(no subject)
Title: Down Here Among the Wreckage
Author: Annerb
Summary: Five years ago, SG-1 broke in half. Two years ago, Earth lost. Today, there is one last chance to fix things. But sometimes the pieces just don’t fit back together again.
Warnings: Mature for language, violence, torture, non-con, adult themes, and some temporal meandering.
Categorization: AU, H/C, darkfic, tragedy, and apocafic for flavor. Team, Sam/Jack.
A/N: Special thanks to la_tante for the beta.
Part One-History
Part Two-Prodigal
Prologue
Chapter 1: What Once Was Lost
Chapter 2: Omega
Chapter 3: Compatriots
Chapter 4: A Song For Our Fathers
Chapter 5: Down So Long
When Sam first heard of Earth’s final fate, she found it hard to feel much of anything. The five years since she’s last seen it are a blur, soft and indistinct and comforting. Easy.
But not this day. Today is full of sharp edges and dangerous words and brittle lies that catch and tear on her skin, refusing to slide by unnoticed.
Some things you just don’t come back from.
There are voices out in the yard, the pitched tones climbing and falling and loaded with things left unsaid and she’s caught in them like a current, so she steps out the rear of her house to submit to the pull, concealing herself in darkness and foliage like any other shadow, following the sound of footfalls stomping down the mountainside.
She knows these men. Or she knew them. Or maybe they just knew her.
The third man though…the stranger. He doesn’t feel right. That’s not his space to fill, striding there in front, shoulders squared against responsibility. Because he would have returned to Earth... Wouldn’t he? But no, he’s been replaced too.
That’s not right.
Her father came, it’s how she knows. He must have used the failsafe she’d given him. The one she won’t use herself. But he hadn’t returned to Earth.
Things you don’t come back from.
She’d known, that sunny day on the mountainside with bruises fresh upon her flesh--so familiar… She’d known he would never come back. It might be the last concrete fact she knows for certain until today. The day Daniel comes.
She watches them approach the gate, watches the way the three men exist in their own separate spheres, so much space shoved between them that they may as well be strangers. She watches Daniel’s jaw, the agitated play of muscles and tendons, a fire barely contained. She watches Teal’c’s fingers trail over her stitches almost reverently, but uncomprehending.
Only the stranger is still, his back bowed slightly as Daniel dials an address she doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t. Can’t.
Can’t go back.
The wind shifts, blowing in her face and she blinks against the intrusion, her eyes watering. She turns away from the gate.
Walking back up to her house, her solitary footsteps scatter the dust, erasing all evidence of any other passing feet. She sits in her chair in her little house and stares at the empty spot on her wall and tries to forget the feel of paper and words under her fingers.
Can’t.
* * *
The blank space nags at her, a giant hole on her wall where cloth used to hang. The emptiness lingers long after she covers it with a different pattern, a new quilt, just not the right one.
She feels exposed, unprotected, restless without it, things creeping up on her in the dark. She doesn’t understand why. From the basket next to her chair, she pulls out a blue square of fabric, the final piece to the now-absent quilt.
It wasn’t on purpose. She never consciously made a decision. The needle and thread are about necessity, about repairing and covering and keeping herself clothed. They are constancy.
They are control.
She learned at the knee of Gairwyn’s eldest daughter, her stitches clumsy, the children gathered by her side. They’re a bit of a blur, those days since he left. The way she likes them.
She remembers that one day fabric appeared in the supplies her father brings. It keeps her hands busy. The numbers didn’t happen until after he came again with words about Earth and its ending, full of facts and numbers, only they were after the fact. Facts that can’t be altered.
The first time she looked down and saw the fabric covered with numbers and facts and equations to a universe she tries to forget, she dropped it to the floor, walking a wide berth around it for a week. But then the numbers just built up, threatening to burst out through her skin, so she gave them that one square and then another, allowing that one tiny piece of her to spill out over it when she feels like she might rupture. It keeps things quiet that way, and she thinks maybe one day she’ll find the bottom of that well. Maybe it will dry up if she tries hard enough.
