast down her cheeks.
The colonel nodded, his expression momentarily more haggard than she’d seen it before. “Yeah.”
“What are we going to do now?”
It was a ridiculously broad question, and she half wondered why she’d asked it. But the colonel just set his beer on the counter in a way that indicated he was about to leave, and Sam felt her stomach drop. For all she’d been furious at him for being there at first, she didn’t want him to go now. She didn’t think she was ready to be alone again.
“Well, first of all,” he said, “I’m going to tell Hammond to take us off active duty.” He looked away from her, glancing around the room with what she might have labeled shame, if it had been clear enough. “We shouldn’t have stayed on it in the first place, not after—” He cut himself off, then he cleared his throat and continued. “Next, I’m going to go get Teal’c and we’re going to come back with pizzas and more beer.” Pausing, he looked to her for confirmation. “As long as that’s okay?”
She gave him a watery smile. “Yes, sir. I’d like that. And I think we all need it.”
“Yeah, we probably do.”
He looked down, rocking back on his heels, as much admitting that he’d been the one blocking them from having a team moment as acknowledging the fact that one was needed. She saw his eyes cut over to the mess she’d made in the living room, glass sparkling under the lights and beer staining the walls and carpet.
“You want me to help clean that up before I go?” he asked, gesturing in that direction with his chin.
She sighed and wiped her face. “No, sir. It’s my mess. But thank you.”
Nodding again, he took a few steps backwards, toward the front hallway. “I’ll be back soon,” he started, before stopping and just standing there with his keys in his hands. He gently jangled them about in his palm as he looked from her face to the remains of the shattered bottle and back again. “Be careful, Carter,” he lightly said. “If I come back and find you’ve cut yourself on that, I might just write you up for throwing a bottle at a superior officer anyway.”
“Around,” she corrected him.
“Close to,” he countered.
“In the presence of.”
“While arguing with.”
“If I’d planned to throw it at you, sir, I wouldn’t have missed.”
His lips twitched at that. “I know, Carter,” he replied, with exaggerated solemnity. “That’s what I worry about.” He studied her face for another second, then turned and disappeared into the hallway. “Back soon,” he called over his shoulder. “Keep the porch light on for us.”
“Sir?”
The word came out of her before she’d consciously decided to say it, and she hurried over so that she was standing at the entrance to the hallway and could look down it. The colonel had stopped with his hand on the door handle, and he looked back at her with a questioning expression.
“Carter?”
She could tell there was something she wanted to say—thank you or I’m sorry or maybe her own be careful—but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was. So she just gave him a feeble smile.
“Could you get cake, too?”
He raised an eyebrow at her as he pulled the door open and stepped outside. “You know me, Carter. I’m always up for cake.”
As the door shut behind him, Sam took a deep breath. Walking back into the kitchen to grab what she needed to clean up the broken bottle, she mentally prodded her anger and her grief. They weren’t gone, but they were settled now, still beneath her skin instead of writhing. She knew that feeling—was intimately familiar with it, actually—and knew how to deal with it, so she knew she’d be okay. Wherever Daniel was, whatever he’d become, they would figure out how to make it without him.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter, Jack O’Neill
Word Count: 5789
Categories: gen, drama, angst, friendship
Spoilers: Set after “Revelations” (5.22); spoilers for that and “Meridian” (5.21).
Warnings: none
Summary: Sam’s anger was stronger than her grief, and it kept her going, for a while. The tension between Sam and Jack following Daniel’s death finally comes to a head.
Sam’s anger was stronger than her grief, and it kept her going, for a while.
While Daniel’s loss had opened a bottomless chasm inside her, it was narrow at the surface, a crack easily papered over with the vast swathes of rage that had settled in her body. In fact, she was sure the former fed the latter—she’d learned long ago that sorrow to fury wasn’t much of a leap. The anger kept her functional when she knew the grief would have otherwise shut her down, so she held onto it, needs must. But the longer she kept hold of it, the worse it got.
She left the base as soon as she was allowed to.
Once the team got back from saving Thor and Freyr, General Hammond had kept them on base for another twenty-four hours. Sam hadn’t understood why, but she also hadn’t argued against it, already so on edge that she knew the slightest slip of her tongue would probably snowball into a court martial. So she held herself together through the post-mission physical and the debriefing, submitting to the examination and the general’s questions with a calmness she didn’t actually feel. She spent a few hours tinkering with things and avoiding everyone—but especially her teammates—and then signed out at security the second the clock hit 1700.
