S/D Ficathon: Tho' always under alter'd skies
A
sd_ficathon piece for
wistful_memory .
Title: Tho’ always under alter’d skies
Author:
niamaea
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through season seven.
Notes:
starting_gate has proven herself to be a rock star of a beta - thank you! Any mistakes left over are my fault. Prompt information and a little context on the title reference is
here. The prompt for this fic was, “Post-Heroes, Sam and Daniel help each other in the wake of the loss of Janet.” The title is a line from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam,” which is a gorgeous treatment on the struggle to lose someone and have to keep going. Anyone interested can read it here; verses 30 through 40 are particularly awesome.
“With weary steps I loiter on, / Tho’ always under alter’d skies / The purple from the distance dies, / My prospect and horizon gone. / No joy the blowing season gives, / The herald melodies of spring, / But in the songs I love to sing / A doubtful gleam of solace lives.”
Thursday is Daniel’s day, now, and Sam doesn’t get home until a little before 2200. The street’s getting dark, quite a few of the porch-lights already off; her house, with the front lights on and Daniel’s Jeep at the curb, looks deceptively welcoming. It’s been a month and a half, 46 days. She still isn’t used to coming home to people. To Cassie.
Inside is quiet. Usually when Daniel’s over the two of them are doing something. Movies, cards. He keeps her engaged - he’s surprisingly good at it. But there’s no echo from the television as Sam toes her shoes off, slips off her coat, and their usual spot at the dining room table is vacant. Instead, she finds Daniel sitting in the living room with the newspaper unfolded at his feet and his eyes staring off, unfocused, into middle distance. Not so far gone that he doesn’t come out of it when Sam moves into his line of sight, but she can see the pause while his head clears. “Deep thoughts?”
“No, just - long ones,” he says, checking his watch. “Wow. It’s late.”
“Yeah, sorry. We were running a closed lab, it took a while to….” But Daniel is shaking his head, shaking her explanation off.
“No, that’s fine. Not what I meant.”
Sam nods, presses her lips together, hesitates. “Where’s Cassie?”
And Daniel reaches up to pull his glasses off, scrubs at his eyes. “In her room,” he says, and sighs.
“Bad day?”
“We’ve had better,” he admits.
Sam resists the impulse to flop down onto the couch and stay there, turns and looks instead back towards the guest room. “She’s been getting worse.”
“Anger always comes later.” Daniel shrugs, slips his glasses back on.
“Yeah. I’m gonna - ” She angles a thumb, starts to go and then turns back just as Daniel’s leaning down to gather up the paper. “Don’t leave, ok?” He nods, waves her off.
Cassie is shut in her room, stretched out on her bed with a book and the dog, and dry-eyed when Sam comes in. But distant, monosyllabic and refusing to hold eye contact. The usual. Sam’s learning when not to push, when to let her come out of something on her own. She doesn’t stay long.
“Um,” Cassie says, just as Sam is turning to leave. When Sam turns she’s looking down, picking at a fingernail. “Tell Daniel I didn’t mean it, ok?”
Sam leans against the doorframe. “He’ll know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
She waits, but Cassie gives nothing else. Finally, Sam says, “Sure,” and steps out into the hall, pulls the door shut again behind her. She figures Daniel will clue her in - but the living room is empty, newspaper put back in order and folded on the coffee table, and he’s not in the bathroom. For a minute Sam wonders if he left anyway, until she glances down the front hall and sees the door wide open. Daniel’s sitting out on the steps, back against one of the posts, face tipped up and out, towards the sky. She turns back and grabs a couple of cans of Coke from the fridge - no beer in the house anymore, which is a shame, since he’s much less picky about it now than he used to be, before - and pads out to join him. Pulls the door most of the way shut behind her, sits against the opposite post, passes him a can.
Daniel looks at it as if the answer to whatever has him so far away might be printed somewhere near the nutrition information. “How is she?”
The best Sam can do is shrug. “Not talking much. Says she’s fine. And she wanted me to tell you that she didn’t mean it.” She reaches for the pull-tab, stops, puts it down when Daniel’s eyes tighten. He makes a face that looks, almost, like a smile. “What?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Daniel.”
And it’s the look again, the almost-smile that really isn’t. He rolls the can back and forth between his hands for a long, silent moment. “Cassie was asking me about ascension, today.”
