Posted March 2004
DISCLAIMER: Yeah, the SG-1 guys are all property of MGM, World
Gekko Corp and Double Secret productions. This is all in fun, no
infringement on copyrights or trademarks was intended. All other
characters, ideas, etc., herein are copyrighted to the author.
TITLE: Ice For Melting
AUTHOR: Rowan Darkstar
EMAIL: rowan_d1@yahoo.com
RATING: (PG)
ARCHIVE: SJD yes. All others fine, just let me know, please.
CATEGORIES: Sam/Jack UST, Sam/Daniel Friendship
SPOILERS: Through "Lost City pt. 2"
STATUS: Complete
SUMMARY: Post-ep to "Lost City" Part 2.


ICE FOR MELTING
by
Rowan Darkstar rowan_d1@yahoo.com

Copyright (c) 2004



She hardly remembered the past six hours. Equipment and uniforms
moving around her. A makeshift base rising before her eyes. An
outpost for the new generation forming almost of its own power on
the pillars of an outpost of the Ancients. The world had turned
upside down; all in a day's work. But this was more foreign for
the team than they realized, at least for the human members. For
all of their experience offworld, for all of their constant
knowledge of the possibility of an earth invasion, at heart they
had continued to take their safe haven for granted. They had
walked out of Cheyenne Mountain and gone back to their neglected
little homes and not watched the skies for Goa'uld ships. Not
listened for the sounds of Zat fire. Now the battleground of
work and the safe ground of home were all blurred into one.

Military uniforms moved around her. Orders echoed off ancient
ice. Sensors hummed. Cameras flashed. Daniel scrawled in a
primitive notebook. Teal'c took quiet command of the guard.
Jack's eyes watched her. Always watched her. Haunted her.

They had to drag her out of the cave. She remembered quietly
refusing the first fifteen times it was suggested she go, and
continuing to pace the maze of the outpost, soaking up every nook
and cranny, every detail. Her mind was running at hyperspeed.
She didn't clearly remember shouting at the last request. She
didn't want to remember socking a well-intended airman in the jaw
when he took ahold of her arm.

She remembered Daniel getting in her face with gentle insistence
and a deep understanding she didn't want to see.

She had returned to the ship with Jack's eyes on her back. She
had returned to her resources at Cheyenne Mountain with his eyes
in the black behind her lids.

Daniel had been silent beside her. Teal'c had stayed behind.

Her boots hit the surface of home base with a reassuring firmness
and a foreign heaviness. She kept walking. Her mind was racing
like she would never rest again. Everything they had learned,
everywhere they had been--there had to be a way to piece it all
together. The answer had to be right in front of them. Jack had
given them so little, really, before they had been able to find
the weapons they needed to hold off the Goa'uld invasion. So
much of the knowledge had come from their own store. They were
so close. She could do this. She had to do this. If Daniel
couldn't find the needed information to help O'Neill in the
Ancients' outpost writings, she would find Atlantis herself. And
that would be the answer. It had to be.

She stripped off her mission gear. She washed the smell of old
metals from her skin. She pulled on the rumpled clothes from her
locker. She shrugged into her lab coat. She lost herself in
knowledge.

She was deeply focused, oblivious to the expanse of the lab,
comfortable in the dim light, tracing coordinates on a map of
Antarctica and comparing them to stars, when Daniel's voice
carried to her from the doorway. "Sam?"

"Yes, Daniel?" She turned to look at him, pencil in her hand,
and an underlying rush in her voice she hadn't meant to throw at
him.

His image hit her like a truck. Her comfortable oblivion
quavered. Her blinders slipped. She felt sick.

Tousled hair and tired eyes and glasses slightly askew. A hand
in a wrinkled pocket and a shoulder against a door casing.
Standing in her doorway was a man who had already lost too much
in his life, doggedly taking in his stride the possible loss of
another dear friend and still standing by the others as he
struggled. And it was all too real. Sam put down her pencil and
tried to breathe, found she was shaking. "Did you find
something?" she asked.

Daniel shook his head. "No, no, not yet... I just... Sam, I
know you don't want to waste a moment away from your work, and I
certainly don't want to hold you back, but...could I just ask you
to take a look at something for me for a minute? You see, Jack
scribbled something on a napkin yesterday that I couldn't make
sense of at the time, but I kept it in my pocket. And now that
I've seen the writings at the outpost, I'm beginning to think I
might make some sense of it after all. I don't know if it has
anything to do with what I'm thinking it might, but if it does,
it would really help to have a scientific eye looking over the
sequencing with me for just a few minutes. I think it has
something to do with planetary shifts or...timing of the shifts
in conjunction with--well, I don't want to influence your
opinion."

"I doubt that would matter, Daniel. I can offer my knowledge,
but the interpretation is all your department."

Daniel nodded, but his brow furrowed, maybe with something more
than the problem at hand. "Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. And if
you're...involved. I mean, if you'd rather wait..."

"No. No, I mean if you think...if you think it might mean
something. I'll, umm..."

--*Jack's eyes on her back. "Don't you dare leave us now..."*--

"I'll be--"

--*Fingers on ice. "...before Daniel and Teal’c showed up, what
I was going to say..."*--

"I'll, uh...just give me a few minutes. And...I'll meet you in
your office. Okay?"

