Title: Indian Summer
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Angst
Character(s) or Pairing(s): Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson. Sam/Daniel (implied Sam/Jack and Daniel/Jack subtext, Daniel/Sha're)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Notes: I'm really hoping that this doesn't go into the area of Wangst. I'm really rusting on writing in general except for school, so be warned about that as well. Also, I hope that this is not too broad-strokes of an interpretation of Jack/Sam/Daniel. This is just the first thing that sprung to mind. I'm also very, very new to liking SG-1 (I JUST finished watching 2x01). The title came from a Katy Perry song that actually has next to nothing to do with what I'm writing, but sparked a thought or two. I thought the title made sense. Briefly described sexuality.
Continuity: AU. Missing scene(s), which is AU due to the fact that my little hypothetical notion of what happened following Solitudes [1x17] would have changed a lot of the character relationships, I think, since it would have most definitely needed to come up again. However, since it didn't, I'm asking for your willing suspension of disbelief.
The elation of finding someone important, of being able to tell them that everything was all right, knowing that it would be, were all things that Daniel Jackson longed for every day of his life. Every time they saved someone's life, every time they beat the odds, it allowed him to dare to hope.
Still, every time they saved someone, every glimmer of silver lining had its cloud. Every time they found something, anything, that might free Sha're from the thing that was inside of her, it became just out of reach, just that much more impossible.
And as if that impotence wasn't enough, now he had to wonder if they could manage to beat natural odds.
People, somewhere far away from a mountain in Colorado, lived their lives every day and did not know what truly was up in the night sky, had never even heard of Naquadah, and were at home watching television. Even those people could die from hypothermia, from frostbite, from internal bleeding.
He had promised them—Sam and Jack—that they were going to be all right. As the hours passed, he wasn't so sure.
The rational part of Daniel's brain tried to justify the fact that it wasn't up to him to keep that promise. He was the wrong kind of doctor to have any kind of effectual impact on the fate of his friends—or on the fate of his wife for that matter, his mind kept coming back to. However, he couldn't stop the flood in his mind, the overwhelming sense of responsibility.
None of this would have ever happened if not for him.
None of it.
Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter were lying, unconscious—Jack was in a coma, actually—in a military infirmary. Cold metal, concrete, everything about this place was unfeeling and empty compared to the world outside—so why did it feel so full, so thick with thoughts Daniel couldn't escape?
Daniel got up from the chair where he sat outside the infirmary, keeping vigil since Dr. Frasier had shooed him away hours previously, needing to move his legs rather than kicking something.
Everything was silent except for the low hum that always seemed present inside the mountain. The Stargate itself was completely silent on its own—until it was activated, anyway.
This was certainly not the first silent night Daniel had spent wandering in solitude up and down the halls, lost in thought. However, each and every time this happened, it became more of a strain to force himself to hope.
He knew what a marvel the Stargate was, and he knew that part of him would defend the Gate itself to his last breath, but now he had to wonder why. How many people had it hurt? How many people was he going to lose to it? As many things as it had given, it seemed to take away. First Sha're, and now it seemed that Jack and Sam might not actually make it.
Daniel groaned at himself, turning around and walking back toward the infirmary. It was stupid to become so self-absorbed tonight of all nights.
The first (and faulty) translation of the Stargate had called it a "door to heaven". More than ever Daniel hoped that that wasn't true. He couldn't bear to lose anyone else, especially not part of SG-1, especially not—
"Daniel?" said a voice, interrupting his reverie. In fact, it was Dr. Frasier's voice.
The doctor stood with a single foot holding the door to the infirmary open a crack and she smiled gently—the way she always smiled before she delivered the good news and the bad news.
"What's--" he began to ask, but it came out as a whisper, hardly intelligible. He had been silent for hours.
"Captain Carter is awake," Dr. Frasier interjected quickly, reaching out her hand, gesturing for him to follow her as she turned to open the door again.
"And Jack?"
The pause before Janet answered was enough to make Daniel's stomach turn.
"He's... stable. But the damage was considerable," she explained, shutting the door completely so Sam wouldn't hear the answer to his question.