On the way home, she made one stop to get beer. It wasn’t her usual procedure, drinking away her feelings, but she needed some way to slow down her brain and short of getting Janet to sedate her, alcohol was the only option she had. She’d originally planned to just lock herself inside for the rest of the night and see whether she’d managed to buy enough beer for things to stop hurting for a little while. But when she got home the place was too still, too quiet, too empty, and her restlessness drove her back out the door and onto her bike.
She rode as though she could outrun her own thoughts, as if all she had to do was drive fast enough and reckless enough and they wouldn’t be able to find her again. Sometimes, that worked. But not tonight. Once it was getting dusky, in that grayed out space between light and dark where the danger on the roads was at its greatest, she turned back home. Her mind was still racing, but the jitteriness had at least lost its edge, and she was feeling marginally better by the time she turned into her neighborhood.
Then she pulled onto her street and saw Colonel O’Neill’s truck parked outside her house.
There was no reason for him to be there, none at all, and she was irrationally furious that he was. Too furious to risk being anywhere near him, she knew, and as she rolled her bike back into the garage, she decided to ignore him. She would sit inside and drink her beer and eventually he’d go away. Or he’d break in and she could shoot him. Either way there would be limited interaction, and that was for the best. For both their sakes.
But the colonel must have sensed something, because instead of waiting for her to let him in through the front door, he followed her into the garage, ducking under the door before it rolled shut behind her. It took every ounce of self-control Sam possessed to not throw her helmet at his head. He didn’t say anything, and she refused to look at him as she unlocked the door that led inside. She had half a mind to slam it in his face, but again he seemed to be on to her, his arm reaching past her to hold the door open even as she stepped through it.
Fighting the urge to growl in frustration, Sam stormed through the house, shedding her riding gear as she went. She was going to ignore him, dammit. She was going to ignore him and he was going to leave and she could go back to the drunken night she’d planned and forget for at least a few hours that she had to deal with tomorrow.
Reaching the kitchen, she yanked the fridge open with more force than was necessary, all the items in the door rattling and clanking loudly in protest. She pulled out a beer, pointedly not offering the colonel one as well. Instead, she pushed the fridge door closed again with her foot even as she popped the top off her bottle, hoping the very obvious snub would send him packing. But he was never easily dissuaded, and it didn’t look like this time would be any different.
So she took a swig and waited for him to say something, to provide an explanation for why he was intruding on her personal time. But he just stood by the kitchen island and watched her, hands shoved in his pockets and face inscrutable. Part of her wanted to see how long it would last, them standing there not speaking. That part of her balked at being the one to give in and break the silence. But she also knew that the longer the stalemate lasted, the longer he would be in her house, and her desire to get rid of him quickly overrode her stubbornness.
“Why are you here, sir?” she asked, her voice as cold as the bottle in her hand. She wasn’t facing him, staring resolutely at the living room wall instead, but she saw him shift slightly out of the corner of her eye.
“We need to talk.”
She let out a huff of sardonic laughter. “Now you want to talk?”
“Carter—”
“Why?”
“What?”
He sounded genuinely confused, and she took another drink as she turned to him, catching the puzzled frown he wore.
“Why do you suddenly want to talk now, sir?”
His stoic demeanor slipped a little, and he looked away, glancing around the room. “You were avoiding me, on base. I figured we should talk about it. Not on base.”
“Trying.”
His eyes came back to hers. “What?”
“I was trying to avoid you, sir.” Sam pointedly gestured between them.
He was frowning again. “You’re angry.”
“Oh, top marks for observation skills, sir,” she retorted, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her tone.
“Careful, Carter,” he growled.
He had straightened to his full height, one hand coming out of its pocket and his gaze darkening slightly as he gave her a warning stare. It was his command posture, the one he always shifted into when he felt any of them had gone too far. And she had, but it was on purpose. She was out of line, but so was he, and she wasn’t going to let him hide behind rank to avoid the conversation he’d started.
“No, sir.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“I have every right to be angry, sir, and you don’t have the right to tell me not to be.”
“No, but you’re being insubordinate.”
