Conversations
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(Disclaimer) I'll remain as poor as I hold myself now no matter how many of you read this.
(A.N) It is a matter of friendship asides from all else, never to be underestimated.
.
It is deceptively simple, this business. By walking in and sitting down, or perching on a public stool – settling into an environment of strangers; and this particular one, this place itself, it's dark, familiar and smoky and almost so atmospherically neutral as to be an act of State diplomacy. It is, if not spectacular, then comfortable.
A few road travellers set up in one corner, almost as ornaments; a board of frightfully sophisticated students all strategically sat around a couple of tables so its young girls can croon over the boys and the boys without a snowball's chance can at least observe the bounty from diagonal slants. An older couple on a couch by a faux fireplace and a hunch of drinking buddies heaped at the end of the bar. And then there is her. Sitting alone (though she is not the only one to be doing so) and assured by the informality of coincidental – to time and place – anonymity.
"Ah— Okay, em... I'll have a glass of red, house red, please?" Hesitant because the barmaid nods indiscriminately and silently towards her, and only after waggling an eyebrow (maybe she's mute?) does Sam finally realises she's been asking her to order something.
She blows on tingly fingertips while she waits for her drink, the off-duty Air Force Major, the 2IC of SG-1, and contemplates without gravity what it is like for no one around her here to know who she is, what it is she does in her life. For no one to assume awe or awkwardness at her stature, and better, no one to make her feel on a constant edge of guard by decree of duty.
The barmaid is chatting to a stout woman standing with her and it piques Sam's interest to be able to understand the hierarchy of their relationship just by the tone of a hand gesture, in a nod that is both sure and compliant. The younger, the trimmer of the two, obeys her bosses' instructions and yet there is a looseness in their bodily patter that suggests for them, at this moment at least, a job without consequences, decisions without weight and working relationships without scruples.
There is no bitterness in the wonder. But Sam Carter is not a kidder, very least to herself. There is, after all, her recent conversation with the Colonel weighing candidly on her mind...
A handsome glass for a cheap drink is slid under her nose and Sam pays for it with a sharp, new twenty from her back pocket which she hardly remembers putting there, beckoning the girl to keep five out of the change because it's the only thing she'll be ordering tonight. The barmaid smiles, then she is away to dust Scotch bottles and for all that she is surrounded, Sam is alone.
Is it so bad, she knows (too) many people ask themselves every day in this world. And terrifyingly the answer seems to be yes, every time now.
She is thirty-four years old. At times (like now) she feels jaded. Perhaps as a consequence of knowing the universe too well, its schematics and its people, and forgetting during times wrought with politics and repeated injustices, its imbued awe by which it had once inspired her. Or perhaps it comes down to simpler things, more earthly, more humble things that being as such – simple, that is – become harder for her to control and even understand. Immense intelligence can – yet no one ever warned her – lead you only so far. For some even it is nothing, or a little side thing about you at best.
The wine is dull, almost expressionless. Flat and warm and quick down the throat. Yet it's not impalpable and really it is just a reason to sit in a stranger's place and ponder by ambiguity. Or at least – she begins to regret from something moving at the corner of her eye – it had been the theory.
She once told a man (or did she conjure this in a dream? For she's never quite understood the truth behind this ethereal memory) but she believes she might once have told a man in a bar paradox to this one (perhaps it had been this one...); 'Everyone thinks you owe them something just because you're alone.'
So then, what did they owe her, that mythical body of 'everyone' who is made up of strangers and friends and foe alike, the past, the present and the threat of the future unknown, if they think she owes them an apology for her solitude? Where is the respect for it in return?
It is the conviction she is murmuring to herself as she turns her shoulder against a figure that comes from, it seems, nowhere to sit next to her, a tall, brazen bulk in her peripheral who is (she tries to describe it in body language) not welcome to rob her of her loneliness, not this night—
"Sam."
It makes her jump, the familiar voice. Her glass and the wine jerk in her hand, but nothing is spilt except a little composure as she turns back quickly.
"Daniel?!"
