Fic: 'we build then we break (and build up again)'--Sam/Jack
Title: we build then we break (and build up again)
Author: Annerb
Summary: Sam’s last mission on SG-1, and the life that follows.
Categorization: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Sam/Jack, Teal’c, Daniel
Rating/Warnings: Older teens, some graphic imagery, language
A/N: Written for iwishiwerekerry for the sj_everyday secret santa exchange 2010 with the prompt: Sam whump. If you want a set prompt: "How do Sam and Jack deal after Sam has a medical discharge". Sorry it’s so late, it just kept getting longer and longer and longer despite my intentions to prove I can write a story that fits in one LJ post. (Drat.) Thanks to Trout for her cheese grating skillz.
we build then we break (and build up again)
Sam steps through the wormhole and walks out into the sunny, mild landscape of P4T-937. In the distance there is the blue smudge of snow-topped mountains, and much closer, the slow thinning of foliage that appeared in aerial footage to be cultivated fields.
Daniel steps up next to her, looking happy and eager to be off world again and facing a new first contact situation. He loves the thrill of the introduction, the delicacy of walking a careful line with new peoples. His buoyant energy has always been pretty infectious.
She smiles to herself, patting Daniel on the back. “Good to have you back,” she murmurs, knowing he’d felt a little left out lately, being stuck on base with appendicitis while the rest of them were jetting around fighting replicators and being stranded off world.
He grins at her and heads toward the DHD.
Teal’c moves a few steps away from the gate, his eyes skimming for a path. Sam can’t see any sign that people may travel here regularly, not even so much as a game run. It’s strange, but not completely unheard of. Many cultures have learned to fear the gate as the tool of their oppressors.
Behind her, the Colonel inhales loudly, and she turns in time to see him stretch his arms wide to the side. “First things first, Carter,” he says, his neck bending each way as if he’s getting geared up for a ping-pong match. “What is the very important new rule?”
Sam catches Daniel sending Teal’c an amused glance, Teal’c’s own face creasing with long-suffering annoyance that she suspects is a front. It’s the one he mastered so very well during their week spent on P3X-234.
“Sir,” she protests, not quite eradicating all the laughter from her voice.
The Colonel is in a good mood, happy to have the team back together. No replicators, no Russian submarines, no one-way missions to save the Asgard, and Daniel back in the fold, minus one appendix. It’s a good day for SG-1.
He tugs at the bill of his cap, squinting into the distance. “I think I need to hear you say it.”
She pauses, one arm resting on the butt of her P-90, sighing with thinly veiled annoyance even though her cheeks are aching against a poorly suppressed smile. “If I come across a technologically advanced ‘doohickey’ named The O’Neill, I will not blow it up,” she dutifully rattles off.
He nods, satisfied. “Let’s try to stick to that this time, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” she says, losing the battle with her smile.
His gaze lingers just an extra moment, the heat from the sun warm on her face. She smiles, taking a few steps away from the gate, eyes snapping back to the alien horizon.
It’s the last thing she remembers.
* * *
Snipers call it mist, the telltale spray of vaporized blood when a bullet impacts a human target. It’s a bit like that, to Jack’s eye, the way everything happens.
One moment Carter is glancing back at him, brushing her hair out of her eyes, smiling at some asinine thing he’s said, and the next she’s gone in a plume of smoke and splash of red, a solid boom that echoes in his chest, knocking him to the ground.
When his head clears, he can hear the roar of Teal’c’s voice, calling her name. Taste metal in the air.
Jack’s mind is whirring a million miles a minute as he shoves back up to a crouch. Are they under attack? Where the hell had it come from? His mind runs through and discards various scenarios, eyes tracking to Daniel who is hunkered down against the DHD, a trickle of blood running into his eyes, but otherwise looking steady and unhurt.
Clambering over to Teal’c’s side, Jack gets his first glimpse of Carter, lying half in a hole in the ground that had not been there moments before. Teal’c is supporting her neck, holding her steady and already pressing a pressure bandage to one of the seeping wounds high on her chest, but he’s staring at something else, somewhere lower, his face paler than Jack has ever seen it.
He tracks down Carter’s body and now he sees it. Her legs, what’s left of them, are a bloody mess.
“Daniel!” Jack bellows, jumping to his feet and whipping his belt off. “Dial Earth now!”
He only pays attention to Daniel long enough to see that he’s complied before turning back to Carter, pulling his belt tight around her thigh.
There’s a moment of lucidity where she looks up at him as her blood rushes out over his fingers, a moment where her blue eyes stare clear and focused out of her singed, sooty face.
She says, “I’m sorry, sir,” like she’s done something wrong.
Then the screaming starts.
* * *
Land mine.
An innocuous sounding name for something so dramatic, so insidious. Long dead wars still putting in a good fight, because there’d been a reason the villagers on that planet never strayed too close to the gate. Not that SG-1 had known that at the time, the first explorers through the gate to those people in generations.
One small step, Sam thinks, fighting back a hysterical laugh she easily blames on the painkillers they have her jacked up on. They must have broken out the good stuff. Concussion, broken rib, shrapnel in her thigh and chest, and a foot no longer where it should be. Good enough reasons to be drugged to the hilt. To whisper around her like this is a deathbed she’s laid up in.
A little death. Not all of her, just a piece.
The first time she hears the word stump she thinks, ‘That can’t be right.’ She can still feel each and every toe.
She tries to logically think through the chemical tricks her brain is playing on her, the Latin names for complex medical terms, but everything always spirals back to that empty space under the sheets where the rest of her leg should be.
Only two weeks ago she was trudging around a benign alien world with Teal’c and the Colonel, waiting for the people back on Earth to get their act together and get the second gate rigged up so they could dial home.
A week ago, she was blowing up an Asgard super-ship. She was just stupid enough to save an entire planet.
Today she’s feeling toes she knows aren’t there.
“This can’t be right,” she whispers.
It can’t.
* * *
The screaming won’t stop.
It’s been hovering in the back of Jack’s brain since the moment Carter stepped on that mine. He thinks it may have been there before in some form or another, but only a soft hum, an easily ignored inflection like an unwelcome houseguest. Something he could shove aside with no guilt or ramifications. It had only started to screech as the world blew to hell around them. In the moment, he hadn’t noticed it over the thrum of things that had to be done now, the steps he needed to follow to get his team back through the damn gate, and after, the energy of sitting and pacing and waiting for word that Carter would pull through.
She will. She’s strong. The doctors say she was lucky. Lucky to be so near the gate, to get medical attention so quickly, that she apparently hadn’t been right on top of the thing when it blew, only near, but all Jack can think is this is lucky?