Sam takes a breath, tips her head back to rest against the wood. It’s too cool for crickets, still; too late in the evening for the neighborhood kids to be out in the yard somewhere. Someone’s got a window open nearby, though, and music on. Some kind of jazz, low and rolling and ebbing away in waves. Like thunder, after the storm’s stopped. The track changes after a few minutes, switches over to something with a singer, but Sam can’t make out any of the words. “Oh,” she says.
Daniel nods, but he’s quiet for another minute or two, thoughtful but not lost it in this time; too tense in the shoulders, the rigid jaw, the way he keeps rotating the can with his fingers. She’s not sure when she re-learned to read him like that, not sure if it happened because he re-learned himself, or because she just adjusted to the differences. Filled the new cues in over the old. “She wanted to know how it works. Who can do it.”
And Sam can’t - she's not ready to be - she doesn’t want to have this conversation. Not now. Probably not ever. She knows dumb hope. Like the way she had told herself, for weeks, that it hadn’t been the right taxi, that there’d been a mistake, and her mother was off staying with Sam’s aunt until her dad apologized for being late again. Like she’d told herself that Daniel wasn’t gone either, that she’d see him again. Impossible.
That he’d come back, that was in defiance of all the reality checks that she’d given herself, an isolated aberration in the way things worked. It didn’t change that she had still been wishing for snow in August. “She doesn’t think that Janet….”
“No,” Daniel says, when Sam can’t quite finish. “She knows it’s not - that that isn’t what happened.”
“Okay.” Sam can breathe again, and it’s wrong - it’s so wrong that she should be relieved. “I’m sorry. If she had said anything to me about it, I would have…warned you, at least.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“No. It isn’t.”
A shrug from Daniel. “You’ve thought about it.” She tries to bite down on her reaction, the jolt of surprise, quick mental fumble for denial, but he’s watching too closely. She’s not fast enough. Daniel isn’t upset saying it, though, or the kind of distant that means she should worry. Resigned, maybe. “I mean, I’ve thought about it, too. It’s not… it’s not a huge leap.”
“What happened to you and what happened to Janet aren’t even remotely similar.” She had thought about it. But she’s thought a lot about Daniel, too, already dead before he even hit the wormhole back from Kelowna. They’d spared Cassie most of the details, but she’s not a stupid kid, she knew it had been horrific, bringing it up -
She shuts the thought down before it has time to get where it was doing. It’s getting a lot easier for Sam to get angry, too.
“Yeah, that’s part of it.” Daniel finally stops fiddling with the can, puts it down and looks at her straight, instead of the quick glances and carefully averted eyes that he’s been alternating between tonight. “Knowing even the little bit we know about ascension, it’s easy to see why it’s different. But to Cassie…”
Sam sighs through her teeth, reaches up to rub the back of her neck. “Yeah.”
“I get to come back to life and she loses her second mom because of someone’s lucky shot. No way to explain that.”
“Not a… great place to start the conversation.”
“Um. No. She wanted to know why they… ‘took’ me and they didn’t take Janet. Wanted a straight answer,” Daniel says. He hesitates a moment, she can see him turning whatever it is over in his head. “I tried to tell her that’s it not… passing a test and getting into the club. That it’s a process, and it ultimately depends on if you want it for yourself, if you - think of yourself as capable. And if Cassie knew what it was like, she’d know why I don’t think Janet would ever want it, anyway. If she’d been given the choice. But that wasn’t what she was looking for.”
“No,” says Sam. “Probably not.”
They sit without moving, silent, and eventually her neighbor turns off the music, or shuts the window, and then the night is silent, too. Sam pops her Coke open and sips from it, and Daniel seems to remember his and cracks it, but puts it back down on the step and leaves it there. He stares up, towards the sky where only the brightest stars shine through the light pollution, but Sam watches him. There’s nothing for her to see in the sky over Colorado for her, not anymore. Not on a good day, anyway.
She knows he’s probably looking just to look, and knows all the same that 666 isn’t visible from Earth without a telescope. She checked.
“What didn’t she mean?” Sam asks, after what feels like an hour. (Ten minutes, her watch corrects.)
Daniel blinks at her, raises his eyebrows, and then says, “Oh,” and shakes his head.
“That bad?”
