Title: Grey Between
Rating/Warning: R (language and sexual references)
Spoilers: Through S10
Email: rowandarkstar@gmail.com
Website: http://www.beautyinshadows.net
Huge thanks to Teddy E and Amilyn for the speed betas.
"Grey Between"
by
Rowan Darkstar
"Coming down, the world turned over
Angels fall without you there
I go on as you get colder"
--'Black Balloon', The Goo Goo Dolls
She had forgotten how much she loved her own planet.
Until she saw it shatter before her eyes.
*****
Grocery stores were once torturous. The trivial act of stocking her
refrigerator felt like an excruciating waste of time. She resented
every moment away from her lab. Separating garbage into jars and
newsprint and cleaning leaves out of gutters felt like a traitorous
indulgence while the Goa'uld were devouring civilizations and torturing
innocent souls in the guise of interrogation.
She stares into the supply closet and ice chest at the New Settlement
Movement headquarters, the makeshift stock from which she will retrieve
her week's rations, and she thinks the aisles of the local A&P would
feel like a trip to Disneyland.
All the days she sat beneath alien suns, marveled at the beauty of
advanced societies and felt shame at the primitive state of her own
world, she never understood how grateful she was to set foot on Earthly
soil again at the end of each mission; how much she loved her garden,
her car, her denim skirt, her cat.
She thinks she might cry if someone brought her a cinnamon roll. She
barely recalls the sensation on her tongue.
The Sam Carter of the SGC would have wanted to blast each and every one
of the Goa'uld to hell with her own fucking weapon for what they have
done to her planet. All eyes on the Ori when damn it to hell there were
Goa'uld hiding in the corners with just enough Jaffa to blast away the
only home she has ever known. Millions dead in days and in the end the
Goa'uld lost interest. Slave mining colonies and patrols to prevent the
rise of technology; to hold the gate. The galaxy's last best hope is
reduced to a breeding ground for future hosts and labor force.
The old Sam Carter would have fought them with every breath in her
lungs.
*****
In her dreams she watched the fucking Ori suck the life out of the
galaxy. A decade of battling the Goa'uld and she had never lost hope,
never thought Earth was waging a pointless resistance. But the Ori...
Sam had kept up the act because that was what Samantha Carter did.
Samantha Carter kept her cool, pulled brilliant plans out of her ass,
and saved everyone from certain doom. Samantha Carter lost people she
loved and never mourned for more than a day. Samantha Carter got hit,
beaten, tied up, tortured, but never shattered. She came home, slept it
off, wore her bandages, and saved the world again the next day.
Samantha Carter was supposed to stare the Ori in the face and say, 'fuck
with me and I'll MacGyver something beyond your dreams to short circuit
your finest technology'.
But the Ori felt like a grey cloud that would descend over their
thickest barriers, soaking into their skin while they struggled against
the intangible. She had told herself exhaustion had clouded her
perspective, the Ori were no more undefeatable than the Goa'uld they had
thwarted. She chalked up her pessimism to too long battling uphill.
Turns out her sense of the apocalypse had been bang on, she'd just been
watching the wrong horizon.
In the calm before the storm, R&D had felt like a place to keep her feet
beneath her and lick her wounds. Part of her hadn't expected to return
to battle.
Part of her knew she only returned because Cameron asked her to, and
Jack had taken too long to find himself.
Cameron.
Fuck.
She shoves an armload of cardboard food into her scuffed laundry basket,
logs the retrieval on the clipboard beside the door, and locks the
closet on her way out.
*****
He can still see her radiant smile in the sunlight on Cheyenne mountain.
He can feel her playful slaps when he steals her fries at O'Malley's.
He can remember her warmth tight against him in the wake of the loss of
Prometheus; the flood of relief at the sight of blue eyes and the
too deep need in her touch.
He fell in love with her because she laughed at the most inappropriate
moments.
He fell in love with her because she could forget to eat when her
gadgets were beeping and looked innocently shocked when night passed
into morning.
He fell in love with her because she was afraid of the General's chair,
but not afraid to shoot someone she loved.
He fell in love with her because she glared at his stupid jokes until
she thought he wasn't looking.
He fell in love with her because she let him see her cry.
She is all he has left.
*****
Her civvies used to look nothing like her uniform. Cameron was
endlessly charmed by her preference for skirts and flowered blouses and
high heeled shoes. He watched in fascination as dangling earrings
caught the light of her smile. She has settled now on something between
uniform and original and he hopes she's not denying both sides of
herself in the process. She lives in variations on a central theme.
Low rise khakis with enough thickness and pockets to be practical and a
sleeveless black shirt. Ankle boots, and a haphazard clip in her hair.
Her longer locks are a concession to civilian status.