“In my own house,” she ground out. “Where you weren’t invited.”
“Carter—”
He said her name in a tone caught somewhere between sigh and reprimand, almost like he was annoyed at having to be annoyed with her. But he’d done it to himself, butting in where it had been made clear he wasn’t welcome, and she wasn’t going to hold back now.
“Daniel’s dead,” she snapped, “and all you’ve done is act like nothing happened, like nothing’s changed.”
The colonel went rigid, his face going blank. “We aren’t having this conversation.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Carter—”
“You came to my house, sir. You decided we needed to talk—well, fine. This is the conversation we need to have.”
The tension was coming off of him in waves, a clear indication of his discomfort and irritation. It was the sort of signal Sam would normally have heeded, backing away and dropping the subject. But he also wasn’t leaving, wasn’t walking away, and there was too much she needed to get off of her chest.
“The problem is that you won’t talk about it,” she continued, the words spilling out of her in a rush, like a dam had broken somewhere inside her. “Daniel died and you’re going around like everything is business as usual, as if his death meant nothing to you.”
The colonel flinched ever so slightly, but Sam barreled on.
“For god’s sake; you kept us on active duty as if we didn’t just watch one of our teammates—one of our friends—slowly and brutally die! But he did, and you won’t even let us have a memorial service for him. Hell, you won’t even let us talk about having a memorial service. Now maybe you don’t need to mourn Daniel; you did get to say goodbye, after all. But the rest of us didn’t. We just had to take your word for it that he wanted to die and then accept your complete disregard for our grief when he did.”
The colonel had grown increasingly uncomfortable as she talked, his eyes drifting from hers as he shifted on his feet. He grimaced faintly when she finally stopped for breath.
“He’s not dead, he’s—” He ineffectually flapped his hand in the air.
Suddenly, Sam was angry beyond all control. Her heart was aching and all of her doubts and self-loathing, which had been simmering just beneath the surface, were scraped raw. Before she even realized what she was doing, she had thrown her beer across the room. The bottle shattered against the built-ins with a satisfying, clarifying crash, glass and liquid flying everywhere. The rational part of her mind, which had opted to stay out of the whole situation, reflected that it would be a bitch to clean up later. The livid part of her was gratified to see the colonel jump at the impact.
“He’s gone!” she yelled. “He’s gone and it doesn’t matter where he is or what he is now because it just means that he’s not here!”
There was moment of quiet, where all Sam could hear was her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. The colonel’s expression had gone flat, and he was watching her with a shuttered gaze when he finally responded.
“That’s what happens when we lose people; they’re no longer around.”
The words were distinctly casual, drawled out as if they were doing nothing more than talking about the weather. The colonel had both hands back in his pockets, and he was leaning back on his heels slightly as he watched her. He would have been the picture of nonchalance if not for the rigid way he was holding himself. Sam stared him down, torn between incredulity and rage.
“What in the hell is wrong with you, sir?”
His mouth curled slightly, just at the corner, in a grim facsimile of a smile. “D’you know how many people I’ve lost, Carter?”
More than anyone should, but that wasn’t the point. Sam slammed her hands down on the island counter, reveling in the stinging of her palms. “It’s Daniel!”
“He chose it!” the colonel shouted back.
The outburst took Sam by surprise, and she startled slightly, taking a half step back. For the first time since he’d arrived at her house, the colonel wasn’t masking his emotions, and she was shocked by the depth of fury in his eyes. It was far more than her attitude alone would have provoked in him, and she wondered what it meant.
“You’re angry, too,” she stated, her own anger dissipating at the revelation.
“Of course I’m angry!” he shot back. He stalked away a few steps, dragging a hand over his face before he turned back to face her. “Daniel didn’t just die; he chose to die! We could have saved him and he decided he’d rather die!”
It was like a bolt of electricity went through her. Suddenly the colonel’s irrational behavior since Daniel’s death made perfect sense. His refusal to talk about it, his insistence that Daniel wasn’t actually dead while simultaneously leaning on the adage that they lost people every day, even his ready acceptance of a dangerous mission for the Asgard—it was all because he was mad at Daniel.
Standing there in her living room, hands balled into fists at his sides, the colonel gave her a hard look. “I don’t know about you, Carter, but I don’t like just giving up.”