He shrugs, casually, and so she knows it’s a yes. “You know, my first set of foster parents were really great people,” he says, instead. “In retrospect, I mean. But I was moved after seven or eight months. I was horrible. Wanted nothing to do with them.”
“Me too,” Sam says, and trusts him to know what she means. She could have been Mark, so easily. Was just as bad as he was, in the months after her mom died. Her poor dad.
“And she’s a teenager.”
Sam laughs a little, despite herself. It still sounds weird, in her head. Like someone else. But she’s done this before. Knows it’ll fade, even when it feels like it’ll go on forever. “Bonus.”
She hugs a knee to her chest even though she’s not cold; drinks her soda even though she really doesn’t need the caffeine. Wishes Daniel would have some of his, since he needs to drive home at some point - or doesn’t need to, but he will, would never let himself be there in the morning when Cass wakes up. Would never in general, probably, but especially not after tonight. Tomorrow Cassie’s spending the night with a friend - only really the third or fourth time that she’s seen any of them, since it happened - and it’s just the two of them, for the weekend. Daniel isn’t supposed to come by again until Monday. “Listen,” she says, “Next week. If you don’t want to -“
“I’ll be here.” He stops, backtracks. “Sorry. Unless you think it’s a bad idea. But if you just mean, in case I don’t want to.”
“Yeah.”
“Then, no. I’ll be here. If she doesn’t to talk to me, that’s fine.”
“She will.” Sam shifts, tries to ease some of the pressure where the edge of the post is digging into her back and ends up turning, dropping both feet down onto the steps and leaning back onto her palms. There are dead bugs in the light fixture; she reminds herself to clean it out, soon. “I don’t think she’s going out much this weekend. By Monday it’ll probably be my turn again.”
Daniel gives her a slanted look, a long one; the kind that would make her uncomfortable if it was head on. “You’re doing a good job, you know.”
Sam keeps watching the light fixture, past the point where the circle of light’s been printed into her vision and glows behind her eyelids when she blinks. The light, and the dead bugs, and the bulb she’ll probably change while she’s up there on Saturday. “Thanks.”
“Sam,” says Daniel. She hmms at him. Maybe she’ll get one of those yellow bulbs, the kind that aren’t supposed to attract insects as much. “Sam,” Daniel says again, and then he touches her hand, fingertips brushing along the back. It snaps her back almost immediately; Daniel rarely touches anymore. Never touches first. “You’re doing a good job.”
And she’s looking at him again, and his eyes are way too sympathetic, and she’s not used to that, anymore, either. Not sure what her next line is supposed to be. “I can’t be Janet,” is what comes out of her mouth. The one thing she hadn’t even considered saying. She sits up immediately afterwards, elbows on her knees, but that’s useless. The night is hushed and still, and the words are there. No getting them back now.
“And Janet could never be her mother,” Daniel says. He sits up too, turns so they’re shoulder to shoulder, staring out across the street together. “But she was her mom, eventually.”
“I can’t.” Her throat’s dry, scratchy. She swallows and tries to clear it; picks up her can, but it’s empty.
Daniel hands her his. “No. You can be Sam.”
She takes it but doesn’t drink, puts it down beside her old one. “She doesn’t want me,” Sam says, and is relieved to hear that it comes out much less pathetic than it seems in her head; much more a statement of fact. “She doesn’t want anyone who isn’t Janet.”
“I know,” Daniel says. Folds his arms across his knees, looks down at the walkway. “And I didn’t want my foster parents. And you didn’t want your dad. We’re what she has, and Jack, and Teal’c. You’re not alone, Sam.”
“I didn’t mean…” She lets it go when Daniel shakes his head; he knows. “It’s just - the person I would usually ask about something like this….”
“I know,” Daniel says again. And then, “I think you’re doing a better job than you think you are.”
“She’s miserable.”
Daniel shrugs. “Her mom died. You’re too close, Sam. She’s going to school. She’s starting to see her friends again.”
Sam scrubs at her face, presses her forehead into her palm and breathes. “Yeah.”
“Really.”
“No, you’re right,” she says, and reaches down for the empty can, starts picking mindlessly at the tab. “I probably am. All we do is fight, now. We never used to.”
“No, she had Janet to fight with.”
“Never envied her that.”