It isn’t until the dark first night as he sits waiting for the sedation to lift-knowing she is okay, is going to live, even if things will never be the same-that he finally notices it, understands the noise in his head for what it really is.
Oh, he thinks, sitting by the side of her bed and watching her pale face and steadily rising and falling chest. He takes this rhythm as living evidence. But even his relief can’t quiet the screaming now that he’s been foolish enough to acknowledge it.
Oh.
He pauses, hand halfway reached out to take hers in an attempt to reassure himself that she is still here. Pauses and doesn’t touch, because he finally gets it, the truth slamming into him like an out of control semi.
O’Neill, you stupid son of a bitch. How could you have let this happen?
He sits back in his chair, hating the burning in his chest, but not as much as the part of his brain that wonders if she knew (she’s always been smarter than him). He has no idea what to do with that.
He’s actually relieved when Daniel arrives just as she begins to show signs of stirring, grateful to abandon her bedside to him. She will have a familiar, friendly face to wake to now, and not his reverberating terror and shock at revelations that have no place here.
Over the next two days he only visits when the other guys are there, muffling the scream as best he can, shoving it far back to where he had unknowingly hidden it before. On the third day, he trusts himself enough to go alone.
He’s surprised upon arrival though, to find Carter sitting on the edge of her bed, her hands weakly grasping onto a walker, her one solid leg wobbling dangerously under even a fraction of her weight. A nurse and someone Jack doesn’t know hover on either side, speaking encouragement to her.
He steps up next to Janet, who is watching from a short distance away.
“Already?” Jack asks. She’s only days out of surgery; stitches still black against her face. It seems almost…cruel.
The skin around Janet’s eyes tightens just enough to tell Jack that she’s a little uncomfortable with it as well, even if her crisp tone speaks to the professional necessity of it. “It’s essential that physical recovery start right away, letting her body find a new sense of balance, keeping her muscles limber, and trying to keep her skin from developing hypersensitivity at the amputation site.”
He tries not to wince at the word ‘amputation’, but doesn’t quite pull it off. He looks at Carter and thinks not for the first time that he would gladly change places with her, but that’s not all some sense of responsibility as her commander speaking, so he keeps it to himself.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he takes a steadying breath and saunters into the room, playing the fool he is. It’s safe.
“Hey, Carter. What’s up?”
* * *
After a few days, they move Sam into a quarantine room to give her more privacy, and she’s grateful. SG teams have been regularly cycling through the infirmary for standard pre and post mission checkups and it’s not so much that they are loud or intrusive as much as they are a sick reminder that her life has been completed shattered, but everything is carrying on as if nothing happened.
It’s horrible to realize you are not as essential as you might have believed.
Her life post-accident has sunk into a series of mundane routines. Meals, rehab, wound check, blood work, visits of varying levels of awkwardness. People speaking about anything other than the giant elephant in the room.
Janet brings Cassie by one day, and Sam has to bite back the urge to yell for the girl to be taken away, not wanting her to see her like this. But then Cassie’s hand is touching her hair, a gesture that lacks all pretense of judgment or pity. Not caring of the aches and pains, she pulls Cassie into her chest and breathes in her little girl smell and tries really hard to believe her when Cassie whispers in her ear that she’s going to be okay.
Somehow it’s easier to believe when it’s Cassie saying it. It always has been.
The nights are the worst, because even if the SGC never really sleeps, the nurses still turn the lights down, and her routines, once so cloying, abandon her. She’s left to sleep in fits and bursts, letting the painkillers drag her down and spit her out. Sometimes she tries to pretend she’s in a prison cell off world somewhere, and sometimes that makes it easier to bear. Then she remembers there is no rescue coming, no escape from the reality. These are the times that make it hard to breathe.
A clink of light from the hallway invades her space, but she ignores it, assuming a nurse has come to check her vitals.
“Hey, Carter.”
She looks over to see the Colonel in the doorway, hands shoved in his pockets and a smirk on his lips that automatically makes her wonder what he’s just gotten away with. Then she remembers that it’s the middle of the night and he shouldn’t be here at all.
She blinks against the light, and he takes a few steps into the room, letting the door shut behind him.
“What time is it?” she asks.
“Really late,” he says.
She supposes she should ask what he’s doing here so late himself, or how he’d known she would be awake, but those aren’t really the sort of questions she’s used to asking.
“Mostly I’m just hiding from Daniel,” he says, his voice full of long-suffering. “This seemed a good enough place as any.”
She knows this is a lie, or an exaggeration at the very least, and that this must be the midnight showing of the Jack O’Neill show, meant to keep her distracted. This has been his way of dealing with it, and she can’t blame him for that. Maybe she’s even grateful for it, because she thinks any genuineness on his part may be enough for her to lose it completely. If he’s still joking around, it can’t be all that bad, right?
“Did you booby trap his office again?” she asks, knowing her part.
He crosses over closer to her bed, hand pressing to his chest in mock umbrage. “I would never.”
She knows she’s supposed to laugh, knows it, but the best she can muster is a smile she suspects looks a lot more like a grimace.
The smile slips off his face, leaving behind a hard sort of seriousness like he’s finally letting himself strip away the happy go lucky exterior for a moment. “How are you handling…all of this?”
Sam feels her entire body stiffen, a throb building behind her forehead. The last thing she needs is the Colonel going perceptive on her. She can’t handle--.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“Carter,” the Colonel counters, leaning against the edge of her bed, hand heavy on the blankets, fingers brushing near her forearm.
She stares hard at that point of near contact, at once not wanting him to touch her and yet wanting something warm and human to hold on to so much that it nearly aches.
“Let’s not mess around this time, okay?” he says, voice incredibly soft. “You don’t have to pretend this is easy or no big deal.”
She closes her eyes, biting down hard on her tongue.
“I’d like you to talk to someone,” he says.
She wants to ask what he’s still doing here. She’s lost more than a foot. This she knows without anyone saying ‘medical discharge’.
She’s just waiting for them to leave her behind.
“Please,” he says.
It isn’t an order.
She wishes it were.
* * *
Hammond sends SG-1 off world. In some ways it seems way too soon, in others, like it’s been a million years since Jack last stepped through the gate.
It’s a simple revisit, a check in with old allies on a planet already thoroughly established as friendly. On the surface it may seem like a nice way to ease SG-1 back in, but Jack understands it as the punishment it is. Hammond clearly does not appreciate Jack’s stubborn insistence that he’s not replacing Carter. Well, not refuse so much as go strangely deaf every time Hammond tries to broach the subject.
The small, fair part of Jack has to admit that Hammond is being way more patient than he deserves.
Still, it should feel good to be off world again, to be doing something other than haunting the SGC and playing the endless mind games of ‘what if’ and ‘if I had to do it all over again’.