Sam didn’t either—none of SG-1 did—and she’d always thought it had made them a force to be reckoned with. But she also understood how death could look like relief, something to be welcomed instead of feared. And she was too knowledgeable about the effects of radiation poisoning not to be acutely aware of exactly how Daniel had suffered, would have known every horrific detail even if she hadn’t watched the majority of it occurring in real time. Even with her dad doing his best with the healing device, there were no guarantees Daniel would have fully recovered from his near-death state. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting to live that way.
“You said it’s what he wanted,” she quietly reminded the colonel.
“He said it was better,” he sourly replied, “that he thought he could do more if he left, but the bottom line is that he’s gone and he chose to be.” He met her gaze again, and she could see weariness creeping into his eyes. “So yes, Carter. I’m angry.”
It occurred to Sam that she should have realized the colonel wasn’t as unaffected by Daniel’s death as he’d appeared to be. She’d seen him shove his emotions behind a veil of indifference before; it was his go-to move. He pushed his feelings down and people away and that was how he got through everything. He wasn’t alone in that.
She studied him for a minute before she went back to the fridge. More calmly this time, she retrieved two beers from it and opened them, setting one on the edge of the counter nearest the colonel. He appeared to silently sigh before he walked over and picked it up, one eyebrow rising upward as he took in the label.
“Splurging, Carter?”
“I figured I deserved it, sir,” she said as he took a drink.
“That you do.” Leaning against the counter, he turned to survey the mess of her first bottle, tilting his own toward it. “Bit of a waste, that one.”
“Not really, sir.”
“Oh?” he innocently asked.
Sam was going to simply say that throwing it had felt good enough to warrant the loss, but she decided to be honest. He’d seen her expression and would know better, anyway. “Better than me hitting you.”
His lips quirked this time, but he kept a straight face. “Technically, I could still write you up for that.”
“Technically, you were still an intruder at that time, sir.”
He turned to give her an amused look. “And now?”
“I think sharing my splurge beer with you counts as an invitation, sir.”
“A very tasty one.”
She almost reflexively commented on his choice of words, but the quip died in her throat. This wasn’t the place nor the time, and she didn’t think she had it in her to banter, cautiously or not. Setting down her beer, she braced her hands on the counter and slumped against them, abruptly exhausted.
“Daniel’s dead,” she said, the words having a weighty finality to them that they hadn’t had before, now that the colonel wasn’t avoiding them.
His expression sobered and he nodded, staring down at the bottle in his hands. “Yes, he is.”
“I’d started to feel like we’d always make it out of things,” she reluctantly admitted. “Not that I think we’re invincible or anything, just that we’re, y’know…” She trailed off, trying to find the right words.
“Too stubborn to die?” the colonel offered.
Sam sighed. “Yeah.”
“Well, this time Daniel was too stubborn to live,” he replied, with a hint of bitterness, “so I guess that record still stands.”
“I don’t think you could have saved him, sir.”
“I couldn’t, but Jacob was trying, there was a good chance—”
Sam was already shaking her head. “Even Dad admitted that it didn’t look good, that Selmak probably wouldn’t have been able to heal Daniel completely.”
“Mostly healed and alive is better than kind-of-but-not-exactly dead,” the colonel argued.
“I don’t really think there’s a ‘mostly healed’ when it comes to radiation sickness, sir,” Sam countered in a small voice.
They both went quiet, each lost in their own painful memories of Daniel’s rapid decline. It had been the helplessness that had been the worst part, their inability to fix the issue, to solve the problem, to heal the hurt. She’d seen it in all of them, none more so than Janet. Sam hadn’t been all that shocked when Janet had admitted a willingness to put Daniel out of his misery; it was the one thing she could’ve done that would have ended his suffering, and with no other outcome it made sense she’d at least considered it. In fact, if they hadn’t had that slimmest of chances at being able to heal him, Sam thought Janet might have actually done it. But by the time that chance had proved futile, Daniel had already been lost to them.
“It took too long for Dad to get here,” Sam said, repeating what she’d been telling herself over and over. “It was too late.”
“There was nothing else any of us could have done.”
The colonel said it with a firm sense of certainty, like he’d run through every single one of the scenarios himself and found no other options. And she could agree with him on one point: there was nothing the rest of them could have done.