“She trusts you enough to fight with you and know you won’t leave,” Daniel says. He looks at her sideways, raises his eyebrows. “That’s something.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, slowly. It’s… not how she would have looked at it. Maybe she is too close. “It is.”
Daniel gives her another one of those long glances but doesn’t say anything; turns his face back up towards the sky and watches the lights of a plane pass overhead, flying north. They sit with their shoulders brushing, close enough she can feel the heat coming off his skin, can hear him breathing. Easily, she notices, no allergic rasp, because his allergies are always worse in the fall than in the spring; some things don’t change.
“Teal’c and I are driving up to Boulder on Saturday,” he says. “There’s this world music festival he wants to go to. It’s supposed to be really good. You should come.”
Normally, Sam would pass. She’s tried to avoid taking Cassie out unless she asks first, hitting her with too much before she’s ready. But that’s left them at home, bouncing off each other, ending the weekends in tight silences. And Cass has always liked doing ‘Earth research’ with Teal’c. They used to mainline the History Channel together, quiz each other. “I’ll ask her,” she decides, and realizes after she says it that she’s already hoping to go, and get them both away from the house and the mountain, and all the places that Janet isn’t anymore.
“Tell her I said please,” Daniel adds, and when Sam turns to raise her eyebrows at him he lets slip a flicker of a smile, makes a face. “You two need a break. I’ll guilt trip her if I have to.”
Sam finds herself smiling back, even though it feels strange. Less strange than it used to a few weeks before; more than it will, eventually. Some things do change. “I appreciate that.”
“Any time.”
When Daniel leaves it’s a little before midnight, and the street is dark and silent. Sam stands in the doorway and watches him pull away, watches as he turns the corner and his car disappears between the houses, and the sound of his engine fades. Then she shuts the door and kills the porch light, turns back to her house, where her shoes and Cassie’s sit next to each other by the table, and the dog’s frisbee has been forgotten under the dining room table. She starts turning things off for the night, drawing the blinds, and goes in to the room that’s Cassie’s now, where Cass is passed out on top of her comforter with her faced smushed into the pillow, looking for all the world like a little girl with big eyes that Sam fell in love with in an elevator going down.
Sam covers her up, and eases the door closed, and goes to bed. Day 46. She’ll worry about 47 in the morning.
sd_ficathon piece for
wistful_memory .
Title: Tho’ always under alter’d skies
Author:
niamaea
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through season seven.
Notes:
starting_gate has proven herself to be a rock star of a beta - thank you! Any mistakes left over are my fault. Prompt information and a little context on the title reference is
here. The prompt for this fic was, “Post-Heroes, Sam and Daniel help each other in the wake of the loss of Janet.” The title is a line from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam,” which is a gorgeous treatment on the struggle to lose someone and have to keep going. Anyone interested can read it here; verses 30 through 40 are particularly awesome.
“With weary steps I loiter on, / Tho’ always under alter’d skies / The purple from the distance dies, / My prospect and horizon gone. / No joy the blowing season gives, / The herald melodies of spring, / But in the songs I love to sing / A doubtful gleam of solace lives.”
Thursday is Daniel’s day, now, and Sam doesn’t get home until a little before 2200. The street’s getting dark, quite a few of the porch-lights already off; her house, with the front lights on and Daniel’s Jeep at the curb, looks deceptively welcoming. It’s been a month and a half, 46 days. She still isn’t used to coming home to people. To Cassie.
Inside is quiet. Usually when Daniel’s over the two of them are doing something. Movies, cards. He keeps her engaged - he’s surprisingly good at it. But there’s no echo from the television as Sam toes her shoes off, slips off her coat, and their usual spot at the dining room table is vacant. Instead, she finds Daniel sitting in the living room with the newspaper unfolded at his feet and his eyes staring off, unfocused, into middle distance. Not so far gone that he doesn’t come out of it when Sam moves into his line of sight, but she can see the pause while his head clears. “Deep thoughts?”
“No, just - long ones,” he says, checking his watch. “Wow. It’s late.”
“Yeah, sorry. We were running a closed lab, it took a while to….” But Daniel is shaking his head, shaking her explanation off.
“No, that’s fine. Not what I meant.”
Sam nods, presses her lips together, hesitates. “Where’s Cassie?”
And Daniel reaches up to pull his glasses off, scrubs at his eyes. “In her room,” he says, and sighs.
“Bad day?”