Only it doesn’t. Because being off world without Carter just feels wrong.
He knows Teal’c feels it too. He’s been strangely pensive, restless, since the accident, like he takes it as a personal insult. He’s mourning, and Jack tries not to let that piss him off. Carter is still alive, just not here.
He tries to remember that too.
Next to him, Daniel glances back over his shoulder, catching himself midway through the gesture. He gives Jack a sheepish grimace of a smile. “I keep expecting her to be there,” he admits.
“Yeah,” Jack says, turning back to the path in front of him, focusing his mind back on the mission at hand. “I know what you mean.”
It’s all wrong.
* * *
Someone knocks on the doorframe of Sam’s room. “Is this a good time?”
She looks up to see a vaguely familiar figure. “Captain Miller,” she says, placing him as the former member of SG-4.
He smiles, taking a few steps into the room. “Not for a while now,” he says, holding out his left hand for her to shake. “It’s Tim.”
She takes his left hand awkwardly in hers, her eyes automatically falling to the empty sleeve on his right side.
He holds her hand, polite, firm pressure on her fingers until her eyes manage to travel back to his face. “Mind if I call you Sam?” he asks.
She nods, dropping his hand. “Sure.”
She remembers him from the first year of the program. Like so many of them back then, he’d been bright and eager and so sure of his own indestructibility. Then he’d touched the wrong plant on the wrong world and nearly lost his life to a creeping sort of alien necrotizing fasciitis. In the end, an amputation of the infected arm above his elbow is what saved his life. But also ended his career.
It had reminded them all, for a while, just how vulnerable they are. Just how little they really know about the galaxy, and how much they risk each time they step through the gate.
She wonders if she will be a cautionary tale now, whispered about in the halls and locker rooms.
“Colonel O’Neill asked you to come talk to me,” she guesses, trying to feel anger about that, but frankly, she’s just too tired.
Tim grabs a chair, pulling it closer to her bed. “He thought it might help.”
“Because you lost your arm, and that makes us automatic buddies?” she snaps, wanting to flinch the moment the words are out. Maybe she does have enough energy for anger after all.
Tim doesn’t look offended. “Sure,” he says. “But probably mostly because this is my job.”
“What?”
He hands her a card. “I’m a counselor with the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
“Ah,” she says, glancing down at the card, realizing he must have gone back to school after his medical discharge.
“It helps that I already know about the SGC.”
She can imagine. “Did they send you to break the news to me?”
He doesn’t play dumb, which she appreciates. “You don’t really need me to tell you, do you?”
“Honorable discharge,” she says, words bitter in her throat. It doesn’t feel honorable. It feels like she did something wrong. Like she failed.
Tim leans closer to her. “Maybe I’m just here to remind you that you were injured in the course of duty. In the defense of your country and your planet. That this is the very definition of honorable.”
“I took a wrong step,” she corrects. “A freak accident. It didn’t mean anything.”
“That’s not the way people will remember it.”
Lucky them.
She drags her hands across her face. “The Air Force is my life.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I had to learn to be something else.”
She eyes his clothing, the way the casual civvies still don’t seem to sit quite right on him.
He gives her a wry smile. “I didn’t say it didn’t suck. At first.”
“And now? It’s all just Kumbayah?”
He shrugs. “Not better, not worse. Just different.”
“You’re trying to tell me you love your new job, your new life?”
“It’s my life, Sam,” he says with that annoying smile, the one that seems to says he has all the answers, imbued as he is with the calm certainty one gets from looking at a situation from the other side.
She kind of wants to punch him in the face.
He leans back in his chair, either unaware or uncaring of his precipitous situation. Or maybe he would think Sam lashing out is a positive sign of healing. She wonders what he would think if she gave in to the impulse to start screaming like a bloody lunatic.
She bites down on her tongue.
“Luckily for all of us,” he says, “you’ve still got that brain of yours.”
“Right,” she says.
Just stupid enough to save an entire planet, she thinks.
* * *
The Saturday before Carter gets released from the infirmary, Jack calls in reinforcements and sees to getting her house ready. In the end he actually has to turn away a few teams, the entirety of on world teams eager to do their part. Too many hands would not only defeat the purpose, but he also doesn’t want to invade Carter’s privacy any more than he has to.
Luckily it’s a small one story and doesn’t require too much modification, just a ramp at the front door, a few handles here and there throughout. SG-1 has sat through many a class to get a clear picture of just what she’ll need.
Teal’c is surprisingly handy with a hammer, even if he’s clearly uncomfortable with the entire concept of accessibility. Jack doesn’t ask if Teal’c somehow thinks Carter will be better off being looked after and coddled for all time. If he really thinks that what she needs.
She will get out of that wheelchair someday. Her progress has just been slowed by her other injuries. This isn’t forever.
He reminds himself of this again when the van service arrives and Carter gets her first glimpse of the modifications. She looks torn between yelling and crying, but of course does neither (just once, he sort of wishes she would).
Instead she swallows hard, giving them a brittle smile that threatens to crack her face into pieces. “Thanks, guys,” she says, and absolutely refuses any help.
She makes it up the ramp all on her own.
* * *
It starts as a careless glance in the gym on level 18. Sam looks up at the weird tingle between her shoulder blades like a sixth sense telling her she’s being talked about by someone somewhere. Two officers by the doorway quickly look away as her head lifts, but that’s normal these days.
Did you hear about Major Carter?
“Sam,” her therapist says, pulling her attention back.
She forces her mind back on the exercises, because missing limb or not, she’s never been about doing things halfway. She finishes the rest of her reps without incident, collecting her things with a promise to be back the next day.
By the time she’s done with showering and changing and is back in her wheelchair, her muscles are twinging, exhaustion tugging at her bones. It’s a good feeling most days, this ache of accomplishment, even if other days she just wants to throw something at the wall because what is there really to be proud of here when her biggest goal may be to actually walk again someday?
She blows out a breath and tells herself she’s being ridiculous again. Give yourself a break, Tim loves to tell her when he drops by to visit. She doesn’t find him quite as obnoxious these days, though she still imagines punching him from time to time. But the advice is sound all the same.
Once Sam’s out in the hall, the tingle of awareness returns as a whisper. By the time she hits the elevator banks, one of the members of SG-6 crosses her path, giving her a quick, guilty double take and not one of the sly ones she’s getting used to. It’s enough to tell her she isn’t just being paranoid.
Something is happening.
Rather than heading up for the waiting van service and a well-deserved cool down from her grueling therapy session that usually has her reaching for a carton of ice cream and a two-hour afternoon nap, she hits the button for level 28.
The doors open on people running up and down the hall. “SG-1,” she overhears someone say. “Fubar gate malfunction.”