He tells himself if she weren't the voice of the NSM he would still be
taking a stand away from those who had once been their comrades in arms.
He tries to believe they are on the side of right.
She has single-handedly built this place and he can't help but marvel.
A phoenix of human fellowship rising from the dust. Sam Carter is a
force to be loved and a force to be feared. He wonders sometimes at the
grey between the lines.
He sees the doubt at his conviction in her gaze some nights and he
masters the art of coercion and pacification. He touches, coaxes,
licks, sucks, pins her to the wall and won't stop until she digs her
nails into his shoulders and gasps into his ear. He ignores the tick-
tock of the countdown in his mind.
*****
Daniel sees her for a moment before she sees him.
She's walking down the dim hallway, crossing patches of amber and dusty
sunlight, gait steady and purposeful, focus on what looks like rations
in a cracked plastic basket propped on her hip.
He holds his place, hands in his pockets, shoulder scrunched against the
wall, pretending he hasn't learned this posture from Jack. He waits
until her gaze lifts and she sees him there. He thinks he is braced for
the look of disdain and rejection, thinks he has cultivated the same
emotions towards her. But for a moment, he sees his best friend Sam
Carter walking the halls of the SGC, and the warm greeting smile in his
memory clashes with the steely blue eyes of the present and sucker-
punches him in the gut. He prides himself on his outward calm.
She gives a brief shake of her head as she nears, nostrils flaring in
suppressed anger. He's seen that look directed toward Kinsey, Woolsey,
Ba'al. "What are you doing here, Daniel?" Her steps do not slow as she
passes. Once, she would have brushed against his shoulder, for no
reason in particular. Now he doesn't feel the breeze.
"'Morning, Sam, good to see you, too." He listens to her footsteps
continue behind him, then he pushes off the wall and falls into step
behind. He thinks coming here has been a mistake. He didn't want the
job. Landry thought Daniel had the best shot with Carter. A long time
ago, he might have been right.
****
"Marietta?"
Sam enters the third doorway on the right, into a room filled with
tables of electronic equipment, cables and wires pushed to the edges of
the floor. Daniel hovers on the threshold as a tall red-headed woman in
torn jeans looks up from a tool bench. "Sam," is all she offers in
greeting.
"Are you working security this afternoon?" Sam asks. She has retrieved
a hair clip from a cluttered tabletop and is holding the clip in her
teeth as she works her unruly locks into a knot at the base of her neck.
She speaks as though Daniel is not present.
"Yeah, I'm on after lunch," the woman says.
"Can you switch with someone?"
Red-headed woman frowns, letting a pair of tweezers slip from her
fingers. "Maybe. Why?"
"I could use some help in the clinic. Their lights are acting up
again."
Marietta nods. "Okay. I'll get on it."
"Thanks, Mar."
Sam turns her attention to something on her desk, picks up a piece of
paper. This building is worn down, the supplies haphazard and patched
together, but there is something of Sam's old laboratory in this room,
and he knows this is her place. Her workshop. There is an order in the
chaos, a sense of indefinable energy in the air; something being
invented, advantage rising from the dust.
The woman called Marietta pushes to her feet and brushes past Daniel out
the doorway with a cursory "Excuse me" and only a mildly curious glance.
Sam and Daniel are alone.
The silence thickens.
"So, how is everyone?" Sam asks, looking up at him for the first time,
acknowledging his presence. Despite her words, her response is distant
and mechanical.
He nods and ventures a step into the room. "They're all still alive.
Good as could be expected, I guess."
She angles her head slightly in response, sucks at her upper lip, but
offers nothing more.
"How about you here?" He pushes the words into the stiff silence like
footsteps through water. "How are things...coming along?"
She shrugs. "It's a grind every day. Nothing's easy. But we're making
progress. People are...finding their places."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"Is this...your place?" He glances around the room, but he
thinks she knows he's not asking about office space.
"Yes," is all she says. Her voice is strong and there is a defiance in
the undertone he remembers from the sparkle of her youth.
"Sam..." He hopes the words will come as he speaks, because he doesn't
know where to go from here.
She never gives him a chance. "Why are you here, Daniel?"
He narrows his eyes and rights his posture, folds his arms across his
chest. He pushes at his glasses. He remembers Sam Carter watching him
with a child's hurt pleading when he announced his intent to leave the
SGC in the wake of Sha're's death. But that moment was an illusion. A
figment of his long lost imagination. And in the wake of that tearful
departure, he saw her from his apartment window, buried in Jack's
comforting arms on the street below.
He can't blend the memory with the woman he sees before him.
"We need your help, Sam."
"With what?"
"Well, yes, there is a specific reason I've come here today, but to be
honest? With everything. There's no one at Stargate Command--"
"You're not Stargate Command. They have the Stargate, Daniel."