Daniel knew that he should be much happier about Sam waking up—he really was, but there was something about the fact that Jack was still unconscious, in a coma, that was almost completely unbearable. He felt like he was going to be sick, and he couldn't explain it.
"Daniel," Dr. Frasier tried again, her voice soft, sincere, as she put a hand on his shoulder. "I really do believe he's going to wake up. It just might take some time."
"And time is something we don't have," Daniel replied with a heavy sigh. "We never have time."
"Just... come see him, all right? Sometimes talking to coma patients can even... help them bring themselves out of it. Really. Besides, Sam could use someone she... knows well right now, all right?"
Daniel simply nodded and focused his blue eyes on the door, taking a deep breath before allowing Janet to lead the way.
The infirmary seemed even darker, even more sterile than usual. Monitors beeped in a silence that was only punctuated by the sound of breathing—but at least there was that.
The first Daniel came to was Jack's, and his eyes immediately focused on the man that usually looked so formidable, even intimidating to him. So broken, so quiet. Maybe it was the silence that seemed most unnatural, rather than the healing wounds themselves. He tried to pull his eyes away, to look at Sam, but there was hesitation, as if he needed to do something for Jack.
"Daniel," Sam said, finally drawing his eyes from Jack to her. She took a deep breath and tried her weight against her palms, trying to sit up.
"Easy, easy, Captain," Dr. Frasier said, hurrying over from checking a bag of fluid that was keeping Jack nourished and hydrated.
Daniel took to the other side of the bed, supporting Sam's shoulder with his hand, helping her up.
Dr. Frasier went through the process of checking her lymph nodes, her temperature, her blood pressure, and every other task she typically did in rote. Then she stopped and smiled brightly.
"You look good, Captain."
Then her eyes focused behind Sam, on Daniel. Daniel hardly took any notice at all, but she saw how his eyes went from Sam to Jack almost frantically. He needed to work this out on his own. After all, she knew there was something about the "team" that she didn't quite understand, couldn't be a part of.
"I'll be just in here if you need me, all right?" she said, gesturing toward her office. Then everything was silent again.
"Sam?" Daniel said, almost tripping over his own tongue as he got around to the side of the bed she was facing, sitting in a chair between the two beds, looking at her with deep concern. He wanted to reach out and touch her, almost to confirm that she was really there. How many times had they all almost lost each other?
"How is he?" she asked, looking past Daniel's shoulder at Jack.
"Dr. Frasier says he's going to come out of it. It's just going to take some time," Daniel replied. The look in Sam's eyes hurt—because he knew she was feeling the same kind of desperate hopelessness he was feeling.
"Time," she repeated.
"Yeah... Time. But... But how are you feeling?"
"I'm fine," Sam replied automatically, stubbornly.
Daniel simply raised his eyebrows slightly in response. Her tone was so automatic that it was almost funny.
"Really, Daniel. I'm fine," she repeated. Still, she couldn't keep her eyes from going back and forth from Daniel to the Colonel, until finally she thought of another question.
"How did you find us?" she asked.
"At first, I thought maybe you had... been derailed, sort of, somewhere on the way back, so we tried every world in between. A few teams went out and searched for you, but there wasn't any sign, then we figured out we ruled out a world we shouldn't have..."
"Which one?"
"Earth. We never stopped to think that maybe whoever built the Stargates might have had more than one on a planet. Teal'c said that especially if one became inaccessible or particularly hazardous that another might replace it."
Sam's eyes lit up and she suddenly looked exponentially more alive.
"More than one Stargate on Earth?"
Daniel's own expression mirrored her own, but then he imagined what Jack would say. He almost wished that he could feel the other man's eyes boring into his back as he almost got excited about the other Stargate while he was still unconscious.
"I wouldn't get too excited," he forced himself to say. "You were in Antarctica."
Sam smirked and shook her head.
"An ice planet."
"Not quite."
"Where is Teal'c?" she asked, eventually forcing herself to stop being so upset at not figuring it out.
"Dr. Frasier told him to go get some rest and he was... eventually persuaded."
"What about you? When is the last time you slept?" Sam asked, skeptically. She would never understand why Daniel felt that depriving himself of sleep helped anyone.
"Erm... yesterday?"
