Five Days in a Hundred
by Remi Craeg
1.
Samantha Carter is not known for dropping the ball. In fact, if over the years she'd garnered a reputation for anything, it's reliability. The last couple weeks were decidedly un-Carter like and Daniel chooses day twelve to say something. He recognizes the anger and frustration she must feel to have a solution elude her for so long, because he feels it too, but, he tells her, this is quickly heading to a place where she'd be doing more harm than good.
She nods but Daniel knows she isn't listening.
*
2.
On day thirty-seven, Sam goes to his home under the guise of watering his plants. She takes an inventory of his things and the fact that they are all there but he is not. She doesn't cry in the entryway. She doesn't cry in his living room, even after catching a glimpse of an old family photograph. Her eyes are dry when she picks up an empty cereal bowl off the kitchen table and rinses it in a half-full sink.
She makes it two steps into his bedroom when she sees a flannel shirt tossed on the end of his bed, like he'd be back any second to grab it because even he thought his house was too drafty. She can't hold the tears back when she thinks he won't be back to get it.
She never told him how damn ugly those rags were.
*
3.
Sam yells at Daniel somewhere around day seventy, as if he didn't miss his friend as well. As if he wasn't doing everything he could think of to get him home.
Nothing is enough because Jack isn't here, she informs him.
*
4.
Sam stays on base for ninety of the hundred days. The other ten are nights the General is so fed up with her haunting the halls like the SGC's resident ghost, that he forces her off the premises. She doesn't sleep at home either.
*
5.
Their first conversation back at the SGC isn't a conversation at all. Few words are actually spoken, but the air between them is filled with all the things he isn't allowed to say, and one he is.
"Thanks, Carter."
She smiles because she knows he'll go straight home and pull on the shirt she folded with her own personal pattern and he'll wonder why it isn't wrinkled.
Maybe tonight she'll find her dreams again. The ones where she's walking through puddles of not-quite-water with her friends, looking for an answer to a question the world didn't know how to ask yet.