For two years she worked on it, ripping thread and pulling numbers, reworking as she went, a puzzle made of fabric squares, moved around step by step, an anchor for her listing existence.
She’s adrift without them now that they are gone.
Twisting the one remaining square in her fingers, rumpling the fabric, she peers at the numbers from a different angle, her eyes sharpened by words she tries to forget. Things slip, tumble, falter into place. She sees it.
We really need your help.
She drops the square to the floor.
* * *
She’s in the forest.
Sunlight filters down through the thick trees, painting yellow patterns on the springy earth, rich with loam and decaying leaves. There’s the crunch of a twig in front of her, and she drops to a crouch, her weapon tucked in tight against her shoulder, her eyes scanning the landscape in front of her.
“Sam,” someone says, and she spins to her left, calming her breathing and stretching her senses as far as she can, weapon still firmly in place.
There. A flash of dark blue in the trees, a faint voice she should know.
“Daniel?” she asks, pushing to her feet to follow. She bobs and weaves through the thick trunks until they thin out, falling away to reveal a large clearing with a stone platform built at its center. On top standing proudly in the clear sunshine is a Stargate.
“Sam,” a voice says again, and she turns, almost stumbling over a DHD.
Teal’c catches her arm, steadying her. “Are you all right, Major Carter?”
Something is not right. “Are you?” she asks.
He bows slightly, a Cheshire grin on his face that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I would appreciate your company.”
“Sam!”
She jerks. Daniel stands in front of the wormhole, nearly indistinct against the sea of rippling blue behind him. “Are you even listening?”
Shaking her head, Sam takes a step toward him. “Where are we going?”
“I asked you if you recognized this,” Daniel says, pressing something cool and solid into her hand.
She doesn’t look down at the object, just feels the weight of it in her hand. “We’re right behind you,” she promises as Daniel and Teal’c step through.
A hand on her arm. “Come on, Carter. Let’s get moving. You know how Hammond gets when we make him wait.”
She tries to turn, tries to lift that heavy weight in her hand, but she’s rooted to the ground. His grip is hard on her arm, squeezing her bones, but when she looks down there is nothing, only perfect, clear, unmarred skin.
“Go! Now!”
She turns towards his panicked voice, legs finally breaking free, hands reaching, but there is nothing there. Even the forest is gone, replaced with a black pit, a gaping cliff, the complete absence of everything, crawling towards her across the clearing, beginning to tug at the hem of her skirt.
The gate dims as if loosing opacity moment by moment.
Something cold latches onto her ankle, and she opens her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.
“Carter!” his voice shouts, insistent against her ear.
Sam gasps into wakefulness, blinking rapidly against the light invading her room, the sun bright and high in the sky outside her window. The echoes of the dream vibrate through her mind and she squeezes her eyes shut, fingers pressing against her temples.
Dreams are another thing she left behind five years ago. They don’t belong here.
They don’t matter. They can’t.
She walks the rest of the day in a haze, only it’s not one full of indistinct comforts, but contrasts, the dream jarring against her daily routine. Something isn’t right. She wants to believe the dream is the culprit, the one that doesn’t belong, the foreign thing to be ignored, but she just can’t quite settle on anything.
She finds herself at Linna’s door, staring in at the cozy interior, breathing the familiar smell, and she thinks maybe she will be okay in this space. Nothing can reach her here. Not even the dreams.
But then the unexpected happens.
“I dreamed last night.”
The words slip out in an unfamiliar voice, her throat moving well before thought or impulse. Unfamiliar either because she sounds different or it’s just been so long that she’s forgotten the sound of her own voice.
Linna, sharing a table with her middle child, betrays no surprise at the end of Sam’s five-year silence. She simply leans down to her daughter to whisper some command in her ear, the child rising from the table and exiting the house. Linna then turns her full attention to Sam, her hands folded in her lap, calm and steady as if it were any other morning Sam came to this space. “And of what did you dream?” she asks.