"--no one in the military with your skills. Your understanding, your
technical abilities. We could accomplish so much more if--"
She wrinkles her nose in a gesture of bitterness that makes his guts
curl. "Sorry, Daniel. Your model SC-97 Droid is no longer available."
"Dammit, Sam. This is not about..." but he loses the words again.
She sniffs, touches the corner of her mouth with her thumb. "You know,
we could use your help around here, Daniel. Someone with your knowledge
and understanding. The adjustment issues have been hell on so many of
the Settlers."
"I don't want to help people adjust to a life of cruelty and oppression.
Once upon a time, you didn't either."
Her eyes widen and her stare is intense and real for a moment, but he
misses his chance to hear her reply when Cameron Mitchell appears at the
doorway.
"Jackson. Didn't know you were coming. We would have made meatloaf."
Mitchell raps his knuckles on the door casing for a moment, then moves
cautiously toward Carter.
Daniel lets his gaze fall to the uneven wood flooring as Cameron greets
Sam with a wide hand on the flat of her stomach and an intimate whisper
near her temple. She turns into his touch, but keeps her focus half on
Daniel. Sam has never mixed affection with business.
"Hey, Mitchell," Daniel says, weariness bleeding in.
"How are things at the old SGC?" Cameron asks as he hefts himself to sit
on the counter at the side of the room.
Daniel's eyes flicker to Sam's when Cameron uses the term, but she
averts her gaze and lets the slight pass; he can see the flare of
resentment beneath her pale skin.
"A bit difficult at the moment, actually." He's trying for the direct
approach, playing off the shift in dynamics and hoping for the best.
"We've gotten word of a problem at the South East Col Work camp.
Actually, problem isn't quite the word. Impending holocaust would be
more accurate."
Sam is listening, Sam always listens, but it's Cameron carrying the
conversation. "Ouch. What's going down?"
"I'm sure you got wind of the massacre up North last winter?" Cam nods,
the darkness in his eyes serving as reply. "Well, it seems the Goa'uld
feel it's time to set another example. There are rumors of a rebel
organization at SE Col. Some equipment was damaged. Our informants
tell us the council is planning a retaliation. They plan to publicly
execute no less than 300 people. And when I say people, I don't mean
just workers. Our source says they plan to invade the villages this
time, massacre the families of each of the suspected offenders as well."
Sam and Cameron are listening in silence, Sam offering only brief
moments of eye contact. The tension prickles the hairs beneath Daniel's
wool sweater. He misses the comfort of the BDUs; clothing he once hated
that had unknowingly become home. But BDUs weren't made by hand, and
second hand offerings are in short supply.
"Well, crap," Cameron breathes. "What's the plan?"
Daniel cringes, draws a hissing breath through his teeth. "That's the
snag. Plans are in place, of course, double agents have infiltrated
both the Jaffa guard and the work camp. But the security at SE Col is
one of the highest they've implemented. The level of technology is,
frankly, greater than what we're able to manage at the moment, and wit
and guts don't always save the day. The General is hopeful, but there's
no question we're lacking a capstone advantage. We need one point, one
brilliant strategy, if we want any hope of getting those people out,
away. It's an isolated area, there's a long run by foot from the camp
to the nearest tree cover." He falls quiet. Then, "We need your help,
Sam." He isn't talking to Cameron, anymore; in an instant, he virtually
forgets the other man's presence in the room.
Sam doesn't waver under pressure. She gives a single shake of her head.
"Sorry."
"Are you?"
She stares at him for a second that seems like forever. He wants to
believe he sees doubt, sees a hesitation, sees something of the champion
of the defenseless he once called his friend. He finds only anger. "Go
home, Daniel," she says, with nothing of the softness he hoped for.
Daniel plays his last card and steps close into her space. He sees the
slight increase in her heart rate, times the rise and fall of her chest,
feels the tightness as she swallows. "Sam. You may not want to play
soldier anymore, but a village full of children is going to die."
"They're not my children."
The light in the room goes grey.
He draws a slow breath, searches for each word deliberately in this
unfamiliar reality. "The Sam Carter I know would never say that."
There is no give in her reply. "Well...maybe you never knew me at all."
Cameron slides off the counter onto his feet, ready to intercede, but
Sam's a step ahead of him. "Hey, let's say we all take a step back for
a minute here...."
She snatches a notebook off a nearby table, turns toward the door
without a backward glance, and says, "Get out, Daniel. Don't come here
again."
"Sam. Sam, hang-on--" Cameron has moved to follow her, but she's
vanishing before he can reach the door. "Sam!" He calls into the
length of the hallway.
"Let her go," Daniel says, tone as void of emotion in his own right as
she has been in hers.