She exclaims it as she turns, like she hasn't seen him in a year; she's almost too flustered by his sudden appearance to say anything at all. He smiles easy though as Sam combs a hand through her hair to try cover her start, and turns to the barmaid to orders himself something while he sits on a stool beside her.
"Sam," he repeats, in kind jest mocking her exclaim. "Glad I found you."
Sam resettles her perch, puts down her wine warily and smiles not at all surely.
"Yeah?" She hadn't asked for him to join her tonight.
"Ah, thanks—" Drink in his hand now. "Yeah, sure. I mean, because it wasn't easy; this wasn't exactly the first place I came looking for you. In fact, it was hard to find exactly how far you'd actually gone." A pause, a careful tilt of his head as if he's examining her for something, and she's vaguely aware his words aren't at all making sense to her.
"But here you are. Which is kind of funny." He looks around and Sam begins to wonder, was it always so smoky in here, the outlines so pale and grey? "This is meant to be where were came for steaks, once – O'Malley's right?"
Matter-of-factly he takes a sip of his drink, never lifting his eyes off Sam as she tries to look with resolve back at him. Tries to figure exactly what it is that doesn't quite feel right about this exchange, with someone she knows so well. She thinks she sees a glimmer of misquoted concern hinted at around the edges of the blue in his eyes, and it is then, caught again in a moment of unsettling displacement, that Sam notices Daniel is not wearing his glasses.
His next words are delicate, and honest, and frightening.
"They're coming for you, I promise."
It jolts her, words like a slap in the face for all that they are sad and true, and suddenly there is a real, very blinding pain lancing through her chest which forces her to double over and wrap her arms around her torso as an unwilling cry shudders from her throat; a miserable sound, like an old ache permanently asunder in your bones.
"Sam... "
Daniel can do nothing for it if sit back and be subjected to watch.
When she does manage to lift her head back, when the brilliance of the hurt becomes something less of a consequential pulse, Sam's eyes are wet and bright from shock and her mouth silently agape in breathlessness.
"What... the hell?" she whispers desultorily. She is looking at Daniel though, hard, like she can see straight through him, as if—
"You're not real..."
Not a question but a terrible and depressive realisation which makes Sam drops her head into her hands as she props her elbows onto the bar. "This isn't real, none of this is. You're not— So I'm..."
Suddenly her stalwart understanding of everything means nothing, other than to make her frightfully aware of a feeling of unreality. She wonders pale, is it a dream, or a death? Perhaps it is the disillusion of torture but by whom and for why she cannot conjecture; it is as if suddenly there was nothing before this moment, and nothing due to take part after. She is just here, in a bar that is mere memory with a drink and an old, dead friend.
"Sam, this is important." Daniel's urgency is hard to shrug, as it (had) has always been.
"There is enough time, but you need to hang on, just a little longer. They know where you are; Jack's tracking back towards the flare right now but you need to give him a little more—"
"Daniel." And if looks could save as effectively as they could kill, then he feels she might yet live."I don't know what you're talking about."
Daniel still has one hand prone on his drink. He wears a ribbed sweater she has never seen on him before, the colour of wild grit. His skin is flawless and an odd thing to notice, she realises. Sam twists away from the bar suddenly and drops her elbows to her side. It is with a pale, straight hand that she reaches for him.
He offers nothing as her hand passes through his chest; there is nothing he can or will explain to her. This epiphany is structured on the very crux of the thin line he is already walking. What reprimand it will cost he can only hope is no weightier than the one he has already paid for Jack, for Teal'c. Like tokens, he reckons. One for each friend. For each person he counted as the only family he had had left, in another lifetime.
"Just bare here, Sam. Give yourself time. Think why you've brought yourself here rather than how you're here."
She frowns dubiously, because until minutes ago she hadn't suspected this to be anything other than a real bar in the real Colorado Springs after a real seven day week of living and working on base day-by-night. "For the fine wine?"
Daniel smiles slightly. Nods and takes the thin layer of humour that gleams through her angst and distress as a not-terrible sign. She is more like Jack than they both realise.