"Daniel... What good are you doing by staying up? And why Teal'c and not you?"
"I don't always do as I'm told," he replied, shifting in the chair, trying to change the subject.
Deciding to give way, Sam shifted forward a bit more, leaning to see Jack a bit better.
"It's so strange. I thought we were going to die back there, and now I can't stop thinking..."
"Sam, I promised you you were going to be all right," Daniel said emphatically, getting up the nerve to gently touch Sam's cheek, to pull her to face him, to look him in the eye.
"I know. I've just... I know this doesn't make sense, but I've never been that aware of mortality."
"It does. I don't know why, either, Sam, but I know it does..."
The next hours passed in something of a blur for both of them. Janet told Sam that she wanted her to stay overnight, just in case. She implored Daniel to go home, get some sleep, but he consistently refused.
The next morning, when Sam woke up from a fitful night of trying to sleep on the hospital bed, Daniel was still in the same place he had moved to the night before, on the other side of Jack's bed. His elbows had eventually slumped against the Colonel's bed, and he had somehow managed to have the foresight to remove his glasses before falling asleep, head draped over his own arm in the empty space to the side of Jack's legs.
"Morning," Dr. Frasier whispered to Sam as she saw her eyes open. Sam didn't know if she had ever gone home, though she was sure she must have.
"He was here all night?" Sam asked, looking at Daniel.
Janet smiled a bit and shook her head as she readied her stethoscope.
"I tried to tell him, but he just wouldn't listen."
"Doesn't do as he's told," Sam replied, her eyes still fixing on Jack, causing the lump she felt in her throat to swell.
"Looks to me like you're all set," Janet said after her brief physical.
"Great, thank you," Sam replied, getting to her feet and finding her boots.
Just as she knelt down to put them on, Daniel jerked awake, inhaling sharply as his eyes, bespectacled once more, focused on Sam's empty bed and eventually found her putting on the boots.
"Sam?"
"Dr. Frasier says I'm free to go," Sam replied, reassuring Daniel that she wasn't being stubborn and trying to escape.
"I was asleep?" he asked, as if this were something quite strange to him.
"Yeah. I'm telling you, you can't just stop sleeping, Daniel."
"I can try," he repeated, as he did every time. "You should go home, get some rest."
"I'm not going anywhere until the Colonel wakes up."
"Me neither."
"Actually, both of you are," Janet piped in as she came back over to check on Jack again. "As a doctor, I can't let you just stay here and jeopardize your health all over again, Sam. And Daniel, unless you want to end up in that bed Sam was just in, you've got to eat something, get some actual rest."
"I don't think you understand," Daniel said, trying not to sound childish.
"He's right. We can't just leave him. What if he does wake up?"
"Don't argue. Doctor's orders. Speak to him before you go, but I'm telling you, it's doing none of you any good to be in here right now. You can visit him later."
Daniel and Sam met one another's eyes. Both of them were prepared to present arguments, in spite of the order, but Sam just sighed and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Dr. Frasier knew what she was talking about, and the fatigue that still gripped her was nothing compared to what she could see ringing Daniel's eyes. And if she didn't leave, he never would.
"All right," she said, taking the initiative and going over to Jack's bedside, looking down at him.
"See that she gets home," Janet said, pressing her clipboard briefly against Daniel's chest as she walked past him, back to her computer.
"Right," he replied, almost completely under his breath.
Sam looked around, her eyes resting on Janet's back with a kind of satisfaction. She looked almost thrilled at finding her back turned, like a child about to get away with something it shouldn't. However, Daniel was observing this, wondering whatever cookie jar Sam could be so intent on getting into. After all, this hardly seemed to be the time or the place for some kind of scientific pursuit, which was virtually the only reason Sam ever had that expression.
Sam knew that she should just walk away. Military detachment was one of the most important things about being in the military. This wasn't personality, it was duty. Still, she couldn't just walk away—it wasn't a matter of will, it was a matter of need.
Her hand stretched out toward Jack, but then she felt something. Something different, she wasn't quite sure she had ever felt before.