“I could have.”
She saw him frown in confusion for a second before his expression cleared as he realized what she meant. The sympathy in his eyes might have undone her if it could have gotten past the contempt she felt for herself.
Afterwards, none of them had talked about her botched attempt at using the healing device on Daniel. Janet had, briefly, offering comfort by stressing that it had been their only option to help him and that they’d had to try it. And Sam had just nodded in acceptance, not wanting to add her own surliness and self-loathing to the unbearable burden Janet was already carrying.
But in truth, Sam regretted having ever touched the healing device. It had been stupid of her, and desperation was a brutal teacher.
She never had managed to get the device to work properly in tests, not that she’d had much practice. After the brass had expressed some initial mild interest in the healing device, all of the R&D resources had been allocated to figuring out the hand device instead. Logically, Sam understood the reasons. The hand device was the weapon, it was the thing they needed to win the war. And she had managed to get it to work, after a fashion, even if that research would likely never result in any practical application. But it was a point-and-shoot situation, like every firearm or missile they’d ever manufactured, so of course it was the primary focus.
The healing device was different. It was finickier to use and, unlike the hand device, almost impossible to grasp the mechanics of intuitively. And since operating it required physical damage of some sort that needed repairing, testing it came with a host of ethical quandaries the hand device didn’t. If Sam screwed up with the hand device, she might make a bigger hole than she meant to in the target she was aiming at. If she messed up with the healing device, she’d kill someone. So even with the types of injuries the SGC saw, the executive decision had been made to not attempt any use of the healing device on wounded personnel. The device had been locked up in a safe and ignored.
And so Sam had never learned to use it, and mostly she’d never felt guilty about that. Until Daniel.
The image of Daniel lying in the isolation room, bloody sores hidden beneath bandages that made him look like one of the mummies he used to study, would haunt her until the day she died. But it was the image of him earlier on, when his visible symptoms were still at a minimum, convulsing on his cot while she held the healing device over him that ruled her nightmares.
She wrapped her arms around herself as the colonel shook his head.
“Carter—”
“Do you have any idea how infuriating it is that I can rig a ha’tak to self-destruct, that I can blow up a sun, that I can—can blast a hole in the firing range wall with the hand device, but when it mattered, when I was actually needed, I couldn’t save my friend?”
She was shaking by the time she finished, all the pent up guilt and horror she’d felt since that fateful moment in the isolation room unleashed on her body in a tidal wave. She felt like she should be crying—shouldn’t she be crying?—and she didn’t understand how her eyes were still dry.
“You tried,” the colonel responded in a mollifying tone.
“Drastic measures,” she caustically returned. “It wasn’t until Daniel was heading downhill fast that we even contemplated it. Because I can’t use the damn thing and trying to was a risk. If I had been able to use it, I could have healed him as soon as we got back and he wouldn’t have died. He wouldn’t have even felt anything.”
“You did what you could.”
“I made it worse!” she cried. “For all we know, if I’d left it alone Daniel might have still been okay enough for Dad to have actually healed him! Maybe he gave up, maybe he died because I screwed up!”
“He didn’t give up.”
“He’s dead, sir,” Sam flatly replied.
The colonel shook his head and sighed. “No, he was very clear that he wasn’t giving up, that that’s not what he was doing.”
“You called it giving up, sir,” she scoffed.
“Yeah, and I’m allowed to be contradictory,” he airily responded. “Benefits of command. But Daniel was adamant that he wasn’t giving up, and we both know he’d be pissed if he heard you talking this way, so since he isn’t here to berate you for it, I’ll do it for him. So stop blaming yourself, Carter. This wasn’t your fault and you aren’t responsible for any of it.”
Rationally, she knew he was right. But her emotions weren’t rational at the moment and she couldn’t let it go. Because the potential of the device was there inside her—undeveloped and ignored—and its waste had led to Daniel dying. Even worse, she knew the potential would never be more than that, that she would never actually be able to use the healing device. And she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself for that.
She sneered at the wall. “Daniel saved people and I destroy things. That’s why he’s gone: because he saved the Kelownans and I couldn’t save him.”
The colonel grimaced, looking like he was going to say something, but Sam cut across him.