Sam shifts, looking down at her hands where they’re twisted in the fabric of her skirt. The words are hard to find, thick and weighty on her tongue. “I dreamed. Of before.”
Daniel. Teal’c.
Him.
“Was it pleasant?” Linna asks, pushing to her feet.
It was…real. It was them. But pleasant? Or horrible? She can’t tell. She’s shivering.
Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.
“What is this?” Sam asks, panic squeezing her throat, pitching the words.
Linna steps closer, her hand brushing across Sam’s forehead and down her cheek as if she is one of her children. And maybe she has been, these long, long years. “I believe you are waking up,” she says.
But Sam doesn’t want to wake up, to defrost. She just wants her dreamless nights and mindless tasks. Doesn’t want to have to think, to consider. To remember.
There is a noise behind them, and Sam spins, heart in her throat. Gairwyn stands in the doorway, a basket in her arms, the muted green showing between the slats whispering the secret of its contents to Sam.
“We never expected you to remain with us forever,” Linna explains.
You can’t hide here forever, Sam.
Her hands clench. She can try.
But Gairwyn blocks her escape, the woman and the package that she never wanted to lay eyes upon again. Sam shakes her head, stumbling back a few steps closer to Linna, to her soft hands and comforting scents.
From the start Sam has been with Linna, attaching herself to her household and the sheer foreign appeal of this woman’s life. Nothing in Linna’s house reminds Sam of anything. At the most, maybe those early hazy years with her mother, and isn’t it a bit unexpected that those previously unpalatable memories are now the only ones she allows? Maybe precisely because they are hazy and incomplete and if she stares out of focus at Linna and her family just right, she almost believes that this place has always been her home, her reality.
It’s Gairwyn, sharp, unbending Gairwyn, that she studiously avoids, and if either mother or daughter notice, they never comment. Gairwyn always grants Sam the space she craves. Until today.
Staring at her now, Sam isn’t reminded of her team, of their missions and close calls and great discoveries, but rather reminded far too much of herself, the woman she’d been before she let Anhur strip that from her. Before she’d allowed herself to be broken.
No, no, no, she thinks, fingers digging into her thighs as she fights the foreign press of tears.
She’d thought it laughable at the time, Anhur’s boast that she wasn’t strong enough to survive. She remembers that now, his vile prophecy she hadn’t been prepared for, the way he ferreted out her most heavily guarded secrets, ripped pieces of her away until she was unrecognizable even to herself.
She survived, believed that to be enough. But is survival really the same as living?
This isn’t who you are…
And her words, her thoughts and voice, that last act of defiance…had it really been rebellion? Or had she freely given him her one last connection to anyone or anything?
Had she…capitulated?
The possibility sickens her, physically doubles her over until she’s kneeling on the floor, but the sensation is still weaker than the fear that closes her throat, the subsumed rage and guilt she’s never allowed herself to feel, so scared that it might have the power to erase the things most important to her.
Better that they be ignored than destroyed.
Better not to feel or think.
Better to lose herself in the mindless stitch and the animated chatter of Linna’s daughters.
Today there is neither, only Gairwyn and her unavoidable associations.
The warrior is dressed much as she ever is, leather leggings tight over thighs used to exertion, arms built for lifting a sword, the stature and posture of a woman who has lived through the loss of father and husband and son, a woman who easily stepped in to fill the gap, a sword maiden of Thor, wise, powerful, slow to anger, and never, ever broken. Not even by the slaughter of her people, a fate dealt to her by Sam’s own hands, by SG-1. Yet never a trace of bitterness, just calm surety born of faith in the greater plan, in Thor. Only now does Sam realize the woman’s steadiness is equally born of her own confidence in her abilities as much as a distant, benevolent god.
Would such faith have saved Sam? Hadn’t she, too, once believed?
We really need your help.
She’s terrified she can’t be what they need. But is it better to try and fail than to never try at all?
He doubts you are strong enough to survive.
She doesn’t want to capitulate.
She can’t.
