A Mother's Last Stand
It's the end of Earth as we know it…and Sam had to make a choice.
There was blood in her mouth and blood in her hair. She knew where she was. The loading bay on the Daedalus had been turned into a makeshift infirmary and the F302 bay had become a makeshift mortuary.
And seeing as she'd woken up with a drip in her arm and a sheet over her legs, she assumed she'd made it out in one piece. The last promise she'd managed to make before all hell had broken loose.
It had only been a fortnight ago that they'd been proudly dropping their daughter off for her first day at kindergarten together. Throughout it all, she'd kept the one photograph she'd had time to print off before the power failed. The generators were jerry-rigged to keep the lower levels of the SGC running, what power being left being carefully rationed to try and ensure the safety of those still remaining.
She found herself looking at the photograph of her daughter more often than she felt she should have, considering the circumstances.
She knew her daughter was safe. That she was with her friends…her family, on her way to the relative safety of Atlantis on the Daedalus.
They'd lost the mountain days before but as the last line of defence, they'd managed to hold them off for long enough to try and evacuate as many as they could.
Planets they'd once helped evacuate refugees too were now taking on their own refugees. There was no going back. She knew that much.
She'd set the self destruct herself.
They hadn't seen it coming and as much as she wanted to figure out why, it wouldn't change anything anyway. Earth had gone but she had no choice but to carry on. There were repairs to be done, reports to be completed, the living to be taken care of…
The dead to be buried
And that little voice in the back of her head. The one that whispered to her that she'd saved her own daughter above the sons and daughters of others. The one accompanied by the terrified cries of those sons and daughters as the world as they knew it ended…then she'd just have to live with it.
None of it mattered to her as she laid eyes on her daughter for the first time in over a week. The little brown eyed, blonde haired girl with her arms wrapped tightly around her father's neck,
She was safe. They were safe.
Her daughter slipped from her father's arms and ran to her, colliding with her lower extremities as she heard her sob 'I'm so glad you're here Mummy…I was so scared without you.'
Allowing herself one moment of weakness before trying to rationalise the situation, she listened to the little voice in the back of her head, the screams suddenly deafening her.
Sinking to the floor with her daughter in her arms, she allowed herself to cry.