“I told him it was important,” she blurted out. “Daniel—I told him that we’d gotten some of the naquadriah and that I thought it could be important. I don’t even know if he could hear me by that point, but it was one of the last things I said to him.”
“Well, it is important, right?” the colonel asked in a perplexed tone, clearly not following Sam’s train of thought. She gave him a dark look.
“Sir, you know as well as I do that while we may focus on the defensive and hyperdrive capabilities of the naquadriah at first, that won’t be the end of it. We’ll make our own bombs.” She laughed, brittle and hollow. “That I’ll be making them.” She twisted her bottle on the countertop, slowly circling it in the pool of its own condensation. “The one device we’ve found in all of our travels that has a positive effect and that only I would be able to wield? I can’t use it. But everything else? The guns, the lasers, the explosives? I’m on it!”
Across from her, the colonel mirrored her earlier position, bracing his hands on the edge of the counter and leaning against them. “Dammit, Carter—”
“My specialty is destruction, and even Daniel’s death is going to give me more fuel for that fire.”
The colonel pushed himself away from the counter in a jerky move. “Jesus, Carter. It isn’t like you have become Death, the destroyer of worlds; get a grip.”
That managed to bring her up short, and she looked at him in surprise. “Oppenheimer, sir?”
He looked annoyed by her surprise. “C’mon, Carter; give me a little credit.”
She bobbled her head, part acknowledgment, part apology. “Y’know, I thought a lot about the Manhattan project while we were working on the first naquadah-enhanced warheads,” she confessed. “I had the odd sensation of history repeating itself.” She clenched her teeth. “It wasn’t the history I’d wanted to be a part of.”
No, she’d just wanted to go to space. Not that she’d give up the SGC for NASA, not by any stretch of the imagination. But going through the Gate came with a lot more baggage than could fit on the ISS. She’d learned to live with that, but it was an uncomfortable living arrangement.
“You build things, Carter,” the colonel told her. “That’s what you do. You don’t decide how and where they’re used.”
“I don’t get to bury the things I’ve done—or the things I’ve been used to do—inside the chain of command, either, sir,” she snapped back.
He looked up at her then, and she could see sorrow and guilt swimming in his eyes before he hid them behind a determined frown.
“Look, Carter, I’m not gonna list out all the people and planets you’ve saved with the things you’ve built and the things you’ve done, because you already know. But if you want to play the blame game, let’s do it. We can start with the fact that I never should have left Daniel at that lab in the first place. He should have been touring the city; that’s where he belonged.”
“And I should have been at the lab.”
She watched whatever head of steam the colonel had been building up fizzle out at her words.
“Well, I—”
“That’s where I belonged, in the lab with the project scientists, learning more about the naquadriah and what they were trying to build.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t know why I didn’t ask to stay; there wasn’t any reason for me to go on the tour of the city, and I know you would’ve let me stay if I’d asked.”
The colonel nodded, somewhat hesitantly. “I would have.”
“Maybe if I had been there, I could have stopped them from performing the test. I could have asked more pointed questions, gotten more information to ascertain the potential outcomes of what they were trying to do, and been able to explain the repercussions to them in a detailed enough way that they would have aborted the attempt.”
“Or maybe they wouldn’t have.”
The colonel had managed an admirable attempt at a neutral tone, but Sam knew him too well to miss the tension in his voice. She glanced over to see him staring intently at her, his face calm but his gaze unsettled. Within the space of a heartbeat, she realized he was contemplating that scenario—that everything had played out the same, except she had taken Daniel’s place—and what that would’ve meant. And she knew that, despite him not wanting to, he was weighing which one of them he would have preferred to lose. Because she was doing something similar, trying to decide whether it would have been better for the team to have lost her instead of Daniel. She didn’t think either of them actually wanted to know the answers.
He recovered faster than she did and gave her a faint, crooked smile. “And then it would have been you saving all those people. Like you do.”
Sam tried to return the smile, but turned away, unable to hold the colonel’s gaze. She wanted to believe the way that he did, wanted to think she would have done the same thing Daniel had done, but the truth was that she wasn’t sure. And that uncertainty was hard to look at.
She pushed past the thought. “At least if it had been me, Daniel wouldn’t have been able to futz around with the healing device,” she said, in a feeble attempt at a joke.