“We’ve had better,” he admits.
Sam resists the impulse to flop down onto the couch and stay there, turns and looks instead back towards the guest room. “She’s been getting worse.”
“Anger always comes later.” Daniel shrugs, slips his glasses back on.
“Yeah. I’m gonna - ” She angles a thumb, starts to go and then turns back just as Daniel’s leaning down to gather up the paper. “Don’t leave, ok?” He nods, waves her off.
Cassie is shut in her room, stretched out on her bed with a book and the dog, and dry-eyed when Sam comes in. But distant, monosyllabic and refusing to hold eye contact. The usual. Sam’s learning when not to push, when to let her come out of something on her own. She doesn’t stay long.
“Um,” Cassie says, just as Sam is turning to leave. When Sam turns she’s looking down, picking at a fingernail. “Tell Daniel I didn’t mean it, ok?”
Sam leans against the doorframe. “He’ll know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
She waits, but Cassie gives nothing else. Finally, Sam says, “Sure,” and steps out into the hall, pulls the door shut again behind her. She figures Daniel will clue her in - but the living room is empty, newspaper put back in order and folded on the coffee table, and he’s not in the bathroom. For a minute Sam wonders if he left anyway, until she glances down the front hall and sees the door wide open. Daniel’s sitting out on the steps, back against one of the posts, face tipped up and out, towards the sky. She turns back and grabs a couple of cans of Coke from the fridge - no beer in the house anymore, which is a shame, since he’s much less picky about it now than he used to be, before - and pads out to join him. Pulls the door most of the way shut behind her, sits against the opposite post, passes him a can.
Daniel looks at it as if the answer to whatever has him so far away might be printed somewhere near the nutrition information. “How is she?”
The best Sam can do is shrug. “Not talking much. Says she’s fine. And she wanted me to tell you that she didn’t mean it.” She reaches for the pull-tab, stops, puts it down when Daniel’s eyes tighten. He makes a face that looks, almost, like a smile. “What?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Daniel.”
And it’s the look again, the almost-smile that really isn’t. He rolls the can back and forth between his hands for a long, silent moment. “Cassie was asking me about ascension, today.”
Sam takes a breath, tips her head back to rest against the wood. It’s too cool for crickets, still; too late in the evening for the neighborhood kids to be out in the yard somewhere. Someone’s got a window open nearby, though, and music on. Some kind of jazz, low and rolling and ebbing away in waves. Like thunder, after the storm’s stopped. The track changes after a few minutes, switches over to something with a singer, but Sam can’t make out any of the words. “Oh,” she says.
Daniel nods, but he’s quiet for another minute or two, thoughtful but not lost it in this time; too tense in the shoulders, the rigid jaw, the way he keeps rotating the can with his fingers. She’s not sure when she re-learned to read him like that, not sure if it happened because he re-learned himself, or because she just adjusted to the differences. Filled the new cues in over the old. “She wanted to know how it works. Who can do it.”
And Sam can’t - she's not ready to be - she doesn’t want to have this conversation. Not now. Probably not ever. She knows dumb hope. Like the way she had told herself, for weeks, that it hadn’t been the right taxi, that there’d been a mistake, and her mother was off staying with Sam’s aunt until her dad apologized for being late again. Like she’d told herself that Daniel wasn’t gone either, that she’d see him again. Impossible.
That he’d come back, that was in defiance of all the reality checks that she’d given herself, an isolated aberration in the way things worked. It didn’t change that she had still been wishing for snow in August. “She doesn’t think that Janet….”
“No,” Daniel says, when Sam can’t quite finish. “She knows it’s not - that that isn’t what happened.”
“Okay.” Sam can breathe again, and it’s wrong - it’s so wrong that she should be relieved. “I’m sorry. If she had said anything to me about it, I would have…warned you, at least.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“No. It isn’t.”
A shrug from Daniel. “You’ve thought about it.” She tries to bite down on her reaction, the jolt of surprise, quick mental fumble for denial, but he’s watching too closely. She’s not fast enough. Daniel isn’t upset saying it, though, or the kind of distant that means she should worry. Resigned, maybe. “I mean, I’ve thought about it, too. It’s not… it’s not a huge leap.”