Gairwyn crosses the room, pausing to crouch down by Sam, placing the basket next to her knee.
Sam tries to forget, to close her eyes and breathe the scent of Linna’s home, the life she’s tried to steal her way into. But all she can feel is the hard edge of the basket against her knee, the one containing five-year-old garments infused with half-forgotten scents.
We really need your help.
Sam’s hand lifts up over the edge and down into the pile of fabric. She stares at it there against a sea of color. Green.
And she remembers.
She’d worn green the last day she set foot on her planet and again the day she leveled Anhur’s world into nothing more than smoke and ash. She thinks maybe she can smell it still. Burnt flesh and the tang of blood. Sweat and desperation.
She’d thought them lost, forgotten.
Lifting the shirt, she finds a careful patch of fabric on the shoulder that doesn’t quite match the rest, Linna’s even stitches anchoring it in place. Ragged pieces brought back together. Never quite as they were, but holding.
Holding long enough to be of use again.
Looking up to meet Gairwyn’s gaze for the first time in five years, Sam finds something in her eyes like understanding. “Thank you,” she says.
Gairwyn nods, her hand firm on Sam’s. “You are welcome.”
And so it begins.
* * *
Standing in front of the DHD, Sam forces the secrets back to her surface, the combination to a path she never thought to walk again. She touches the glyphs, sharp and cold under fingers used to the soft forgiveness of fabric.
Stepping into the event horizon, she feels herself torn into tiny pieces, nothing more than energy flying through the stars, and when she’s put back together on the other side, she wonders if the wormhole can tell, can sense that there’s less to her than there used to be. Wonders if it makes a difference.
She breathes rattling, dry desert air, and sits upon the steps in her ungainly, but familiar uniform, the blunt edges of her shortened hair pulled back into a ponytail. And in her fingers, the final piece.
She waits. And when he finally appears, concern on his face, her name spoken as a fractured question, she stands. Her tongue sweeps across her lips, the words building and compressing in her throat like the numbers, vying for escape.
“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “It’s me.”
Next: Patchwork
Author: Annerb
Summary: Five years ago, SG-1 broke in half. Two years ago, Earth lost. Today, there is one last chance to fix things. But sometimes the pieces just don’t fit back together again.
Warnings: Mature for language, violence, torture, non-con, adult themes, and some temporal meandering.
Categorization: AU, H/C, darkfic, tragedy, and apocafic for flavor. Team, Sam/Jack.
A/N: Special thanks to la_tante for the beta.
Part One-History
Part Two-Prodigal
Prologue
Chapter 1: What Once Was Lost
Chapter 2: Omega
Chapter 3: Compatriots
Chapter 4: A Song For Our Fathers
Chapter 5: Down So Long
When Sam first heard of Earth’s final fate, she found it hard to feel much of anything. The five years since she’s last seen it are a blur, soft and indistinct and comforting. Easy.
But not this day. Today is full of sharp edges and dangerous words and brittle lies that catch and tear on her skin, refusing to slide by unnoticed.
Some things you just don’t come back from.
There are voices out in the yard, the pitched tones climbing and falling and loaded with things left unsaid and she’s caught in them like a current, so she steps out the rear of her house to submit to the pull, concealing herself in darkness and foliage like any other shadow, following the sound of footfalls stomping down the mountainside.
She knows these men. Or she knew them. Or maybe they just knew her.
The third man though…the stranger. He doesn’t feel right. That’s not his space to fill, striding there in front, shoulders squared against responsibility. Because he would have returned to Earth... Wouldn’t he? But no, he’s been replaced too.
That’s not right.
Her father came, it’s how she knows. He must have used the failsafe she’d given him. The one she won’t use herself. But he hadn’t returned to Earth.
Things you don’t come back from.
She’d known, that sunny day on the mountainside with bruises fresh upon her flesh--so familiar… She’d known he would never come back. It might be the last concrete fact she knows for certain until today. The day Daniel comes.