The colonel latched onto it, though. “No, he’d have been blowing up the proverbial intergalactic phone, demanding that our allies get their butts to Earth post haste to fix you.” He huffed out a laugh. “He’d have probably browbeat the Kelownans into renaming the country in your honor. Hell, the planet.”
Sam wrinkled her nose. “I don’t really have a good name for that.”
“He’d have translated it into Sumerian or Greek or Ancient or something,” the colonel suggested, with a wave of his beer. “And you could have added it to your very long service record: Has planet named after her.”
All of a sudden, the fact that they were talking about Daniel in the past tense hit Sam. He was, and they would never see him again. She would never again watch him argue with the colonel until they were both red in the face, only for them to turn back to back in the next second as they fought off an ambush. She would never sleep next to him in a tent on an away mission again, his faint snores a familiar lullaby. They would never have another needlessly philosophical conversation at some ungodly hour of the night, or sit together across from Teal’c in the commissary and playfully tease him about how much food was on his tray. There was a giant Daniel-sized hole in their team, and it suddenly felt like the floor had disappeared beneath her feet.
Her laugh was half sob, and the colonel turned to her in surprise.
“Daniel’s dead,” she said, the tears she’d been expecting finally pouring out of her, hot and fast down her cheeks.
The colonel nodded, his expression momentarily more haggard than she’d seen it before. “Yeah.”
“What are we going to do now?”
It was a ridiculously broad question, and she half wondered why she’d asked it. But the colonel just set his beer on the counter in a way that indicated he was about to leave, and Sam felt her stomach drop. For all she’d been furious at him for being there at first, she didn’t want him to go now. She didn’t think she was ready to be alone again.
“Well, first of all,” he said, “I’m going to tell Hammond to take us off active duty.” He looked away from her, glancing around the room with what she might have labeled shame, if it had been clear enough. “We shouldn’t have stayed on it in the first place, not after—” He cut himself off, then he cleared his throat and continued. “Next, I’m going to go get Teal’c and we’re going to come back with pizzas and more beer.” Pausing, he looked to her for confirmation. “As long as that’s okay?”
She gave him a watery smile. “Yes, sir. I’d like that. And I think we all need it.”
“Yeah, we probably do.”
He looked down, rocking back on his heels, as much admitting that he’d been the one blocking them from having a team moment as acknowledging the fact that one was needed. She saw his eyes cut over to the mess she’d made in the living room, glass sparkling under the lights and beer staining the walls and carpet.
“You want me to help clean that up before I go?” he asked, gesturing in that direction with his chin.
She sighed and wiped her face. “No, sir. It’s my mess. But thank you.”
Nodding again, he took a few steps backwards, toward the front hallway. “I’ll be back soon,” he started, before stopping and just standing there with his keys in his hands. He gently jangled them about in his palm as he looked from her face to the remains of the shattered bottle and back again. “Be careful, Carter,” he lightly said. “If I come back and find you’ve cut yourself on that, I might just write you up for throwing a bottle at a superior officer anyway.”
“Around,” she corrected him.
“Close to,” he countered.
“In the presence of.”
“While arguing with.”
“If I’d planned to throw it at you, sir, I wouldn’t have missed.”
His lips twitched at that. “I know, Carter,” he replied, with exaggerated solemnity. “That’s what I worry about.” He studied her face for another second, then turned and disappeared into the hallway. “Back soon,” he called over his shoulder. “Keep the porch light on for us.”
“Sir?”
The word came out of her before she’d consciously decided to say it, and she hurried over so that she was standing at the entrance to the hallway and could look down it. The colonel had stopped with his hand on the door handle, and he looked back at her with a questioning expression.
“Carter?”
She could tell there was something she wanted to say—thank you or I’m sorry or maybe her own be careful—but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was. So she just gave him a feeble smile.
“Could you get cake, too?”
He raised an eyebrow at her as he pulled the door open and stepped outside. “You know me, Carter. I’m always up for cake.”
As the door shut behind him, Sam took a deep breath. Walking back into the kitchen to grab what she needed to clean up the broken bottle, she mentally prodded her anger and her grief. They weren’t gone, but they were settled now, still beneath her skin instead of writhing. She knew that feeling—was intimately familiar with it, actually—and knew how to deal with it, so she knew she’d be okay. Wherever Daniel was, whatever he’d become, they would figure out how to make it without him.