"Daniel what's happened? To me? To us?"
The man shakes his head. His ghostly head. It is a bare-faced refusal to give her an answer and for all her confusion Sam pulls him a demanding frown.
"What? You're just going to sit there, when you're supposed to be dead, let me pass my hands through you and believe suddenly I'm in some, some ghost-bar but you can't tell me what's really happening to me? You're—"
He knows it is about to happen again. Suddenly another shudder tears through her teeth and then another shaft of pain, not just enough this time to cull her chest into her hands, but to drop her entirely. So she's fallen off the stool and down on her knees, trembling but fighting it. Using anger to counter fear, frustration to berate panic. A scream escapes that turns into a low howl that filters off into a growl.
"You know, Daniel, it really does break my heart to say this isn't exactly the happy reunion I've been fantasising about."
Daniel pushes off his stool and rather literally without a sound drops to the floor next to her. She notices his hands bunched into fists, and though his outline is grey and his colour hazy, it gives him back a sense of being real, of being Daniel Jackson, which causes for Sam more pain than any of whatever it is lancing through her chest now.
"Daniel..."
"Sam, I promise you they are coming."
It is ironic that she had imagined coming here, to O'Malley's. For time to spend away from it all, from the team and the base, from command and servitude. For just one night, the company of strangers had seemed more appealing than that of the work in her lab, of her own teammates. She had truly believed it when she had walked in. She had believed this was real.
"I had a talk with the Colonel," she says suddenly, sitting back with her shins tucked under her thighs and one ethereal hand combing through her stunted, blonde hair.
"Yeah?" Daniel encourages and she notices him looking briefly over her shoulder, with just the slightest tilt to his head as if he is hearing something. But he does not – he never – misses a beat of the conversation. "How'd that go?"
"Ah. Well, you know..."
Daniel wrinkles his nose. "Actually, no, I don't. You, um, you never talk about it, Sam."
She wrinkles her brow back. A part of her feels like this is a morning-after apparition, only she has no incredible night-before to serve it justice. It is a displacement that makes her tongue loose and her inhibitions low.
"Well, maybe because there's never been anything to talk about. Maybe because... Because who has the time for it anyway? For a relationship." Picking at a chipped fingernail now and it is amazing how the ponders of one's own life can make us forget everything else of the bigger picture, even for just the small moment a conversation can be held within.
"We talked in that way... where you have everything in the world to say, sitting there right at the front of your tongue. Everything you've been meaning to say, since the first time you realised—And then, somewhere your mind bails on you; your resolve, it gets shot to hell and you end up pushing out the worst questions instead, talking about topics that are anything but what you came to talk about — you know?"
But Sam tilts her head at her own question, as if concerned this Daniel does not know, that perhaps instead he is just another part of the worst joke of her life.
"You talked about her."
He doesn't mean to say it as a betrayal of his old friend's privacy, or as a slanderous expense towards her, but because it (was) is his gift and his way, it seems to be exactly the best thing to say. And so Sam nods adamantly.
"I think after everything, all he ever wanted was someone normal and happy to come home to. The worst of it being, he had it from her, once. And with me... well that's just something I cannot give him. That we can't ever give each other...
"It's a bad choice, Daniel. Your own self-esteem... or your happiness at the most instinctive and destructive level."
Not for the first time Daniel wonders what he would not pay to be able to reach out and touch the arm of the ones he's visited. His friendship with Sam, he feels at times, had been far too flitting. Brief coffees and occasional bar drinks, and every so often a personal word to sum up a difficult mission – it had never been enough. They could have done far more for each other, if they had not, like we all do, assumed their time as friends together was infinite.
Sam is scratching at the bend in her arm, displacing the swell of anxiety from her gut into a hard raking across her skin with her nails. Daniel can hear things she cannot in this plane, and he can know before her that she will live, that she is already found and being brought back from this halfway house. But he cannot heal what cannot be bound and a part of him wants her to stay. A proud part of him that feels he can do better for her than she can for herself. Not as a figure of romance but as a soothsayer of emotions with an understanding let in by the light of higher-being.