She watches them approach the gate, watches the way the three men exist in their own separate spheres, so much space shoved between them that they may as well be strangers. She watches Daniel’s jaw, the agitated play of muscles and tendons, a fire barely contained. She watches Teal’c’s fingers trail over her stitches almost reverently, but uncomprehending.
Only the stranger is still, his back bowed slightly as Daniel dials an address she doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t. Can’t.
Can’t go back.
The wind shifts, blowing in her face and she blinks against the intrusion, her eyes watering. She turns away from the gate.
Walking back up to her house, her solitary footsteps scatter the dust, erasing all evidence of any other passing feet. She sits in her chair in her little house and stares at the empty spot on her wall and tries to forget the feel of paper and words under her fingers.
Can’t.
* * *
The blank space nags at her, a giant hole on her wall where cloth used to hang. The emptiness lingers long after she covers it with a different pattern, a new quilt, just not the right one.
She feels exposed, unprotected, restless without it, things creeping up on her in the dark. She doesn’t understand why. From the basket next to her chair, she pulls out a blue square of fabric, the final piece to the now-absent quilt.
It wasn’t on purpose. She never consciously made a decision. The needle and thread are about necessity, about repairing and covering and keeping herself clothed. They are constancy.
They are control.
She learned at the knee of Gairwyn’s eldest daughter, her stitches clumsy, the children gathered by her side. They’re a bit of a blur, those days since he left. The way she likes them.
She remembers that one day fabric appeared in the supplies her father brings. It keeps her hands busy. The numbers didn’t happen until after he came again with words about Earth and its ending, full of facts and numbers, only they were after the fact. Facts that can’t be altered.
The first time she looked down and saw the fabric covered with numbers and facts and equations to a universe she tries to forget, she dropped it to the floor, walking a wide berth around it for a week. But then the numbers just built up, threatening to burst out through her skin, so she gave them that one square and then another, allowing that one tiny piece of her to spill out over it when she feels like she might rupture. It keeps things quiet that way, and she thinks maybe one day she’ll find the bottom of that well. Maybe it will dry up if she tries hard enough.
For two years she worked on it, ripping thread and pulling numbers, reworking as she went, a puzzle made of fabric squares, moved around step by step, an anchor for her listing existence.
She’s adrift without them now that they are gone.
Twisting the one remaining square in her fingers, rumpling the fabric, she peers at the numbers from a different angle, her eyes sharpened by words she tries to forget. Things slip, tumble, falter into place. She sees it.
We really need your help.
She drops the square to the floor.
* * *
She’s in the forest.
Sunlight filters down through the thick trees, painting yellow patterns on the springy earth, rich with loam and decaying leaves. There’s the crunch of a twig in front of her, and she drops to a crouch, her weapon tucked in tight against her shoulder, her eyes scanning the landscape in front of her.
“Sam,” someone says, and she spins to her left, calming her breathing and stretching her senses as far as she can, weapon still firmly in place.
There. A flash of dark blue in the trees, a faint voice she should know.
“Daniel?” she asks, pushing to her feet to follow. She bobs and weaves through the thick trunks until they thin out, falling away to reveal a large clearing with a stone platform built at its center. On top standing proudly in the clear sunshine is a Stargate.
“Sam,” a voice says again, and she turns, almost stumbling over a DHD.
Teal’c catches her arm, steadying her. “Are you all right, Major Carter?”
Something is not right. “Are you?” she asks.
He bows slightly, a Cheshire grin on his face that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I would appreciate your company.”
“Sam!”
She jerks. Daniel stands in front of the wormhole, nearly indistinct against the sea of rippling blue behind him. “Are you even listening?”
Shaking her head, Sam takes a step toward him. “Where are we going?”
“I asked you if you recognized this,” Daniel says, pressing something cool and solid into her hand.
She doesn’t look down at the object, just feels the weight of it in her hand. “We’re right behind you,” she promises as Daniel and Teal’c step through.
A hand on her arm. “Come on, Carter. Let’s get moving. You know how Hammond gets when we make him wait.”