“What happened to you and what happened to Janet aren’t even remotely similar.” She had thought about it. But she’s thought a lot about Daniel, too, already dead before he even hit the wormhole back from Kelowna. They’d spared Cassie most of the details, but she’s not a stupid kid, she knew it had been horrific, bringing it up -
She shuts the thought down before it has time to get where it was doing. It’s getting a lot easier for Sam to get angry, too.
“Yeah, that’s part of it.” Daniel finally stops fiddling with the can, puts it down and looks at her straight, instead of the quick glances and carefully averted eyes that he’s been alternating between tonight. “Knowing even the little bit we know about ascension, it’s easy to see why it’s different. But to Cassie…”
Sam sighs through her teeth, reaches up to rub the back of her neck. “Yeah.”
“I get to come back to life and she loses her second mom because of someone’s lucky shot. No way to explain that.”
“Not a… great place to start the conversation.”
“Um. No. She wanted to know why they… ‘took’ me and they didn’t take Janet. Wanted a straight answer,” Daniel says. He hesitates a moment, she can see him turning whatever it is over in his head. “I tried to tell her that’s it not… passing a test and getting into the club. That it’s a process, and it ultimately depends on if you want it for yourself, if you - think of yourself as capable. And if Cassie knew what it was like, she’d know why I don’t think Janet would ever want it, anyway. If she’d been given the choice. But that wasn’t what she was looking for.”
“No,” says Sam. “Probably not.”
They sit without moving, silent, and eventually her neighbor turns off the music, or shuts the window, and then the night is silent, too. Sam pops her Coke open and sips from it, and Daniel seems to remember his and cracks it, but puts it back down on the step and leaves it there. He stares up, towards the sky where only the brightest stars shine through the light pollution, but Sam watches him. There’s nothing for her to see in the sky over Colorado for her, not anymore. Not on a good day, anyway.
She knows he’s probably looking just to look, and knows all the same that 666 isn’t visible from Earth without a telescope. She checked.
“What didn’t she mean?” Sam asks, after what feels like an hour. (Ten minutes, her watch corrects.)
Daniel blinks at her, raises his eyebrows, and then says, “Oh,” and shakes his head.
“That bad?”
He shrugs, casually, and so she knows it’s a yes. “You know, my first set of foster parents were really great people,” he says, instead. “In retrospect, I mean. But I was moved after seven or eight months. I was horrible. Wanted nothing to do with them.”
“Me too,” Sam says, and trusts him to know what she means. She could have been Mark, so easily. Was just as bad as he was, in the months after her mom died. Her poor dad.
“And she’s a teenager.”
Sam laughs a little, despite herself. It still sounds weird, in her head. Like someone else. But she’s done this before. Knows it’ll fade, even when it feels like it’ll go on forever. “Bonus.”
She hugs a knee to her chest even though she’s not cold; drinks her soda even though she really doesn’t need the caffeine. Wishes Daniel would have some of his, since he needs to drive home at some point - or doesn’t need to, but he will, would never let himself be there in the morning when Cass wakes up. Would never in general, probably, but especially not after tonight. Tomorrow Cassie’s spending the night with a friend - only really the third or fourth time that she’s seen any of them, since it happened - and it’s just the two of them, for the weekend. Daniel isn’t supposed to come by again until Monday. “Listen,” she says, “Next week. If you don’t want to -“
“I’ll be here.” He stops, backtracks. “Sorry. Unless you think it’s a bad idea. But if you just mean, in case I don’t want to.”
“Yeah.”
“Then, no. I’ll be here. If she doesn’t to talk to me, that’s fine.”
“She will.” Sam shifts, tries to ease some of the pressure where the edge of the post is digging into her back and ends up turning, dropping both feet down onto the steps and leaning back onto her palms. There are dead bugs in the light fixture; she reminds herself to clean it out, soon. “I don’t think she’s going out much this weekend. By Monday it’ll probably be my turn again.”
Daniel gives her a slanted look, a long one; the kind that would make her uncomfortable if it was head on. “You’re doing a good job, you know.”
Sam keeps watching the light fixture, past the point where the circle of light’s been printed into her vision and glows behind her eyelids when she blinks. The light, and the dead bugs, and the bulb she’ll probably change while she’s up there on Saturday. “Thanks.”
