Sam Carter collapsed onto a wooden bench in the locker room, exhausted, both emotionally and physically. Leaning forward, she placed her elbows on her knees, burying her face in her hands.
"Oh, God," she moaned, dry eyed. "I don't know that I can do this anymore." Closing her eyes, all she saw were the last seconds of her attacker's life. *Yes. Attacker. He was going to kill you. There was no choice,* she told herself.
It wasn't like she hadn't been in the situation before, she tried to rationalize. She'd prided herself on the fact she didn't kill willingly. That it was a last resort when all else failed. But today, it seemed different. She saw his eyes and for a moment felt the full impact of her actions. First there was shock, then pain, quickly followed by regret. He whispered a name, then he was gone.
Sam looked down at her blood-stained BDUs and was sickened by the sight. Tearing at the buttons, she was frantic to remove her clothing, to separate herself from the horror of shooting someone point-blank and having him literally die on her. Jack had pulled his body off her, and noting the red smeared across her fatigues, began checking her for wounds.
She assured him she was okay, but was she? True, she had no injuries, but she'd never felt so shaken up after a mission. Stepping into the shower, Sam stood under the harsh spray for ages. She knew she was holding up the guys, but for once, didn't care. She couldn't face anyone right now.
Finally, she turned off the water, blinking as she stared at the bank of lockers just outside the shower area. Olive green, military lockers. Lined up like good little soldiers. The soldier she tried to be. Everywhere she looked were signs of the military. Everything austere, utilitarian and non-descript. Just like she was supposed to be. Do the job and don't think about the consequences. Don't over-analyze your actions. But how could she not, when her other half was a scientist? Her two professions had never seemed so far apart as they did at that moment.
Opening the door of her locker, Sam was relieved to find civilian clothes. She couldn't remember if she'd arrived in her uniform that morning or not, but seeing her jeans and a sweatshirt, she felt a part of herself relax. She needed to feel normal. Like an average woman who'd just finished a tough day at work and was in need of a bit of self-indulgent behavior. But every time she thought she'd pushed the images of the dead man from her mind, suddenly they'd be there again, haunting her.
Sam was leaning down to tie her shoes, mentally ticking off her grocery list, videos she wanted to rent, anything to keep her mind occupied. She'd just sat up when Jack poked his head into the locker room.
"Hey, you die in here or something?"
Sam felt the blood drain from her face. Swallowing, she quietly answered. "Sorry, sir. I'm just about done. You guys can come in." She ran a hand through her damp hair, opting to leave it so she could just get away from the base. She needed to be home, surrounded by things that wouldn't reminded her she was a cold-blooded killer.
"Sam?" Daniel asked, concern clear in his eyes. "You okay? You look like death warmed over."
Sam flinched at the description. Why today of all days did they have to choose phrases that centered around death? She'd seen Daniel kill one of the natives as well. Didn't he feel any remorse? He was usually the one struggling with the fallout of his actions. Not that any of them seemed jubilant, but the dead comments were hitting too close to home.
"Daniel's right, Carter. You do look like hell. Doc say everything was okay?" There was genuine concern in the colonel's voice and for a moment she allowed herself to enjoy the warmth it sparked.
"Not a scratch," she said, smiling ruefully. "Kind of ironic, isn't it? Me not even roughed up and that guy. . . ."
"Carter, you did what you had to do." Jack's voice was hard, carrying the same tone as when he gave a command. Did he think he could just order her to get over it?
She dipped her head, issuing a quiet, "yes, sir," as she started gathering her things. Gingerly, she picked up her discarded uniform, tossing it in the laundry with a grimace.
"You going home?" Daniel asked.
Sam looked down at her casual attire. Normally, she would have made some comment about what was his first clue, but she wasn't in the mood to joke with him, or any of them for that matter. She needed to be alone. "See you guys tomorrow at the debriefing."
