The funny thing was, if there was anything funny about the whole situation, was that she didn’t remember anything about it. She didn’t remember anything after they stepped through the gate and were ambushed by a band of natives on a seemingly uninhabited planet until she woke up in an Air Force hospital, strictly guarded, over two years later. When she had come around, she had recognised none of the faces of anyone crowded around her bed.
*
“We’re supposed to call Doctor Fraiser and Cheyenne Mountain Base as soon as she woke up.”
“Yes, but she’s meant to be on leave.”
“The General... what’s his name... Hammond... will be pleased.”
She realised that she had a tube down her throat, and began to panic. A doctor was at her side immediately.
“Major Carter, on the count of three, cough and we’ll remove the oropharyngeal tube for you,” the doctor told her. Sam nodded, and as the doctor counted to three, she coughed and the tube slid smoothly out.
“What happened?” she choked out. “I can’t remember anything.”
The doctor’s faces were all serious. “Major Carter, I’m afraid that none of us have the authorisation to tell you anything,” one of them informed her. “Doctor Fraiser’s on her way in now. She’ll be able to tell you everything when she arrives.”
Sam nodded, and felt her eyes beginning to close. She tried to fight it, but her desire for sleep was too strong and she quietly slipped into natural sleep.
The next time she woke, she was looking at the familiar face of her best friend and doctor, Janet Fraiser.
“Janet?” Sam croaked, noticing her friend’s eyes welling up with tears.
“Yeah, Sam it’s me,” Janet affirmed, grasping the other woman’s hand tightly. “Welcome back honey.”
“How long was I out?” Sam asked, wondering why Janet’s graze dropped before returning to look her in the eye.
“Over two years,” she stated. “It’s now September 2004.”
Sam’s face paled, and she looked at Janet with shock. “Please tell me you’re kidding,” she begged. “Colonel O’Neill put you up to this, didn’t he?”
Sam noticed the agonising look that crossed Janet’s face. “Sam, it’s true,” she confirmed. “Look.” Taking one of Sam’s hands, she moved it until it rested on her swollen stomach. “I’m pregnant.”
*
The funniest thing about that day, according to Janet, was the expression on Sam’s face when she had discovered that her best friend was expecting. What Sam had found funny that none of the other members of SG-1 had come to see her – not even the colonel. That was, until Janet broke the news.
*
“He’s dead Sam,” she told him quietly, after Sam had asked her why he hadn’t come. The expression of shock that had been on her face when told the date paled in significance to when she was told that.
“No...” she choked. “When... how?”
Janet looked worried. “You don’t remember?” she asked, consulting her notes. “He died on your last mission, to P5X-721. You were there when it happened – SG-4 found you next to his body.”
She said it with such emotional detachment that Sam resisted the urge to scream at her. Jack O’Neill was dead – how could she act like that? Then she realised that Janet had had two years to mourn her friend, and accept his death and put it behind her. Janet had also never been in love with the man, a love which she had been forced to hide.
*
She had cried for most of the night on Janet’s shoulder. Crying for a fallen leader, a fallen friend. Crying for the future that would never come and crying for the words that would never be spoken.
*
And now she was here, in his old house. Daniel and Janet lived there now, along with their nearly two-year-old daughter Abigail. As Janet had explained, what with Jack dead and Sam in a coma, she and Daniel had turned to each other for comfort; with Abigail Jacqueline Samantha being the end result. Daniel had refused to let it turn into a one night stand, and they had married five months before their daughter’s birth; eloping to Vegas after leaving Cassie with Teal’c for a weekend. Daniel had said that he couldn’t bare the thought of Jack’s house being sold off to a complete stranger; instead he had sold his apartment, and Janet her house to move in there. Cassie was now attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and Sam had received quite a shock when a grown-up Cassie had come to visit her in the hospital.
*
“Major Carter, ma’am,” a nervous looking nurse poked her head around the door. “There’s a cadet here wishing to see you.”
Sam just nodded, not caring much as she filled her mind with regrets and ‘what ifs.’ Her last mission was foremost on her mind, although she wished her memory could fill in the pieces left by the official mission reports, and what Daniel had told her.
“Sam?” A hesitant little voice asked, and Sam had turned her head, expecting to see a young teenager. Instead, the girl asking for her was grown-up – every inch the perfect cadet.
“Oh my God, Cassie,” Sam exclaimed, holding out her arms for a hug that Cassie gladly reciprocated. Gone was the confident cadet and in her place was the twelve-year-old that Sam had rescued from Hanka, with tears running down her face, mingling with Sam’s own. However, while Cassie’s were tears of joy, Sam was mourning the young girl whom she had never had a chance to see grow up.
*
She hadn’t realised quite how much had passed in the two years she had been in a coma. The war with the Goa’uld had finally turned in their favour, with more and more of the system lords being wiped out. Teal’c had returned to be with his family, and had just reported back the addition of a daughter to his family weeks before Sam had awoke. She had yet to see her Jaffa friend, as he was heavily involved with local politics on his home world. The whole world was so much the same, yet at the same time so alien. Even the advances made by her former team of scientists at the SGC were so much more advanced than what she had been working on. Sam didn’t even know if she still had a place in this ‘New World.’
Sitting on the bed in the Jackson’s spare room, Sam suddenly felt very much alone. She opened the bottom drawer in the chest of drawers to start putting her new purchases away – even her clothes had been out of date – and stopped. Just the sight of the shiny polished metal caused her to recoil at the intensity of the flashbacks.
They had been on P5X-721, and she and the colonel had been patrolling around the abandoned village they had found. Snippets of conversations flashed before her eyes... a vague recollection of the colonel laughing at some comment she had made, before reaching across to clasp her shoulder. The unmistakable sound of a branch snapping behind them, and the colonel calling out to Daniel or Teal’c. The silence that had followed, before the gates of hell opened and flooded them. There were natives... they had attacked the colonel first, and he had been unable to defend himself. He had called to Sam to get away, but she wouldn’t leave – not without him. The natives were perfectly happy to let her go, as she was just a woman; they just wanted her mate. She had screamed at them, telling them that she would not leave without him. Tears had been running down her face.
Sam placed her fingers to her cheek, finding that once again she was crying. The memories were all too powerful, as clear as if it had been yesterday. To her, it had been.
The colonel... Jack, had not even tried to tell her to leave after his first order, knowing that she wouldn’t. No words had passed between them, and he couldn’t even look at her; instead his eyes were firmly fixed to the ground. One of the natives had told him to look up and face him, yet Jack’s eyes were still downcast. In fury, he kicked Jack’s knees out from beneath him, and grabbed Jack’s handgun from its holster. In the time it took to blink, there was a resounding shot, and Jack fell to the ground, dead. She rushed to him, only to be shot herself. However, the aim was off but she still fell, banging her head on a rock as she collapsed unconscious by the bloody body of Jack O’Neill, her blood draining out of her, and mingling with his. There had been no deathbed confessions, no whispered words of “I love you.” No bittersweet kiss, no lover’s embrace. No last respite. Only the darkness of death enveloping them both.
Until SG-4 found her, and brought her back from the brink of hell to live in another.
Sam stared at the standard service pistol she had found. It was the same that she had killed many people with. It was the same that Charlie had been killed with. It was the same that Jack had been killed with. She didn’t know how long she stared at it, just thinking. How something so little could cause so much pain, so much suffering. How life had gone on, even when she had not been aware of it. How life would always go on, how the sun would always rise in the east, and always fall in the west. How in life there is death... and how in death there is life.
Sam picked up the gun.