Sam grabs her wheels and heads down towards the control room, people tripping and jumping out of her way as she gains momentum. She comes to an abrupt halt at the far end, because there are only stairs leading up the final distance, something that only seems like a glaring oversight now as she sits in a wheelchair at the base of the steps. She has crutches she has been getting better and better with, but they aren’t here with her.
She can just make out garbled voices over a radio feed as a confused looking tech ducks past her into the hallway. Her indecision evaporates.
“Airman,” she calls out.
A guard loitering near the entrance turns towards her, an almost comical pause passing as he stares at the empty air above her head before tracking down.
Sam doesn’t have time for a sense of mortification or ego. “Give me a hand.”
He glances from her wheelchair to the stairs. “Ma’am?”
She locks her wheels in place and hefts her weight up onto her foot, ignoring the trembling of exhausted muscles. She waves him closer impatiently, throwing one arm over his shoulders when he’s in range. “You’re getting me up those steps. Now.”
She doesn’t have rank anymore, can’t really boss him about like this, but he still doesn’t hesitate.
It isn’t pretty, but she gets there, pointing to an empty chair next to Walter. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thinks, not allowing herself the time or distraction of gauging people’s reactions to her sudden unauthorized appearance.
Sliding into the seat, she waves the Airman away with a distracted thanks, her eyes already tracking the information on display. Sam can feel Walter looking to Hammond, but she just keeps her head down, fingers moving over the keyboard. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
“Fill me in,” she says when Walter finally looks at her.
She doesn’t see Hammond nod, but he must have because after a beat, Walter starts explaining the problem.
Sam lets out a breath.
* * *
Someone runs down and retrieves her arm crutches from the gym at some point so she doesn’t have to hop around or push her chair from monitor to monitor (which she clearly showed she was willing to do). She’s able to stand then, when SG-1 finally steps through the gate and are safely back on Earth.
She’s been talking to them over the radio for nearly two hours now, so they all know exactly where to look the moment they are through. They’re a little beat up and haggard, but safe, and all three of them trudge straight up to the control room to see her.
“Still saving our sorry asses from light years away, I see,” the Colonel announces, hopping up the last of the steps.
“Luckily for us,” Daniel says, looking around as if finally realizing she shouldn’t even really be here.
“She’s like a junky,” the Colonel jokes.
Sam smiles, her body wavering slightly, and the Colonel doesn’t miss it.
“Not that I’m not extremely grateful, but you need to go home, Carter. You’re still officially on leave.” His eyes dart to her fingers and she doesn’t bother to pretend they aren’t shaking. The adrenaline is fading, and on top of a rigorous physical therapy session… She just isn’t up to this.
Yet.
“Sam,” Daniel says, congenially wrapping an arm around her waist and quietly managing to lend support at the same time. “You do remember that he can’t boss you around anymore, right?”
She expects the twinge of pain, the panic, but with them safe and sound around her, her mind still settling after what feels like a marathon, she only finds a strange sort of giddiness.
“Oh,” the Colonel counters. “I’ll always be the boss of Carter.”
She slides him a look, the exhaustion getting the better of her. “You wish.”
They grin at her, those sweaty, familiar, beloved faces. More than anything, she wants to hold on to them. But she’s beginning to realize there is way more on the line here than her ego. This whole episode might have been avoided had someone with more technical knowledge of the gate been on the team.
“Pretty sure we owe you dinner for this, Sam,” Daniel says with a smile.
She drops her head to his shoulder. “I’ll hold you to that,” she says.
As they trudge out for the locker room, Daniel thanks her again, Teal’c pausing to touch her arm, his head bowing.
She stops the Colonel as he passes. “You need to replace me, sir.”
He opens his mouth as if to protest, to feed her some line about being irreplaceable. As much as she’d like to believe that, it just isn’t true.
“Sir,” she insists. She isn’t coming back. It’s time they both faced that.
He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “Yeah. I know.”
“Okay,” she says, gathering her energy to make it to the surface and home. She can’t quite remember ever being quite so exhausted.
The Colonel walks with her to the elevator, turning back to glance at her one last time before the doors close.
“Help me whittle out the idiots?” he asks, voice almost tentative, and she doesn’t know if that’s because he’s not sure it’s fair to ask her to pick her own replacement or if it’s just the way he’s phrasing it, as an honest request.
Her choice. She’ll need to get used to that.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “Of course.”
She has to know they’ll be taken care of.
* * *
Daniel and the Colonel have fallen into the habit of helping her with her rehab, cycling in and out as their duties allow. She tried to tell them once that they didn’t have to do that, but Daniel had just looked at her like she was out of her mind and said, “Sam. We miss you.” That shut her up, because she misses them too.
Teal’c has occasionally come with one of them, but never on his own. He still makes time for her as often as he can, he just chooses different venues for the most part. She hasn’t put a lot of energy into wondering why, but she has her suspicions nonetheless.
So it’s a bit unusual that Teal’c is the one who shows up in the gym as she’s unpacking her newly arrived prosthesis, Daniel apparently having been detained elsewhere.
He looks intrigued and mystified as she explains what it is, and Sam knows that for all the wonders of Goa’uld technology, prosthesis engineering is probably something they never even turned their minds too. Why bother? If a body is permanently damaged, all a Goa’uld needed to do was trade in for a new model.
“If I were a Jaffa…”
“You are not,” Teal’c says, voice blunt and unwavering as if she is a young apprentice he is daring to disagree with him. His eyes are hard as he stares down at her, almost angry. “And for this I am grateful.”
Because if she had been a Jaffa, there would be no future. Would they have left her to bleed out on the battlefield, or maybe just wait for her symbiote to age and not supply her with a new one? Or would she be expected to commit ritual suicide to save her honor?
“And if it was you?” she asks.
His jaw tightens and he can’t hide it, his distaste for the very idea of living this way.
She looks away, feeling her stomach drop. “That’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“No,” Teal’c says without hesitation, not seeming bothered by the contradiction. “Because I know your worth, Samantha Carter.”
She swallows. “My brain,” she says, surprised by the bitterness in her tone. That had always been enough, before.
He regards her steadily, all of the conflict and anger and confusion finally smoothing from his face.
“No,” he says. Stretching a hand out, he presses his palm flat against her sternum. “Your worth is your heart.”
Not a brain or a body, but a person.
She takes a careful breath. “You underestimate your own worth, Teal’c.”
“Perhaps,” he says. “And because you are still here with us, one day you may be able to convince me of it.”
She grabs his hand, working against the tightness in her throat. “Count on it, Teal’c.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, warmth filling his eyes. “Now,” he says. “Show me this device. I am curious to see how it works.”
She pulls out the prosthesis.