Sam could feel their eyes on her as she left, but kept walking. She knew them so well. Jack and Daniel would exchange worried glances, and Teal'c would raise an eyebrow at her uncharacteristic behavior. She was half-way down the hall when she heard the sound of booted feet, running.
"Carter! Hold up!"
*The colonel* she thought, shoulders slumping as she prepared to give him a false smile and assure him once again everything was fine, and he should go home and that wrestle with his own demons.
"Sir, . . . ."
"What?" he asked, looking confused at her tone.
"Well, you came out here to ask me again if I was doing all right, or if I needed anything or. . ."
"No I didn't."
"You didn't?" Now she felt even worse. *Add embarrassment to self-loathing,* she thought as her face regained some color.
"No, I ah, was wondering if you had any extra shampoo. Seems like we all ran out at the same time," he smiled sheepishly.
The corners of Sam's mouth actually began to twitch into a grin. She didn't think it was possible, but the nervousness with which he looked down at his feet charmed her for some inexplicable reason. "Sure," she said, turning to return to the locker room.
Jack's shirt was open and Sam made a conscious effort to look away from the sight of his chest. Daniel was even more revealed, sitting on the bench with only a towel wrapped around his waist, but she didn't feel the same fluttering in her stomach as she had just catching a glimpse of Jack.
With her back to them, concentrating on the combination of her locker, Sam heard the colonel's voice behind her.
"You're a lifesaver, you know that, Carter?"
Sam tried to swallow the sudden lump in her throat. "First time today, sir."
"Oh, I don't know about that. You got that guy who was about to shoot Teal'c."
She'd forgotten about him. How could she forget about him? Just because she hadn't seen his eyes? Hadn't heard the plea in his voice as he called out a name? Was that the secret? See just a body and not a person?
"Carter?" Jack asked, nudging her shoulder.
"Yeah?"
"The shampoo?"
Sam looked down at the bottle she was choking with her hands. She released her grip and handed it too him. "It's not too girlie," she said.
"Hell, I'd take something that smelled like a field of flowers right now if it would clean my hair. Maybe you should analyze that mud. I think we've come up with a new alternative to concrete."
Jack's quip failed to produce even the slightest of grins, causing a frown to embed itself between his brows.
"I should get going," she said, not meeting his gaze. "Let you guys get cleaned up."
"See ya, Sam," Daniel called, but she walked away without responding to him.
***
Sam was halfway out of the mountain when she realized she'd forgotten a file in her lab that needed going over before the briefing. "Damn it!" she swore, slamming her hand against the side of the elevator. Was there *nothing* about this day that could go right?
Once she'd retrieved the file, she stood before the elevator, angrily stabbing at the call button. The numbers were crawling by, and she realized she needed to get herself under control. Just because she'd been delayed, it wasn't the end of the world.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, but instead of the fury leaving her body, all she saw were images of the man dying on top of her, choking out the name Miral with his last breath.
The doors to the elevator slid open, and as she looked up, she noticed the car was occupied.
"Carter! I thought you left."
"Well, I was trying to, but then I remembered I forgot my homework," she said, waving the file before him.
"Ah."
Both she and Jack stared at the floor as the tension between them rose, the closer they got to the surface. Upon reaching level 16, Jack leaned over, hitting the stop button. Sam looked up, silently questioning his action when he turned to her.
"Okay, Carter. Out with it. Something's bugging you and don't tell me it's nothing. I got nowhere I gotta be so we'll sit here just as long as it takes."
Sam knew better than to test him, but she had a stubborn streak just as wide as his, and so, remained silent.
"Come on, Sam. I know something happened out there," Jack said. Sam's head jerked up at the use of her name, just as he'd probably intended, she thought.
"Was it that guy I pulled off you? He do anything before you shot him?"
Suddenly, she exploded. "No he didn't do anything to me! But I sure as hell did something to him, didn't I?" Jack was taken aback, unsure how to respond to her outburst. "Look can we just drop this? I really don't want to talk about it." Her eyes looked to the floor again, effectively closing herself off from him.