Daniel saw it, knew something was off. For someone who could
appear so lost on the surface, Daniel Jackson was unnervingly
quick when it came to fundamental human emotion. Even Jack had
recognized that. "Well--I mean, yeah. Yeah, sure, okay.
Just...I'll--I mean you'll be there when you're there. And
*I'll*...well, I'll be there...too. Okay."

Sam nodded. Swallowed hard. Didn't speak.

"Okay," Daniel repeated. Looking unfinished and displaced. He
squinted at her through his crooked glasses for a moment, then
turned and vanished down the hall.

Sam pulled off her lab coat and tossed it onto a chair. She
combed her fingers through her hair and forced herself to
breathe. Too much. Just too much.

She walked out of the lab and down the hall.


*****


"Sam?"

Daniel Jackson tapped tentatively on the open door of the science
lab. "Anyone here?" Silence echoed back.

He glanced over his shoulder down the hallway, absurdly wondering
if he had passed Carter on his return path and not noticed her.
"Sam? I just was wondering if it would help if I brought the
writings here to you, I think I can bring enough of it to..."

But the words were futile. She wasn't here. Which truly should
have meant nothing. But it felt wrong. She was probably
retrieving some reference material, refilling her water bottle,
or taking a bathroom break. But when he'd left, he'd had the
sense he should have said something else. And now it was fifteen
minutes later, and she wasn't at his office and she wasn't in her
lab.

He waited five minutes in the hallway, feeling time ticking at a
snail's pace and tamped down on flashes of a friend suspended in
ice.

No orders from Jack. No one directing Dr. Daniel Jackson from
scholarship into action when his contributions were needed most.

Daniel offered cursory smiles to familiar faces passing in the
hallway and tried to look busy. He felt the emptiness of the lab
behind him. He went to look for Carter.


*****


*"I couldn't sleep at all last night."*

*"You should have called."*

*I would never call. But I've known I could for so long... And
I didn't know that meant everything.*

"Sam?"

She squeezed her eyes closed. *Oh, Jesus. No. Not while I'm
crying, I just need this minute, I just need this minute and then
I can go back to work...*

"Sam?" Daniel's earnest voice. Soft and kind and much too
gentle for the hard walls of the Air Force locker room and the
hard walls she was struggling to erect. "Sam, are you okay?"

She was sitting on the bench, back to the door, elbows propped on
her knees and forehead in her hands.

She didn't speak.

She felt his approach, the brush against her leg as he sat down
close beside her. His hand settled its careful weight against
her back.

*Go. Just go. I'm fine. I'll be there in minute.*

"I'm all right," she said. Her breath caught.

"No... I mean...you shouldn't be."

She tightened her fingers in her hair as her throat clogged with
tears. *No, no, no, not now...* Her stomach cramped.

"Sam..."

*Stop, Daniel, I can't...*

"We left him," she whispered. Her shoulders pulled up against
her ears, fighting a quiet sob. But the inward gasp of air was
loud and painful and Daniel's arms moved around her, awkwardly
enclosing her from behind.

"No. Sam, we didn't leave him. None of us left him. Teal'c is
watching him. Teal'c would die before he let anyone or anything
touch Jack. And we are here now for no other purpose than to
*help* him. This is where he needs us. You know that."

"We left him freezing there, and we don't even know if he can see
or hear what's going on, if he's in there and he's suffering and
we can't see it, and he's...He's been slipping away an hour at a
time for days and I can't...*I can't watch him die.*" Her words
carried on a waterfall of broken sobs, wrenching the ache in her
stomach. She couldn't remember this kind of fear. Hard wood
beneath her and cold tile under her feet and the dull echo off
institutional walls she called a second home. But it was all so
cold and hollow and she was starting to really understand why.

*"You should have called."*

There was nothing more to say. The tears were stronger than she
was. And, as usual, this was something Daniel could understand.
The time when he shined. He didn't prompt her, didn't ask her to
speak. He shifted beside her, pressed his body more firmly
against her back. She felt his head come to rest between her
shoulder blades. "We are going to help him." His voice was
thick and strong beside her ear. There were tears there
somewhere that didn't belong to her. "Do you understand that?
We are going to help him. No one is going to die. No one is
going to die."

Sam nodded, tile floor and the outline of her own black pumps
swimming through a sea of tears, Daniel's breath on the back of
her neck. Jack's eyes like a laser in her mind. "I know," she
whispered. "I know that. I know that."

*I know.*

Nothing more to say. Silent breaths. She stood. And Daniel
stood with her. "The writings are in your office?" she said,
never quite making eye contact, voice hoarse but commanding. *I
gave Jack an order. Because he couldn't give them anymore...*
Her knees nearly let go.

"Yeah." Daniel pulled off his glasses. He swiped inefficiently
at his eyes. "Yeah, they're in my office. I'll only keep you a
minute, it's not complicated, it's just...if you could--"

"Let's go." She was moving again; catching her breath, letting
the cool hallway air take the flush from her cheeks. And
Daniel's steps were close behind, uneven and hurried. Major
Carter. She had to stay Major Carter.

Because one of these days she had to call. She had to take the
offer and call him in the middle of the night... And damned if
she was going to let Jack or the Goa'uld or anyone else in the
universe take that away from her.

They had work to do. She had to bring a team member home. She
had to bring Jack...home.


*****
rowan_d1@yahoo.com


H O M E
Copyright (c) 2004 Rowan Darkstar