She awoke, though he hadn't made a sound. Turning her head from the predawn gloom that was starting to spill through the curtains, she lay and watched him for a few seconds, his hands worrying with the pen that she'd insisted that they keep by the phone as he sat crossed legged and frowning on his side of the bed. She wanted to place a hand on him, to startle him out of his reverie and to pull him back towards the oblivion of sleep.
But that wouldn't work.
He turned to look at her slightly, pen tapping on his knee bone as he regarded her silently for a second, expression serious.
"I didn't know," he said, regret heavy in his voice.
If there was something in her that told her that she should know what he meant by that cryptic sentence, then she shoved it down as the height of stupidity. She was never going to fully fathom him, and she was going to spend the rest of her life trying.
"Daniel," he offered as explanation.
Daniel. A plethora of images flashed through her mind – his deathly pale skin and opaque eyes, displaying the powers of the Priors, Merlin talking through him.
"Oh," she said softly, raising herself stiffly as far as her healing side would allow. Neither had she. Somewhere, somehow, she'd assumed that he'd come back to them, that he wouldn't leave them permanently. That he'd retained himself somewhere beneath the preaching of the Ori. Because he was Daniel, and he didn't die.
A glance at his face told he that she'd probably got it wrong. A decade sometimes didn't seem enough to figure him out.
"I didn't know," and he stressed the word with vehemence. "That he was Daniel. I just trusted him to be." He left unspoken the fact that if it had been anyone else, he may not have closed the Supergate. He may have refused, because the reasonable and rational doubt would have overridden the emotional connection instead of being discarded as irrelevant.
"That's what we do," she commented softly, and left it at that. Because the truth was that even if the two of them went to hell in a handbasket, even if they ended up slowly tearing each other apart, SG-1 would remain. It would be an uneasy truce that the two of them would have to share, but the ties between the four of them would demand it of them and they would acquiesce. Because she loved the team before she loved him, and she knew it was true for him, too. And not having to explain it was something she was still getting used to – the novelty of having that fact intuitively understood was still fresh. Because she was bound to Cam-Vala-Daniel-Teal'c in different ways than she was bound to Colonel-Daniel-Teal'c, and he still understood.
"Sam, I'm not making decisions for just us anymore."
She didn't point out that he'd made decisions that affected the entire universe as leader of SG-1. He knew that.
"I'm sorry," she said. Sorry for what, she didn't know. They had a list of regrets a mile long, one they'd both mutually decided to discard, one that occasionally reared its ugly head at them. Mostly she was sorry that he'd ended up losing her and Daniel at the same time. Teal'c had informed her that he'd spent as much time as he possibly could sat in that room whilst she'd been missing – the only exception being when teams came in with suspected news on Ori movement; at which point he'd demand Daniel-related news and then return to his vigil, accompanied by one or the other of SG-1. Teal'c had also informed her that leaving only he to deal with this behaviour was not appreciated. Or at least he implied it heavily.
His mouth crooked up in the beginnings of a wry smile, though it rarely made it all the way, with him. He was a man of half measures, when it came to expression. Emotions half-voiced, looks half-explained, feelings half-suppressed. "So am I," he said finally, before returning to his silent vigil.
She wants to make it better, to fix it somehow. She can't.