“Sam,” says Daniel. She hmms at him. Maybe she’ll get one of those yellow bulbs, the kind that aren’t supposed to attract insects as much. “Sam,” Daniel says again, and then he touches her hand, fingertips brushing along the back. It snaps her back almost immediately; Daniel rarely touches anymore. Never touches first. “You’re doing a good job.”
And she’s looking at him again, and his eyes are way too sympathetic, and she’s not used to that, anymore, either. Not sure what her next line is supposed to be. “I can’t be Janet,” is what comes out of her mouth. The one thing she hadn’t even considered saying. She sits up immediately afterwards, elbows on her knees, but that’s useless. The night is hushed and still, and the words are there. No getting them back now.
“And Janet could never be her mother,” Daniel says. He sits up too, turns so they’re shoulder to shoulder, staring out across the street together. “But she was her mom, eventually.”
“I can’t.” Her throat’s dry, scratchy. She swallows and tries to clear it; picks up her can, but it’s empty.
Daniel hands her his. “No. You can be Sam.”
She takes it but doesn’t drink, puts it down beside her old one. “She doesn’t want me,” Sam says, and is relieved to hear that it comes out much less pathetic than it seems in her head; much more a statement of fact. “She doesn’t want anyone who isn’t Janet.”
“I know,” Daniel says. Folds his arms across his knees, looks down at the walkway. “And I didn’t want my foster parents. And you didn’t want your dad. We’re what she has, and Jack, and Teal’c. You’re not alone, Sam.”
“I didn’t mean…” She lets it go when Daniel shakes his head; he knows. “It’s just - the person I would usually ask about something like this….”
“I know,” Daniel says again. And then, “I think you’re doing a better job than you think you are.”
“She’s miserable.”
Daniel shrugs. “Her mom died. You’re too close, Sam. She’s going to school. She’s starting to see her friends again.”
Sam scrubs at her face, presses her forehead into her palm and breathes. “Yeah.”
“Really.”
“No, you’re right,” she says, and reaches down for the empty can, starts picking mindlessly at the tab. “I probably am. All we do is fight, now. We never used to.”
“No, she had Janet to fight with.”
“Never envied her that.”
“She trusts you enough to fight with you and know you won’t leave,” Daniel says. He looks at her sideways, raises his eyebrows. “That’s something.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, slowly. It’s… not how she would have looked at it. Maybe she is too close. “It is.”
Daniel gives her another one of those long glances but doesn’t say anything; turns his face back up towards the sky and watches the lights of a plane pass overhead, flying north. They sit with their shoulders brushing, close enough she can feel the heat coming off his skin, can hear him breathing. Easily, she notices, no allergic rasp, because his allergies are always worse in the fall than in the spring; some things don’t change.
“Teal’c and I are driving up to Boulder on Saturday,” he says. “There’s this world music festival he wants to go to. It’s supposed to be really good. You should come.”
Normally, Sam would pass. She’s tried to avoid taking Cassie out unless she asks first, hitting her with too much before she’s ready. But that’s left them at home, bouncing off each other, ending the weekends in tight silences. And Cass has always liked doing ‘Earth research’ with Teal’c. They used to mainline the History Channel together, quiz each other. “I’ll ask her,” she decides, and realizes after she says it that she’s already hoping to go, and get them both away from the house and the mountain, and all the places that Janet isn’t anymore.
“Tell her I said please,” Daniel adds, and when Sam turns to raise her eyebrows at him he lets slip a flicker of a smile, makes a face. “You two need a break. I’ll guilt trip her if I have to.”
Sam finds herself smiling back, even though it feels strange. Less strange than it used to a few weeks before; more than it will, eventually. Some things do change. “I appreciate that.”
“Any time.”
When Daniel leaves it’s a little before midnight, and the street is dark and silent. Sam stands in the doorway and watches him pull away, watches as he turns the corner and his car disappears between the houses, and the sound of his engine fades. Then she shuts the door and kills the porch light, turns back to her house, where her shoes and Cassie’s sit next to each other by the table, and the dog’s frisbee has been forgotten under the dining room table. She starts turning things off for the night, drawing the blinds, and goes in to the room that’s Cassie’s now, where Cass is passed out on top of her comforter with her faced smushed into the pillow, looking for all the world like a little girl with big eyes that Sam fell in love with in an elevator going down.
Sam covers her up, and eases the door closed, and goes to bed. Day 46. She’ll worry about 47 in the morning.