"You know, I was trying to talk Daniel into going for a drink, but he's too wound up about finding out why those guys were so hostile to us." He waited a moment then asked, "Why don't you join me?"
Again Sam's head snapped up in surprise. They didn't socialize. Not just the two of them, anyway. And certainly not someplace as questionable as a bar. "Thanks for the offer, sir, but I think. . ."
"I knew you'd say that," he said with a sigh, cutting her off before she could even finish refusing. He caught her gaze again and said, "You know, maybe *I* need to talk about it once, ya know? You guys all seem to think that I take missions like this in stride. Like it's 'oh, well. Better luck next time.'"
Sam was shocked. *He* wanted to open up and talk about the mission? Since when? "Sir, forgive me, but any time we've tried to get you to talk about rough assignments, you completely shut down. I find it a little hard to believe you want to talk about what happened on P4R-269. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary happened there."
"Well, how come you're so upset?"
Damn! He had her! She should have seen his amateur psychology coming at her, but she was too surprised by his statements. "It's just some days are worse than others," she shrugged, hoping he'd accept her lame answer.
"Then it sounds like you could use a drink. Come on, Carter! One drink. What could it hurt?"
She had to admit, something that would fog her brain slightly sounded pretty good, and she couldn't ask for better company. The only trouble was, she knew they really shouldn't be seen in public, alone.
"I think you know why it would be a bad idea," she said, looking away.
"Is that the only thing holding you back? I've got just the place. It's so far off the beaten track even the locals don't know about it."
Sam was skeptical, but the offer was beginning to sound tempting. Maybe he could offer her some platitudes that might actually help. And truth be told, she'd rather spend some time with him than going home to her cold, empty house.
"Okay," she agreed. "But it's just for one."
*********
It took them about a half an hour to reach the bar, and it was definitely out of the way. Sam never would have suspected there was anything at the end of the gravel road, much less a drinking establishment. How on Earth did they stay in business?
"How did you ever find this place?" Sam asked.
"Oh, I had a lot of hideouts a few years ago," Jack replied. She didn't need to ask what he was hiding from. They'd never really discussed Charlie, but his son's death was unspoken common knowledge amongst SG-1. There were a surprising number of vehicles parked on the grass that served as the parking lot. *Guess there's a lot of people hiding out,* she thought.
The bar was dark, slightly smokey, and the patrons seemed to be keeping to themselves. There was no pool table, just an ancient jukebox that was warbling out some equally ancient country song.
"I thought you didn't like clichés," Sam said as Jack led her to a booth. He tried to stifle a grin, but didn't quite succeed.
"Sometimes you need a cliché." Jack walked up to the bar, returning with two bottles of beer. "Sorry, there's not a lot of choice."
"This is fine," she assured him. He sat down a cross from her, taking a long drink from his bottle as Sam played with the label on hers. She'd managed a sip, but for some reason it tasted unusually bitter. She felt Jack's eyes on her, making her fidget even more under his scrutiny.
"Come on, Carter. Spill it. It can't be that bad."
"How do you do it?" she asked suddenly. "How do you keep going out there and not let affect you?"
"I don't recall saying it never affected me," Jack said, placing his bottle back on the table.
"But you've got such a handle on it. I thought I did, but that guy today. . . ."
"What about him? What made him different than the rest?" he asked gently. His eyes were intense, boring into hers, willing her to open up. She couldn't face the sympathy she saw there, and looked back to the shredded label on the table.
"It wasn't him, necessarily," she said, her voice only slightly above a whisper. "He was just the last straw." Sam waited a moment, but Jack offered no comment. "Don't you wonder about them, sir?"
"In what respect?"
"What their lives are like? What impact our coming to their world has had on them? What they do when we leave? How they pick up the pieces?"
"Well, I suppose they try to go about their lives," he answered with a shrug.
"And what if those lives are shattered? What if they had families, were important in society? Religious leaders? What if their loss has a chain reaction throughout the entire community?"