Daniel's eyes never left her. He watched as her own almost gray eyes scanned the room, looking for anything that might reveal her breach of regulation. Then, as her hand reached toward Jack's face, he understood. He understood far better than he would ever have expected to, and he feared that he had broken the spell—though he wasn't sure why he knew that to be a bad thing—by taking a single step toward the bed, toward Jack, himself.
Their eyes met and Sam's hand froze. Instead of looking at her with accusation, confusion, even curiosity, in that moment, Daniel understood. He tried to manage a smile, though he knew it didn't meet his eyes.
Without a word, Sam broke the contact and looked down at Jack's face, wishing he could do the same.
"I... I'll come back for you," she promised again, brushing the backs of her fingers down the man's worn but somehow peaceful face. Then she felt her composure break, just as sure as any tangible thing, and she fled the room so quickly that Daniel hardly had time to blink.
His eyes paused on Jack for a moment more and he pressed his lips together, feeling his weight shift around in his legs like he needed to run in both directions, toward Jack, away from him—toward Sam, all at once.
Reaching down impulsively, he squeezed Jack's shoulder, hesitating, not being able to manage to do the same thing Sam had done. Sam...
The locker room was empty, metal, cold. Sam sat on the bench, her elbows against her knees as she cried softly. She tried to remember the soldier's core, that thing she knew she had deep down inside. She was a rational creature, she knew she was. But this wasn't rational. All of it, all of it was madness.
"Sam?" Daniel asked, poking his head around the corner to make sure she was decent.
"Daniel," she replied, beckoning more than answering. "Daniel, I... he told me... he was going to make me leave him. He was dying... and I... I was going to do it, because he said he was dying. I didn't want to go, but he said... he said it was his last order, and I couldn't..."
"You couldn't do as you were told."
"But I did!" she replied, wiping her tears away against the long black sleeve of her shirt.
"You didn't leave him, Sam. You couldn't have. I know that because I... couldn't."
"Daniel, I almost gave up. Even when I fell back down there where he was, I was going to give up, let both of us die. If not for you..."
"Ssh," Daniel insisted at that point, coming further into the bank of lockers, sitting down beside Sam on the bench. Tentatively, he put his arm around her shoulders, swallowing before he spoke again.
"Daniel! I can't just let this go... h-him," she choked, forcing herself to not let the tears fall anymore. She was a soldier and a grown-up—she was determined to act like one. She pulled away from Daniel's soothing touch and turned her back to him, grabbing a shirt from her open locker. Without any thought as to her nakedness, trying to think about the fact that she was a soldier, just the same as Jack or any of the other men, she pulled off her black top.
Almost immediately it was replaced with another shirt, almost completely identical but of civilian issue.
But that didn't stop the change that occurred in that moment from reverberating around in Daniel's mind.
Sam turned back to look at him, eyes daring him to say a word, to reprimand her, to challenge her in any way.
In spite of the blush on his face, Daniel found nothing to condemn. But it was more than that. There was something in the action itself that didn't even feel indecent. Something ran through his body, buzzed in his fingertips, but it wasn't desire, no lust of any kind. Instead, it was a full-body, hyper-awareness of what she had just done.
His eyes felt branded, not with images of beauty or images that caused him repulsion. It was a sure thing that Sam was a beautiful woman, nothing at all repulsive about her, but her aesthetic appeal had nothing to do with the fact that suddenly he could see, somewhere on her skin, that this experience had left her just as broken as he was, just as broken as Jack may be, somewhere inside.
Daniel blinked a few times, trying to get the impression to go away. When his vision cleared a bit, he dared look her in the eye again, adjusting his glasses on his face nervously.
"Let me take you home," he almost pleaded.
Sam looked at him, searching for an argument, but it seemed that somehow, though she certainly could get herself home, that this was the only real option now. Something passed between them in the infirmary, and something passed between them now. A thread that connected them to the Colonel, and a thread that connected them to each other. A dangerous thread, one that might choke them, but she had no choice but to follow the spool.
Hardly a word passed between them as they left the mountain in Daniel's car. Daniel, trying to be a gentleman even as he could hardly find justification to break the reverential silence, only spoke to make sure that Sam was comfortable. Pulling into her driveway, he let the car idle and looked across the extraordinarily dim light. Everything about this felt normal, safe.