But They would never allow it. For her to stay would mean for her to die, and within universal moments she would be gone into the ethereal dust of the future where he would never see her as Samantha Carter again.
"It's a choice, Sam. That's what matters."
Words she cannot understand, being trapped as she is in the grip of self-reproach, in the eternity that seems to be soul loneliness. The choice she knows, but it is the right answer eluding her, the one that none of us can ever correctly guess.
"Let them bring you back now."
A plea almost, as much as it sits on the pose of a simple request. A plea for her life, even if she is repelled by its state.
But there is a tugging at her chest; where the pain had struck now is an uncomfortable pressure, a tightness in her lungs and a heaviness in her ribs; a real feeling rather than an unearthly suffrage. Daniel stands above her and she looks up at a wordless expression. He is still Daniel Jackson but he is more, here he is everything she will never understand about the universe, everything science will not explain. He is watching her as she is saved, hearing the voices of their team call to each other as they find her in the dust, precariously half-buried. And —
.
— With the promise of imminent death otherwise, he found in a reserve few of us ever need to discover, the strength to roll the crushing boulder off her bloodied chest. And then, somehow, enough composure of himself to lift her between his arms, to balance across the rock-slick terrain carrying her and to take them to flat land, upon which he placed her down again.
"C'mon," he murmured levelly to no one else, though now Jonas was banking in from the other direction, the one Jack had sent him in to look and Teal'c strode not far behind. He rubbed her shoulder, patted her cheek with light slaps, encouraged her with grim light glowering in his wild eyes. "C'mon Major, snap out—"
"Daniel..."
It caught him by hard surprise, whilst he was checking with a thick thud in his chest for her breath, or a pulse – even a flicker of pain. Sam shuddered wholly, one arm surging and struggling as if to reach up, and Jack grabbed her wrist with a reassurance that was scarcely concealed dismay. She barely managed to say it, with dried blood spilling across her dehydrated lips and – he feared the worse – every rib crushed around her lungs. But he heard it clear as if it been a claxon in his ear.
Jack rolled back a little on his heels and allowed a premature wash of relief to assure his taut muscles. Without a thought, he believed her delirious whisper. Even now he had faith. Yet still—
"O'Neill."
It took a canny knowing of the man to trace the note of concern in Teal'c's voice as he came up behind them with Jonas, and it gave the moment more gravity than perhaps it could handle, more than the Colonel was comfortable with, having the rest of his team waiting for his lead on this, the worst of her follies so far. Yet he spoke charge with the confidence he was famed for.
"Quinn, go on ahead. Tell SGC to have Fraiser and her team on full emergency stand-by. Fill them in as best you can.
"Teal'c, watch our sixes for us."
It was with a tenderness that defied military etiquette that Jack spread his hand over the side of Sam's ashen, bruised face.
"You don't get to lose this one Carter. Daniel, you don't let her go."
Then he took her up again; it felt like lifting a shattered package, and to see her head loll back, to hear what could hardly be deemed as breathing – thick, short and ragged with blood, pulled through blue-tinted lips – it unnerved him in such a way that it could almost be reckoned he was scared.
But he was also theirs and her leader, and her friend, and her confidence and reason to have faith and self-assurance in every mission they partook of, and he would kick himself to hell before he betrayed those responsibilities, to any of them, but least of all...
"Teal'c."
"Yes O'Neill?"
"As soon as Carter's recovered; remind me I'm gonna kill her for this."
And somewhere, by a feeling in the back of his mind that he had utter faith in, Jack was sure Daniel was rolling his eyes at him.
...
End
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(Further A.N): This was not exactly how I expected this one-off to work, and in fact the idea that it was set during Daniel's ascension was a totally unexpected twist for me, that still somehow felt more right than what I had intended to do, which was just a straightforward 'friends having drinks together and talking life' piece. So if it came across awkward or jarred at any point, that's my defence. Which is not a barrier against constructive criticism at all, and please, share all and any thoughts you have. Despite it all, quite a fair bit of work and time did go into Conversations and I always find any review the best gratification :P