Jack shifted uncomfortably. "I doubt a few guys would have that much impact," he mumbled. "Besides, military leaders don't put the big guys on the front line."
"So that makes it okay? Those people we killed were expendable so their deaths don't really matter?"
"Now I didn't say that! All I'm saying is I don't think their passing is going to upset the social structure to the degree you're thinking."
"But what about on a personal level? The last thing I heard that guy say was a name. Miral. Was she his wife? Lover? What? And what if he had a family, kids, their equivalent of a dog? What about them? Because I killed that guy, now they all have to suffer?"
"Well, if he left a dog behind. . . ."
"Sir! I can't believe you just said that!" Sam couldn't fathom how he could be so insensitive. This had been a mistake. Jack was too hardened from his years in Special Ops. He'd gotten used to killing. Not that he enjoyed it like some of the guys she knew, but he still had managed to form an impenetrable shell around his heart, allowing him to turn off his emotions and do his job. Strangely enough, she actually admired that trait. It made him a good soldier. So what did that make her?
She'd always considered herself an example of what an Air Force officer should be, but was she? Maybe she *was* too much of a scientist, and the colonel had been right to argue against her initial inclusion on SG-1.
"Carter? Sam?" Jack asked, reaching out and touching her hand, breaking her from her reverie. "Look, I'm sorry. I was just trying to lighten things up a bit." He ran a hand through his hair, then added, "You know, they're the ones who attacked *us.* We were just defending ourselves."
"After we appeared and they deemed us a threat," she countered.
"Is that our fault? Daniel was spouting off his little 'we come in peace' speech and they opened fire on us! We didn't do anything wrong!"
"Didn't we? How do we know just stepping through their Stargate isn't punishable by death on their world? We don't know what their customs are, their beliefs."
"That's the risk we take," Jack said, finishing off his beer.
"Then maybe we shouldn't," she said, looking away once more.
"I don't follow."
"Maybe when we know there's a population we should be a little more careful about how we approach that planet. Maybe this could have been avoided."
"Carter, I don't know that we *could* have done anything different. Until we were stepping from the 'gate, we had no idea how they were going to react. It's why we have to be prepared to defend ourselves when we head out there."
Sam rubbed her fingers across her forehead. "I know, sir. I'm not arguing that. I guess I just can't get the thought out of my mind if it had been one of you guys. What if one of you was struggling with a native and was killed? I know how devastated I'd feel," she said, unable to look him in the eye because it was Jack she was talking about. She'd masked it with a generic statement about all of them, but in her heart she was thinking of him. "It just hit home how much I'd miss. . .any one of you. And it got me thinking about Miral. The pain she was going to feel when that man didn't return. And I was the cause of it."
Sam was playing with her bottle again, taking another small sip hoping to ease the tightness in her throat.
Jack reached over, covering her hand with his. Sam was startled by the contact. He'd touched her occasionally, but never deliberately like this. The contact felt good, even if it was an illicit pleasure. As if realizing they were crossing some kind of line, they both pulled back simultaneously, and Sam felt the loss of the warmth his hand. Both inside and out.
"You're not thinking of bailing out, are you?" The worry in his voice evident.
Looking up at him, then glancing away, she answered. "I'm not sure. I don't know what the answer is." Sam buried her face in her hands, as if the action could block out all the hurt she felt at that moment.
"I do know one thing, Carter. You can't quit. You get back in that saddle again and keep riding."
"More clichés, sir?" she managed to smile as her hands fell back to her lap.
"What can I say? This place kinda rubs off on you, ya know?" His grin was beginning to ease the ache around her heart by inciting a different emotion. She wondered if he had any idea the impact that smile had on her.
"Maybe a break wouldn't be such a bad thing," she said, looking up to judge his reaction.
"I think it's the worst thing you could do," he replied honestly. "Not only is it going to make going back out into the field that much harder, we need you. I need you."
Sam's eyes widened at his confession, heart racing. "You do?"