He knew Sam was safe. They were family now, all of them, and it was the least he could do.
"Are you sure you feel all right? Do you need anything?" he asked, stumbling over words with a smile as she quietly opened the car door.
"I'm fine, Daniel," she said patiently, fumbling for her house key.
"If you're s--"
Sam's fingers closed around the key and she looked him in the eye.
"Goodnight," she insisted, stepping back to clear the door.
"Goodnight," Daniel replied, still not sure that he wanted to believe that his work was done.
Sam actually chuckled a little as she watched how Daniel's eyes never stopped being wide, alert, even as she assured him over and over that everything was all right.
"Unless you want to come in for a minute?"
"Just... to make sure Dr. Frasier was right," he replied, out of the car before she could manage to blink. "I'd hate for something else to be wrong and for me to just walk away, not checking or anything."
Stepping across the threshold, Daniel shifted back and forth on his feet, keeping his hand wrapped around the door as he watched Sam take off her coat and hang it up.
Sam saw his hand on the door, saw his instinctive resistance to closing the door behind him. Briefly, her mind shot back to Hathor—but no, that didn't make any sense. Shaking her head clear of the thought, she looked at him and smiled a little awkwardly.
The sensation of words being right on the tip of the tongue, the need to move tingling in the tips of toes, permeated the air until it was impossible to do either.
Frozen in a kind of timeless twilight, neither Sam nor Daniel knew when he had closed the door, still inside.
Part of them still believed that he had said goodnight, that she had said goodnight. The door had been closed. He walked away, started his car, and drove to his apartment.
There was no thought of who was to blame for the kiss that closed the space between them.
No one was to blame for this fall from grace, this shattering of boundaries that occurred, all in a desperate plea for irrational sanity between two scientists who had come to have no use for the rational side of mind.
A kiss between friends was easily washed away with time, but this would not end there.
Falling deeper and deeper into the wound they cut, the wound they healed between themselves, there was no lust between them, even as their eyes met in the silence, even as they didn't pull away and stop themselves.
No lust, only a grasping for alleviation from the numbness.
They were both numb, oh-so-very numb, and it started to fade away as their clothing was strewn in a path between the door and Samantha Carter's bed.
"Sometimes I forget you're not military..."
Sam knew that Daniel wasn't military. Perhaps that was the reason she could have him, in spite of every other reason why she couldn't. She could run her fingertips over his skin, brush her lips against his, and she knew that every bit of him was there. No regulation to fill some imaginary gulf between them—the gulf that had kept her lips, her fingertips, from kissing Jack goodbye when she knew that they were both dead. And now they weren't, because of the man that she did hold in her arms, in spite of the fact that she knew she shouldn't. They weren't the same person, not at all. Sam didn't want them to be. But in the silence, in the breath between them, she could see Jack's forgiveness in Daniel's eyes.
"They don't know what to do with me, and I don't know what to do with myself..."
Somewhere in the universe, Daniel knew his wife, his Sha're, was inhabited by something that stole her mind, stole her away from him. One of the same creatures that Hathor had used him in order to produce. Everything in him, even as he made love to Sam, knew that he couldn't ever give up. Still, he didn't manage to stop himself. He knew that he could—he actually could say no to this—but this was the only solace there was, just as Jack had been the only solace during that first night back on planet Earth.
And somewhere beneath a mountain in Colorado, a man called Colonel Jack O'Neill lay sleeping, completely unknowing of how utterly he bound together the two people he cared for the most.
End Notes: Again, reiterating that this is my first ever Stargate fic, I have only (up to the point I'm finishing this) seen into the first bit of Season 2. I have no idea how my characterization is because I'm quite rusty on writing in general. Also, I rarely do fics that are focused entirely upon this sort of thing. Also, this fic in absolutely no way belittles Teal'c (especially in the last line). My assertion that Jack cares about Sam and Daniel "the most" has to do with the fact that I see him as being most protective of Sam and Daniel, as opposed to Teal'c, who can "take care of himself."
A bit more explanation about the abstractness of the title: Indian Summer, being a warm spot in the middle of otherwise cold weather seemed to be a good euphemism for comfort in the middle of something otherwise considered awful, in my line of thinking.