Author's Note: Even though I'm almost positive this isn't at all what she had in mind, this fic exists because XFChemist posted a link to Sam Smith's Stay With Meand said something about fic writers and inspiration. This is what happened.

There were fires burning across the country when they gave over after a too-long war, a too-late night and too many shots of bourbon. Neither of their houses were still standing so they fell into bed at an old motel whose doors had all been kicked in weeks before. She smelled sweet against the sheets and tasted sharp against his tongue. Her hair was too long, and her skin was too tan, but she still felt like he'd always dreamed she would when she clenched around him.

Months later she found him outside Detroit leading a group of kids towards warmer weather. They both wanted more than she was capable of giving him, but he let her take what she needed, with the cool grass against his back and her hands in her own hair, tugging against the pleasure he created between her legs. She took from him for three days before she headed off towards Seattle with a group of the best and brightest who survived.

It went on like that for almost a year. They traveled with the people who needed them. She was needed with the brains and he was needed with the brawn and occasionally she let him remind her that she was more than the potential solution to an unsolvable problem. Sometimes she even let him remind her she was a woman first and a goddamn superhero second and she cried against his chest because he didn't mention her tears.

For a while they both stayed with her brother in what was left of San Diego. Eighteen months to the day after the world was set ablaze, the second wave of the assault came. When Mark and the kids didn't survive, she didn't really, either.

Predictably, when the world ended, everything went to hell. Teal'c ended up somewhere north of the Adirondacks, Daniel went to Belize, and Jack followed Sam to Birmingham, Alabama, though he wasn't sure anymore just what she wanted with the deep south in August when central air was a thing of the past.

At first, the novelty of licking the sweat off her collarbones was enough to make him overlook the detached way she spun apart in his arms. It took him six months to realize the only time she met his eyes when she came was when he pressed her up against the counter in the tiny bathroom and she had the buffer of the cracked mirror between them.

Being with her hurt in a way it shouldn't have but he couldn't give her up. Somewhere between Birmingham and her forty-fifth birthday he convinced her he still loved her.

Some sort of rumor-cum-vision-quest sent her out west and she returned four months later with a naquadah generator and his dog tags. They fucked about her clawing through rubble that used to be the SGC but she powered up the town and he could forgive her anything with cold beer and air conditioning, especially when he finally got to see the way goose-bumps erupted across her skin as he trailed a sweaty beer bottle between her breasts.

Word spread that there was a city on the rise and people started to come. It took a month, but Teal'c showed up with three hundred and fifty survivors from New England. Four months after that, a ship arrived with Daniel and two thousand more from Central and South Americas. Over the next year she took fifteen collection trips and the fifty thousand survivors of Earth congregated in Birmingham. She finally smiled in a way he believed while sitting around their appropriated dining room table with her old team and the gleam of success in her eyes.

Idly, she picked at the lace tablecloth she'd found in the attic and mentioned a store of seeds and agricultural equipment in Nebraska she'd heard tell of at the last town hall meeting. She had that save-the-world look in her eyes again but it was time to let someone else have a turn. Samantha Carter couldn't be the superhero forever and Birmingham finally had a justice of the peace and records center.

Later that night, in bed between clean and sweaty sheets, she told him she loved him. Confessed that she couldn't have done it without him. But she made more noise about Nebraska and a harvest schedule and what it took to feed fifty thousand people. He dragged his hand from her knee, up her dewy thigh, across the slick-skinned scar on her belly from their first year together that he could barely remember. He kissed her temple, nuzzled at the damp hair.

"Stay."

She met his eyes and, for the first time in three years, exhaled.

For what it's worth, I don't read apocafic. I don't even like apocafic. I have no idea how this happened.