*****
Cameron falls back on his heels, pulls his hand from the cold door
frame. He can feel Jackson behind him. There has always been something
indefinable in Jackson's presence. He is more...tangible in a room than
anyone else Cameron knows. An unearthly calm, an omnipresence,
accompanies Daniel in his path. A Texas boy like Cam would never admit
such things out loud, but he suspects Daniel Jackson brought something
of the spiritual back from his time on another plane. He's not quite an
ordinary man, anymore. In days past, when such things were fair game
for talk, he and Sam whispered about these theories, shoulder to
shoulder, flat on their backs on the roof of her house, lovers beneath
the stars. He saw the reverence and adoration in her eyes when she
spoke of Daniel. She loved this man. Respected him. He never expected
to watch the last threads of communication dissolve between friends who
clung together longer than he has sustained any relationship in his
life.
"She's been through a lot," Cameron says into the silence, and he hates
that this sounds like an apology for the woman he loves.
Daniel is far from pliable. "We've all been through a lot, Cameron.
The planet was nearly wiped out."
"Obviously, I know that," he says, turning to face Daniel. Daniel is
deep in thought, brow furrowed behind his glasses, arms folded across
his chest. He might have been a philosophy professor transposed from
the days before. "All I'm saying, Jackson, is...you just might want
to...cut her some slack."
"'Cut her some slack,'" Daniel mimes without sarcasm, and Cameron thinks
again of the unearthly calm. "Sam made her choices. She left us
behind."
"Then why are you here? Are you just here because you need a
tech droid?"
"Of course not." Then, "You heard that?"
"Walls are thin in this place. You haven't answered my question."
He pauses. "I suppose I'm here...because she used to be someone I cared
about. Someone I believed in."
"Used to be."
"I'm not the one who left, Cam. You are."
Daniel does not stay. He begins his return journey mere hours after he
came.
*****
The afternoon is long and dry.
When darkness descends, there is still a fragment of their former
reality in the stars and shadows. Twilight blurs the sharp edges, wipes
the scars and fills in the gaps. Cam likes to lie beneath the stars and
look out over the flickers of light marking the remainders of
civilization, to feel the grass beneath his back and the wind against
his skin. He is grateful there is nothing nuclear in this apocalypse.
The air is not poisoned. He has not been denied his home.
He walks for near half an hour in the shadows unbroken by streetlamps,
knowing on instinct where he will find her. All her usual haunts have
failed him. He has known his end destination from the moment he set
out.
He turns off the beaten path, follows a dirt and grass trail that
awakens memories of his grandfather's farm; through thicker layers of
trees and he listens to the scamper of night creatures in the
underbrush. Again he is grateful no poison has taken the wildlife. A
gentle swell of moonlight signals the start of the clearing.
This is where they are buried. Those who fell in the thick of the
chaos. When the superstructures of society buckled at the knees, and
the heroes threw themselves to the wolves.
The moonlight outlines a wide expanse of mostly level ground, patterned
with stones and symbols. Not far along the first row of stones he can
make out the smooth curve of a figure on the grass. He works his way
toward the shadow in silence, boots sinking comfortingly into organic
ground.
She doesn't startle when he nears. She knows his approach as he would
know hers. And at this moment...she probably doesn't care if she lives
or dies. But he cares. He always has.
He kneels in the damp grass beside her.
"Come here, Baby," he breathes, mouth against the back of her shoulder.
She is collapsed on the chill ground, strength and bone and fight gone
from her limbs, skin white in the ambient moonlight, face buried in the
crook of her elbow. She's shaking with silent sobs.
He doesn't have to see the markers in the dark. He knows where Jack and
Cassie are buried.
"Come on." He eases an arm beneath her and lifts her across her lap.
She falls compliant and lets him gather her, turns in his arms. "I
can't..." she breathes, voice thready and cracked. "I can't lose anyone
else. I can't..." Her nails dig into his arm and she pulls him tight
against her. He knows he is a lifeline.
No one else will ever see her like this.
"I know, Baby. It's okay. We'll stay here. We'll stay here. I'm
right here with you."
She pulls up in his lap and tightens her arms around his neck, buries
her face in his shoulder and he feels the flush of her cheek and the
heat of her tears mixing with the sweat on his skin.
He doesn't try to persuade her to walk. He is her shelter tonight. He
struggles to his feet, feeling the gravity of his years, and walks
without words, retracing his footsteps along the forest path with a
heavier gait. She doesn't lift her face from his shoulder. "I can't
lose anyone else, Cam" she whispers on broken breath, quieter than the
wind in the trees.
He kisses her hair, trudging through the dark beneath the weight of the
world. "I know, Sam. I know"
The world collapsed in a moment. They couldn't fix it. This knowledge,
this failure, broke her. He survived.
But if he can't fix her, he'll have no reason left to breathe.
****
rowandarkstar@gmail.com