He becomes her most dedicated therapy partner.
:: part 2::
Author: Annerb
Summary: Sam’s last mission on SG-1, and the life that follows.
Categorization: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Sam/Jack, Teal’c, Daniel
Rating/Warnings: Older teens, some graphic imagery, language
A/N: Written for iwishiwerekerry for the sj_everyday secret santa exchange 2010 with the prompt: Sam whump. If you want a set prompt: "How do Sam and Jack deal after Sam has a medical discharge". Sorry it’s so late, it just kept getting longer and longer and longer despite my intentions to prove I can write a story that fits in one LJ post. (Drat.) Thanks to Trout for her cheese grating skillz.
we build then we break (and build up again)
Sam steps through the wormhole and walks out into the sunny, mild landscape of P4T-937. In the distance there is the blue smudge of snow-topped mountains, and much closer, the slow thinning of foliage that appeared in aerial footage to be cultivated fields.
Daniel steps up next to her, looking happy and eager to be off world again and facing a new first contact situation. He loves the thrill of the introduction, the delicacy of walking a careful line with new peoples. His buoyant energy has always been pretty infectious.
She smiles to herself, patting Daniel on the back. “Good to have you back,” she murmurs, knowing he’d felt a little left out lately, being stuck on base with appendicitis while the rest of them were jetting around fighting replicators and being stranded off world.
He grins at her and heads toward the DHD.
Teal’c moves a few steps away from the gate, his eyes skimming for a path. Sam can’t see any sign that people may travel here regularly, not even so much as a game run. It’s strange, but not completely unheard of. Many cultures have learned to fear the gate as the tool of their oppressors.
Behind her, the Colonel inhales loudly, and she turns in time to see him stretch his arms wide to the side. “First things first, Carter,” he says, his neck bending each way as if he’s getting geared up for a ping-pong match. “What is the very important new rule?”
Sam catches Daniel sending Teal’c an amused glance, Teal’c’s own face creasing with long-suffering annoyance that she suspects is a front. It’s the one he mastered so very well during their week spent on P3X-234.
“Sir,” she protests, not quite eradicating all the laughter from her voice.
The Colonel is in a good mood, happy to have the team back together. No replicators, no Russian submarines, no one-way missions to save the Asgard, and Daniel back in the fold, minus one appendix. It’s a good day for SG-1.
He tugs at the bill of his cap, squinting into the distance. “I think I need to hear you say it.”
She pauses, one arm resting on the butt of her P-90, sighing with thinly veiled annoyance even though her cheeks are aching against a poorly suppressed smile. “If I come across a technologically advanced ‘doohickey’ named The O’Neill, I will not blow it up,” she dutifully rattles off.
He nods, satisfied. “Let’s try to stick to that this time, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” she says, losing the battle with her smile.
His gaze lingers just an extra moment, the heat from the sun warm on her face. She smiles, taking a few steps away from the gate, eyes snapping back to the alien horizon.
It’s the last thing she remembers.
* * *
Snipers call it mist, the telltale spray of vaporized blood when a bullet impacts a human target. It’s a bit like that, to Jack’s eye, the way everything happens.
One moment Carter is glancing back at him, brushing her hair out of her eyes, smiling at some asinine thing he’s said, and the next she’s gone in a plume of smoke and splash of red, a solid boom that echoes in his chest, knocking him to the ground.
When his head clears, he can hear the roar of Teal’c’s voice, calling her name. Taste metal in the air.
Jack’s mind is whirring a million miles a minute as he shoves back up to a crouch. Are they under attack? Where the hell had it come from? His mind runs through and discards various scenarios, eyes tracking to Daniel who is hunkered down against the DHD, a trickle of blood running into his eyes, but otherwise looking steady and unhurt.
Clambering over to Teal’c’s side, Jack gets his first glimpse of Carter, lying half in a hole in the ground that had not been there moments before. Teal’c is supporting her neck, holding her steady and already pressing a pressure bandage to one of the seeping wounds high on her chest, but he’s staring at something else, somewhere lower, his face paler than Jack has ever seen it.
He tracks down Carter’s body and now he sees it. Her legs, what’s left of them, are a bloody mess.
“Daniel!” Jack bellows, jumping to his feet and whipping his belt off. “Dial Earth now!”
He only pays attention to Daniel long enough to see that he’s complied before turning back to Carter, pulling his belt tight around her thigh.
There’s a moment of lucidity where she looks up at him as her blood rushes out over his fingers, a moment where her blue eyes stare clear and focused out of her singed, sooty face.
She says, “I’m sorry, sir,” like she’s done something wrong.
Then the screaming starts.
* * *
Land mine.
An innocuous sounding name for something so dramatic, so insidious. Long dead wars still putting in a good fight, because there’d been a reason the villagers on that planet never strayed too close to the gate. Not that SG-1 had known that at the time, the first explorers through the gate to those people in generations.
One small step, Sam thinks, fighting back a hysterical laugh she easily blames on the painkillers they have her jacked up on. They must have broken out the good stuff. Concussion, broken rib, shrapnel in her thigh and chest, and a foot no longer where it should be. Good enough reasons to be drugged to the hilt. To whisper around her like this is a deathbed she’s laid up in.
A little death. Not all of her, just a piece.
The first time she hears the word stump she thinks, ‘That can’t be right.’ She can still feel each and every toe.
She tries to logically think through the chemical tricks her brain is playing on her, the Latin names for complex medical terms, but everything always spirals back to that empty space under the sheets where the rest of her leg should be.
Only two weeks ago she was trudging around a benign alien world with Teal’c and the Colonel, waiting for the people back on Earth to get their act together and get the second gate rigged up so they could dial home.
A week ago, she was blowing up an Asgard super-ship. She was just stupid enough to save an entire planet.
Today she’s feeling toes she knows aren’t there.
“This can’t be right,” she whispers.
It can’t.
* * *
The screaming won’t stop.
It’s been hovering in the back of Jack’s brain since the moment Carter stepped on that mine. He thinks it may have been there before in some form or another, but only a soft hum, an easily ignored inflection like an unwelcome houseguest. Something he could shove aside with no guilt or ramifications. It had only started to screech as the world blew to hell around them. In the moment, he hadn’t noticed it over the thrum of things that had to be done now, the steps he needed to follow to get his team back through the damn gate, and after, the energy of sitting and pacing and waiting for word that Carter would pull through.
She will. She’s strong. The doctors say she was lucky. Lucky to be so near the gate, to get medical attention so quickly, that she apparently hadn’t been right on top of the thing when it blew, only near, but all Jack can think is this is lucky?
It isn’t until the dark first night as he sits waiting for the sedation to lift-knowing she is okay, is going to live, even if things will never be the same-that he finally notices it, understands the noise in his head for what it really is.