She tries to turn, tries to lift that heavy weight in her hand, but she’s rooted to the ground. His grip is hard on her arm, squeezing her bones, but when she looks down there is nothing, only perfect, clear, unmarred skin.
“Go! Now!”
She turns towards his panicked voice, legs finally breaking free, hands reaching, but there is nothing there. Even the forest is gone, replaced with a black pit, a gaping cliff, the complete absence of everything, crawling towards her across the clearing, beginning to tug at the hem of her skirt.
The gate dims as if loosing opacity moment by moment.
Something cold latches onto her ankle, and she opens her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.
“Carter!” his voice shouts, insistent against her ear.
Sam gasps into wakefulness, blinking rapidly against the light invading her room, the sun bright and high in the sky outside her window. The echoes of the dream vibrate through her mind and she squeezes her eyes shut, fingers pressing against her temples.
Dreams are another thing she left behind five years ago. They don’t belong here.
They don’t matter. They can’t.
She walks the rest of the day in a haze, only it’s not one full of indistinct comforts, but contrasts, the dream jarring against her daily routine. Something isn’t right. She wants to believe the dream is the culprit, the one that doesn’t belong, the foreign thing to be ignored, but she just can’t quite settle on anything.
She finds herself at Linna’s door, staring in at the cozy interior, breathing the familiar smell, and she thinks maybe she will be okay in this space. Nothing can reach her here. Not even the dreams.
But then the unexpected happens.
“I dreamed last night.”
The words slip out in an unfamiliar voice, her throat moving well before thought or impulse. Unfamiliar either because she sounds different or it’s just been so long that she’s forgotten the sound of her own voice.
Linna, sharing a table with her middle child, betrays no surprise at the end of Sam’s five-year silence. She simply leans down to her daughter to whisper some command in her ear, the child rising from the table and exiting the house. Linna then turns her full attention to Sam, her hands folded in her lap, calm and steady as if it were any other morning Sam came to this space. “And of what did you dream?” she asks.
Sam shifts, looking down at her hands where they’re twisted in the fabric of her skirt. The words are hard to find, thick and weighty on her tongue. “I dreamed. Of before.”
Daniel. Teal’c.
Him.
“Was it pleasant?” Linna asks, pushing to her feet.
It was…real. It was them. But pleasant? Or horrible? She can’t tell. She’s shivering.
Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.
“What is this?” Sam asks, panic squeezing her throat, pitching the words.
Linna steps closer, her hand brushing across Sam’s forehead and down her cheek as if she is one of her children. And maybe she has been, these long, long years. “I believe you are waking up,” she says.
But Sam doesn’t want to wake up, to defrost. She just wants her dreamless nights and mindless tasks. Doesn’t want to have to think, to consider. To remember.
There is a noise behind them, and Sam spins, heart in her throat. Gairwyn stands in the doorway, a basket in her arms, the muted green showing between the slats whispering the secret of its contents to Sam.
“We never expected you to remain with us forever,” Linna explains.
You can’t hide here forever, Sam.
Her hands clench. She can try.
But Gairwyn blocks her escape, the woman and the package that she never wanted to lay eyes upon again. Sam shakes her head, stumbling back a few steps closer to Linna, to her soft hands and comforting scents.
From the start Sam has been with Linna, attaching herself to her household and the sheer foreign appeal of this woman’s life. Nothing in Linna’s house reminds Sam of anything. At the most, maybe those early hazy years with her mother, and isn’t it a bit unexpected that those previously unpalatable memories are now the only ones she allows? Maybe precisely because they are hazy and incomplete and if she stares out of focus at Linna and her family just right, she almost believes that this place has always been her home, her reality.
It’s Gairwyn, sharp, unbending Gairwyn, that she studiously avoids, and if either mother or daughter notice, they never comment. Gairwyn always grants Sam the space she craves. Until today.
Staring at her now, Sam isn’t reminded of her team, of their missions and close calls and great discoveries, but rather reminded far too much of herself, the woman she’d been before she let Anhur strip that from her. Before she’d allowed herself to be broken.