"As my 2IC," he clarified, and she felt her heart slow once more. *Of course he would only mean it in the professional sense,* she thought dejectedly. Jack had never done or said anything untoward since she'd known him. Granted he'd flirt outrageously with her, but he'd never crossed the line. Meeting his gaze again she could have sworn something was different about the way he was looking at her. As if he was willing her to read he *did* need her as more than just his second.
"What would we have done without you there today? Teal'c would have been dead for sure. Who knows about Daniel and me. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to kill a person, but sometimes it has to be done." He held up his hand forestalling her argument. "Let me ask you something. If you were back there again, and had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?"
"Sir?"
"Say that guy is coming at you again. What would you do? Stand there and let him kill *you* instead?"
"Well, no, I'd try to defend myself."
"Of course you would. And I'm sure you wouldn't shoot to kill. You'd be trying to disable him, am I right?"
"Yes," she sighed, wondering where he was going with this.
"But you didn't get a chance, did you? That guy was on top of you, and it was shoot or be killed."
Sam nodded as the image played through her mind once more. She'd been aiming for his legs, but he was running too fast and had been on her before she could fire. He had his hands around her throat, choking her, as she'd pulled the trigger. A lone tear leaked from her eye as she tried again to block the memory.
"How did you know, sir?"
"I saw the whole thing. In fact, I was running to help you. I swear I was this close to shooting the guy myself when I heard your gun go off. Now that I see what this is doing to you, I wish I had been the one to shoot him. At least I could have saved you some grief."
Sam was touched by his willingness to take the blame, but it wouldn't have mattered whose bullet had ended the man's life. She'd still seen his eyes, experienced his death, and the memory of the shock in his eyes would haunt her for many nights to come.
"Thank you, sir. I appreciate you wanting to spare my guilt in this, but the fact remains he's dead, and it's my fault."
Jack leaned back in the booth. "You're bound and determined to take the fall for this, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir, I am."
"Well, I can't tell you what to feel or how to deal with this, but you *do* have to deal with it, Sam. I'm not the one who can grant you absolution. You're the only one who can do that." Again the use of her name drove home how serious he was. "Because until you realize what you did out there today was necessary, you're a liability; not only to yourself, but to the team as well."
God, she was confused! She knew she needed to put it behind her, pull herself together, but she just didn't know how. "Sir? What do you do? I mean how do you deal with all the death you've seen?"
Jack blew out a breath, fiddling with his empty beer bottle. "I don't know. Guess I never really thought about it."
"There must be something," she pressed.
"Well, when I used to be married, I'd think about Sara and Charlie, knowing in the long run what I was doing was for them. And I had to keep alive so I could keep on doing it."
"But things have changed," Sam said, not wanting to needlessly point out he no longer had his family as an incentive.
"Yeah, my priorities are different now, but I still have people I care about, worry about," he said, gazing into her eyes. "And I have to do anything I can to keep them, and myself safe. I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. But it's one way to rationalize my actions."
Sam leaned back, nodding as she thought about his advice. Talking to him hadn't magically made the pain and guilt disappear, but it had helped. It had never been easy for her to kill and she prayed it never would be.
"Take each day as it comes, Carter," he said. "Little bites are easier to swallow." She knew that was true. If she looked at her life as a whole, she knew she'd be overwhelmed. Maybe that was the secret. She'd made it though this day, she'd make it through the next.
"Thank you, sir. I didn't think I wanted to talk about this, but I guess, deep down I needed to."
"No sweat. Hey, you gonna finish that?" he asked, indicating her nearly full bottle of beer. Sam pushed it over to him and he took a hefty drink. "Ugh. It's warm. I can't stand warm beer."
"Really? I thought you'd take it anyway it came."
"There are a lot of things in life I can gloss over, but warm beer isn't one of them." He set the bottle back on the table, wiping his mouth. "You ready to face the world?"
Smiling genuinely for the first time that day, Sam realized she felt better. "Yeah. I think I am."
The End
Story Notes: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/7277/sgindex.html
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