Oh, he thinks, sitting by the side of her bed and watching her pale face and steadily rising and falling chest. He takes this rhythm as living evidence. But even his relief can’t quiet the screaming now that he’s been foolish enough to acknowledge it.
Oh.
He pauses, hand halfway reached out to take hers in an attempt to reassure himself that she is still here. Pauses and doesn’t touch, because he finally gets it, the truth slamming into him like an out of control semi.
O’Neill, you stupid son of a bitch. How could you have let this happen?
He sits back in his chair, hating the burning in his chest, but not as much as the part of his brain that wonders if she knew (she’s always been smarter than him). He has no idea what to do with that.
He’s actually relieved when Daniel arrives just as she begins to show signs of stirring, grateful to abandon her bedside to him. She will have a familiar, friendly face to wake to now, and not his reverberating terror and shock at revelations that have no place here.
Over the next two days he only visits when the other guys are there, muffling the scream as best he can, shoving it far back to where he had unknowingly hidden it before. On the third day, he trusts himself enough to go alone.
He’s surprised upon arrival though, to find Carter sitting on the edge of her bed, her hands weakly grasping onto a walker, her one solid leg wobbling dangerously under even a fraction of her weight. A nurse and someone Jack doesn’t know hover on either side, speaking encouragement to her.
He steps up next to Janet, who is watching from a short distance away.
“Already?” Jack asks. She’s only days out of surgery; stitches still black against her face. It seems almost…cruel.
The skin around Janet’s eyes tightens just enough to tell Jack that she’s a little uncomfortable with it as well, even if her crisp tone speaks to the professional necessity of it. “It’s essential that physical recovery start right away, letting her body find a new sense of balance, keeping her muscles limber, and trying to keep her skin from developing hypersensitivity at the amputation site.”
He tries not to wince at the word ‘amputation’, but doesn’t quite pull it off. He looks at Carter and thinks not for the first time that he would gladly change places with her, but that’s not all some sense of responsibility as her commander speaking, so he keeps it to himself.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he takes a steadying breath and saunters into the room, playing the fool he is. It’s safe.
“Hey, Carter. What’s up?”
* * *
After a few days, they move Sam into a quarantine room to give her more privacy, and she’s grateful. SG teams have been regularly cycling through the infirmary for standard pre and post mission checkups and it’s not so much that they are loud or intrusive as much as they are a sick reminder that her life has been completed shattered, but everything is carrying on as if nothing happened.
It’s horrible to realize you are not as essential as you might have believed.
Her life post-accident has sunk into a series of mundane routines. Meals, rehab, wound check, blood work, visits of varying levels of awkwardness. People speaking about anything other than the giant elephant in the room.
Janet brings Cassie by one day, and Sam has to bite back the urge to yell for the girl to be taken away, not wanting her to see her like this. But then Cassie’s hand is touching her hair, a gesture that lacks all pretense of judgment or pity. Not caring of the aches and pains, she pulls Cassie into her chest and breathes in her little girl smell and tries really hard to believe her when Cassie whispers in her ear that she’s going to be okay.
Somehow it’s easier to believe when it’s Cassie saying it. It always has been.
The nights are the worst, because even if the SGC never really sleeps, the nurses still turn the lights down, and her routines, once so cloying, abandon her. She’s left to sleep in fits and bursts, letting the painkillers drag her down and spit her out. Sometimes she tries to pretend she’s in a prison cell off world somewhere, and sometimes that makes it easier to bear. Then she remembers there is no rescue coming, no escape from the reality. These are the times that make it hard to breathe.
A clink of light from the hallway invades her space, but she ignores it, assuming a nurse has come to check her vitals.
“Hey, Carter.”
She looks over to see the Colonel in the doorway, hands shoved in his pockets and a smirk on his lips that automatically makes her wonder what he’s just gotten away with. Then she remembers that it’s the middle of the night and he shouldn’t be here at all.
She blinks against the light, and he takes a few steps into the room, letting the door shut behind him.
“What time is it?” she asks.
“Really late,” he says.
She supposes she should ask what he’s doing here so late himself, or how he’d known she would be awake, but those aren’t really the sort of questions she’s used to asking.
“Mostly I’m just hiding from Daniel,” he says, his voice full of long-suffering. “This seemed a good enough place as any.”
She knows this is a lie, or an exaggeration at the very least, and that this must be the midnight showing of the Jack O’Neill show, meant to keep her distracted. This has been his way of dealing with it, and she can’t blame him for that. Maybe she’s even grateful for it, because she thinks any genuineness on his part may be enough for her to lose it completely. If he’s still joking around, it can’t be all that bad, right?
“Did you booby trap his office again?” she asks, knowing her part.
He crosses over closer to her bed, hand pressing to his chest in mock umbrage. “I would never.”
She knows she’s supposed to laugh, knows it, but the best she can muster is a smile she suspects looks a lot more like a grimace.
The smile slips off his face, leaving behind a hard sort of seriousness like he’s finally letting himself strip away the happy go lucky exterior for a moment. “How are you handling…all of this?”
Sam feels her entire body stiffen, a throb building behind her forehead. The last thing she needs is the Colonel going perceptive on her. She can’t handle--.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“Carter,” the Colonel counters, leaning against the edge of her bed, hand heavy on the blankets, fingers brushing near her forearm.
She stares hard at that point of near contact, at once not wanting him to touch her and yet wanting something warm and human to hold on to so much that it nearly aches.
“Let’s not mess around this time, okay?” he says, voice incredibly soft. “You don’t have to pretend this is easy or no big deal.”
She closes her eyes, biting down hard on her tongue.
“I’d like you to talk to someone,” he says.
She wants to ask what he’s still doing here. She’s lost more than a foot. This she knows without anyone saying ‘medical discharge’.
She’s just waiting for them to leave her behind.
“Please,” he says.
It isn’t an order.
She wishes it were.
* * *
Hammond sends SG-1 off world. In some ways it seems way too soon, in others, like it’s been a million years since Jack last stepped through the gate.
It’s a simple revisit, a check in with old allies on a planet already thoroughly established as friendly. On the surface it may seem like a nice way to ease SG-1 back in, but Jack understands it as the punishment it is. Hammond clearly does not appreciate Jack’s stubborn insistence that he’s not replacing Carter. Well, not refuse so much as go strangely deaf every time Hammond tries to broach the subject.
The small, fair part of Jack has to admit that Hammond is being way more patient than he deserves.
Still, it should feel good to be off world again, to be doing something other than haunting the SGC and playing the endless mind games of ‘what if’ and ‘if I had to do it all over again’.
Only it doesn’t. Because being off world without Carter just feels wrong.