No, no, no, she thinks, fingers digging into her thighs as she fights the foreign press of tears.
She’d thought it laughable at the time, Anhur’s boast that she wasn’t strong enough to survive. She remembers that now, his vile prophecy she hadn’t been prepared for, the way he ferreted out her most heavily guarded secrets, ripped pieces of her away until she was unrecognizable even to herself.
She survived, believed that to be enough. But is survival really the same as living?
This isn’t who you are…
And her words, her thoughts and voice, that last act of defiance…had it really been rebellion? Or had she freely given him her one last connection to anyone or anything?
Had she…capitulated?
The possibility sickens her, physically doubles her over until she’s kneeling on the floor, but the sensation is still weaker than the fear that closes her throat, the subsumed rage and guilt she’s never allowed herself to feel, so scared that it might have the power to erase the things most important to her.
Better that they be ignored than destroyed.
Better not to feel or think.
Better to lose herself in the mindless stitch and the animated chatter of Linna’s daughters.
Today there is neither, only Gairwyn and her unavoidable associations.
The warrior is dressed much as she ever is, leather leggings tight over thighs used to exertion, arms built for lifting a sword, the stature and posture of a woman who has lived through the loss of father and husband and son, a woman who easily stepped in to fill the gap, a sword maiden of Thor, wise, powerful, slow to anger, and never, ever broken. Not even by the slaughter of her people, a fate dealt to her by Sam’s own hands, by SG-1. Yet never a trace of bitterness, just calm surety born of faith in the greater plan, in Thor. Only now does Sam realize the woman’s steadiness is equally born of her own confidence in her abilities as much as a distant, benevolent god.
Would such faith have saved Sam? Hadn’t she, too, once believed?
We really need your help.
She’s terrified she can’t be what they need. But is it better to try and fail than to never try at all?
He doubts you are strong enough to survive.
She doesn’t want to capitulate.
She can’t.
Gairwyn crosses the room, pausing to crouch down by Sam, placing the basket next to her knee.
Sam tries to forget, to close her eyes and breathe the scent of Linna’s home, the life she’s tried to steal her way into. But all she can feel is the hard edge of the basket against her knee, the one containing five-year-old garments infused with half-forgotten scents.
We really need your help.
Sam’s hand lifts up over the edge and down into the pile of fabric. She stares at it there against a sea of color. Green.
And she remembers.
She’d worn green the last day she set foot on her planet and again the day she leveled Anhur’s world into nothing more than smoke and ash. She thinks maybe she can smell it still. Burnt flesh and the tang of blood. Sweat and desperation.
She’d thought them lost, forgotten.
Lifting the shirt, she finds a careful patch of fabric on the shoulder that doesn’t quite match the rest, Linna’s even stitches anchoring it in place. Ragged pieces brought back together. Never quite as they were, but holding.
Holding long enough to be of use again.
Looking up to meet Gairwyn’s gaze for the first time in five years, Sam finds something in her eyes like understanding. “Thank you,” she says.
Gairwyn nods, her hand firm on Sam’s. “You are welcome.”
And so it begins.
* * *
Standing in front of the DHD, Sam forces the secrets back to her surface, the combination to a path she never thought to walk again. She touches the glyphs, sharp and cold under fingers used to the soft forgiveness of fabric.
Stepping into the event horizon, she feels herself torn into tiny pieces, nothing more than energy flying through the stars, and when she’s put back together on the other side, she wonders if the wormhole can tell, can sense that there’s less to her than there used to be. Wonders if it makes a difference.
She breathes rattling, dry desert air, and sits upon the steps in her ungainly, but familiar uniform, the blunt edges of her shortened hair pulled back into a ponytail. And in her fingers, the final piece.
She waits. And when he finally appears, concern on his face, her name spoken as a fractured question, she stands. Her tongue sweeps across her lips, the words building and compressing in her throat like the numbers, vying for escape.
“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “It’s me.”
Next: Patchwork