He knows Teal’c feels it too. He’s been strangely pensive, restless, since the accident, like he takes it as a personal insult. He’s mourning, and Jack tries not to let that piss him off. Carter is still alive, just not here.
He tries to remember that too.
Next to him, Daniel glances back over his shoulder, catching himself midway through the gesture. He gives Jack a sheepish grimace of a smile. “I keep expecting her to be there,” he admits.
“Yeah,” Jack says, turning back to the path in front of him, focusing his mind back on the mission at hand. “I know what you mean.”
It’s all wrong.
* * *
Someone knocks on the doorframe of Sam’s room. “Is this a good time?”
She looks up to see a vaguely familiar figure. “Captain Miller,” she says, placing him as the former member of SG-4.
He smiles, taking a few steps into the room. “Not for a while now,” he says, holding out his left hand for her to shake. “It’s Tim.”
She takes his left hand awkwardly in hers, her eyes automatically falling to the empty sleeve on his right side.
He holds her hand, polite, firm pressure on her fingers until her eyes manage to travel back to his face. “Mind if I call you Sam?” he asks.
She nods, dropping his hand. “Sure.”
She remembers him from the first year of the program. Like so many of them back then, he’d been bright and eager and so sure of his own indestructibility. Then he’d touched the wrong plant on the wrong world and nearly lost his life to a creeping sort of alien necrotizing fasciitis. In the end, an amputation of the infected arm above his elbow is what saved his life. But also ended his career.
It had reminded them all, for a while, just how vulnerable they are. Just how little they really know about the galaxy, and how much they risk each time they step through the gate.
She wonders if she will be a cautionary tale now, whispered about in the halls and locker rooms.
“Colonel O’Neill asked you to come talk to me,” she guesses, trying to feel anger about that, but frankly, she’s just too tired.
Tim grabs a chair, pulling it closer to her bed. “He thought it might help.”
“Because you lost your arm, and that makes us automatic buddies?” she snaps, wanting to flinch the moment the words are out. Maybe she does have enough energy for anger after all.
Tim doesn’t look offended. “Sure,” he says. “But probably mostly because this is my job.”
“What?”
He hands her a card. “I’m a counselor with the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
“Ah,” she says, glancing down at the card, realizing he must have gone back to school after his medical discharge.
“It helps that I already know about the SGC.”
She can imagine. “Did they send you to break the news to me?”
He doesn’t play dumb, which she appreciates. “You don’t really need me to tell you, do you?”
“Honorable discharge,” she says, words bitter in her throat. It doesn’t feel honorable. It feels like she did something wrong. Like she failed.
Tim leans closer to her. “Maybe I’m just here to remind you that you were injured in the course of duty. In the defense of your country and your planet. That this is the very definition of honorable.”
“I took a wrong step,” she corrects. “A freak accident. It didn’t mean anything.”
“That’s not the way people will remember it.”
Lucky them.
She drags her hands across her face. “The Air Force is my life.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I had to learn to be something else.”
She eyes his clothing, the way the casual civvies still don’t seem to sit quite right on him.
He gives her a wry smile. “I didn’t say it didn’t suck. At first.”
“And now? It’s all just Kumbayah?”
He shrugs. “Not better, not worse. Just different.”
“You’re trying to tell me you love your new job, your new life?”
“It’s my life, Sam,” he says with that annoying smile, the one that seems to says he has all the answers, imbued as he is with the calm certainty one gets from looking at a situation from the other side.
She kind of wants to punch him in the face.
He leans back in his chair, either unaware or uncaring of his precipitous situation. Or maybe he would think Sam lashing out is a positive sign of healing. She wonders what he would think if she gave in to the impulse to start screaming like a bloody lunatic.
She bites down on her tongue.
“Luckily for all of us,” he says, “you’ve still got that brain of yours.”
“Right,” she says.
Just stupid enough to save an entire planet, she thinks.
* * *
The Saturday before Carter gets released from the infirmary, Jack calls in reinforcements and sees to getting her house ready. In the end he actually has to turn away a few teams, the entirety of on world teams eager to do their part. Too many hands would not only defeat the purpose, but he also doesn’t want to invade Carter’s privacy any more than he has to.
Luckily it’s a small one story and doesn’t require too much modification, just a ramp at the front door, a few handles here and there throughout. SG-1 has sat through many a class to get a clear picture of just what she’ll need.
Teal’c is surprisingly handy with a hammer, even if he’s clearly uncomfortable with the entire concept of accessibility. Jack doesn’t ask if Teal’c somehow thinks Carter will be better off being looked after and coddled for all time. If he really thinks that what she needs.
She will get out of that wheelchair someday. Her progress has just been slowed by her other injuries. This isn’t forever.
He reminds himself of this again when the van service arrives and Carter gets her first glimpse of the modifications. She looks torn between yelling and crying, but of course does neither (just once, he sort of wishes she would).
Instead she swallows hard, giving them a brittle smile that threatens to crack her face into pieces. “Thanks, guys,” she says, and absolutely refuses any help.
She makes it up the ramp all on her own.
* * *
It starts as a careless glance in the gym on level 18. Sam looks up at the weird tingle between her shoulder blades like a sixth sense telling her she’s being talked about by someone somewhere. Two officers by the doorway quickly look away as her head lifts, but that’s normal these days.
Did you hear about Major Carter?
“Sam,” her therapist says, pulling her attention back.
She forces her mind back on the exercises, because missing limb or not, she’s never been about doing things halfway. She finishes the rest of her reps without incident, collecting her things with a promise to be back the next day.
By the time she’s done with showering and changing and is back in her wheelchair, her muscles are twinging, exhaustion tugging at her bones. It’s a good feeling most days, this ache of accomplishment, even if other days she just wants to throw something at the wall because what is there really to be proud of here when her biggest goal may be to actually walk again someday?
She blows out a breath and tells herself she’s being ridiculous again. Give yourself a break, Tim loves to tell her when he drops by to visit. She doesn’t find him quite as obnoxious these days, though she still imagines punching him from time to time. But the advice is sound all the same.
Once Sam’s out in the hall, the tingle of awareness returns as a whisper. By the time she hits the elevator banks, one of the members of SG-6 crosses her path, giving her a quick, guilty double take and not one of the sly ones she’s getting used to. It’s enough to tell her she isn’t just being paranoid.
Something is happening.
Rather than heading up for the waiting van service and a well-deserved cool down from her grueling therapy session that usually has her reaching for a carton of ice cream and a two-hour afternoon nap, she hits the button for level 28.
The doors open on people running up and down the hall. “SG-1,” she overhears someone say. “Fubar gate malfunction.”
Sam grabs her wheels and heads down towards the control room, people tripping and jumping out of her way as she gains momentum. She comes to an abrupt halt at the far end, because there are only stairs leading up the final distance, something that only seems like a glaring oversight now as she sits in a wheelchair at the base of the steps. She has crutches she has been getting better and better with, but they aren’t here with her.
She can just make out garbled voices over a radio feed as a confused looking tech ducks past her into the hallway. Her indecision evaporates.
“Airman,” she calls out.
A guard loitering near the entrance turns towards her, an almost comical pause passing as he stares at the empty air above her head before tracking down.
Sam doesn’t have time for a sense of mortification or ego. “Give me a hand.”
He glances from her wheelchair to the stairs. “Ma’am?”
She locks her wheels in place and hefts her weight up onto her foot, ignoring the trembling of exhausted muscles. She waves him closer impatiently, throwing one arm over his shoulders when he’s in range. “You’re getting me up those steps. Now.”
She doesn’t have rank anymore, can’t really boss him about like this, but he still doesn’t hesitate.
It isn’t pretty, but she gets there, pointing to an empty chair next to Walter. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thinks, not allowing herself the time or distraction of gauging people’s reactions to her sudden unauthorized appearance.
Sliding into the seat, she waves the Airman away with a distracted thanks, her eyes already tracking the information on display. Sam can feel Walter looking to Hammond, but she just keeps her head down, fingers moving over the keyboard. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
“Fill me in,” she says when Walter finally looks at her.
She doesn’t see Hammond nod, but he must have because after a beat, Walter starts explaining the problem.
Sam lets out a breath.
* * *
Someone runs down and retrieves her arm crutches from the gym at some point so she doesn’t have to hop around or push her chair from monitor to monitor (which she clearly showed she was willing to do). She’s able to stand then, when SG-1 finally steps through the gate and are safely back on Earth.
She’s been talking to them over the radio for nearly two hours now, so they all know exactly where to look the moment they are through. They’re a little beat up and haggard, but safe, and all three of them trudge straight up to the control room to see her.
“Still saving our sorry asses from light years away, I see,” the Colonel announces, hopping up the last of the steps.
“Luckily for us,” Daniel says, looking around as if finally realizing she shouldn’t even really be here.
“She’s like a junky,” the Colonel jokes.
Sam smiles, her body wavering slightly, and the Colonel doesn’t miss it.
“Not that I’m not extremely grateful, but you need to go home, Carter. You’re still officially on leave.” His eyes dart to her fingers and she doesn’t bother to pretend they aren’t shaking. The adrenaline is fading, and on top of a rigorous physical therapy session… She just isn’t up to this.
Yet.
“Sam,” Daniel says, congenially wrapping an arm around her waist and quietly managing to lend support at the same time. “You do remember that he can’t boss you around anymore, right?”
She expects the twinge of pain, the panic, but with them safe and sound around her, her mind still settling after what feels like a marathon, she only finds a strange sort of giddiness.
“Oh,” the Colonel counters. “I’ll always be the boss of Carter.”
She slides him a look, the exhaustion getting the better of her. “You wish.”
They grin at her, those sweaty, familiar, beloved faces. More than anything, she wants to hold on to them. But she’s beginning to realize there is way more on the line here than her ego. This whole episode might have been avoided had someone with more technical knowledge of the gate been on the team.
“Pretty sure we owe you dinner for this, Sam,” Daniel says with a smile.
She drops her head to his shoulder. “I’ll hold you to that,” she says.
As they trudge out for the locker room, Daniel thanks her again, Teal’c pausing to touch her arm, his head bowing.
She stops the Colonel as he passes. “You need to replace me, sir.”
He opens his mouth as if to protest, to feed her some line about being irreplaceable. As much as she’d like to believe that, it just isn’t true.
“Sir,” she insists. She isn’t coming back. It’s time they both faced that.
He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “Yeah. I know.”
“Okay,” she says, gathering her energy to make it to the surface and home. She can’t quite remember ever being quite so exhausted.
The Colonel walks with her to the elevator, turning back to glance at her one last time before the doors close.
“Help me whittle out the idiots?” he asks, voice almost tentative, and she doesn’t know if that’s because he’s not sure it’s fair to ask her to pick her own replacement or if it’s just the way he’s phrasing it, as an honest request.
Her choice. She’ll need to get used to that.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “Of course.”
She has to know they’ll be taken care of.
* * *
Daniel and the Colonel have fallen into the habit of helping her with her rehab, cycling in and out as their duties allow. She tried to tell them once that they didn’t have to do that, but Daniel had just looked at her like she was out of her mind and said, “Sam. We miss you.” That shut her up, because she misses them too.
Teal’c has occasionally come with one of them, but never on his own. He still makes time for her as often as he can, he just chooses different venues for the most part. She hasn’t put a lot of energy into wondering why, but she has her suspicions nonetheless.
So it’s a bit unusual that Teal’c is the one who shows up in the gym as she’s unpacking her newly arrived prosthesis, Daniel apparently having been detained elsewhere.
He looks intrigued and mystified as she explains what it is, and Sam knows that for all the wonders of Goa’uld technology, prosthesis engineering is probably something they never even turned their minds too. Why bother? If a body is permanently damaged, all a Goa’uld needed to do was trade in for a new model.
“If I were a Jaffa…”
“You are not,” Teal’c says, voice blunt and unwavering as if she is a young apprentice he is daring to disagree with him. His eyes are hard as he stares down at her, almost angry. “And for this I am grateful.”
Because if she had been a Jaffa, there would be no future. Would they have left her to bleed out on the battlefield, or maybe just wait for her symbiote to age and not supply her with a new one? Or would she be expected to commit ritual suicide to save her honor?
“And if it was you?” she asks.
His jaw tightens and he can’t hide it, his distaste for the very idea of living this way.
She looks away, feeling her stomach drop. “That’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“No,” Teal’c says without hesitation, not seeming bothered by the contradiction. “Because I know your worth, Samantha Carter.”
She swallows. “My brain,” she says, surprised by the bitterness in her tone. That had always been enough, before.
He regards her steadily, all of the conflict and anger and confusion finally smoothing from his face.
“No,” he says. Stretching a hand out, he presses his palm flat against her sternum. “Your worth is your heart.”
Not a brain or a body, but a person.
She takes a careful breath. “You underestimate your own worth, Teal’c.”
“Perhaps,” he says. “And because you are still here with us, one day you may be able to convince me of it.”
She grabs his hand, working against the tightness in her throat. “Count on it, Teal’c.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, warmth filling his eyes. “Now,” he says. “Show me this device. I am curious to see how it works.”
She pulls out the prosthesis.
He becomes her most dedicated therapy partner.
:: part 2::