"Come home, Sam."
Jeff doesn't understand. He tries in his own way and it's more than Sam thinks she deserves. She almost wishes for anger rather than his seemingly calm acceptance that his wife of six years one day packed a bag and left him for a classified job for the U.S. military. He's patient, but he's waiting for an explanation she can't give. Because even Sam has to wonder what the hell she is doing.
The SGC represents a world she willingly left behind years before and everyday she feels more and more like she doesn't belong there. She works the eight to five, spending most of her days in a bland lab reading acres of material about an object she couldn't have theorized into existence even in her headiest days as an arrogant grad student. When she isn't trying to bend her brain around the concept that wormholes are real, she's completing mindless tasks for Dr. Lee, the head scientist. She does it without complaint.
Each evening she comes home to a sparsely furnished, lonely apartment and thinks of the home and life she abandoned for this. She waits for the phone to ring, for Jeff to call. He never presses or asks her for anything (though she sometimes wishes he would). He just talks to her of his day and it's hard for her to realize all this time later that he would have loved her no matter what she had done with her life.
She knows their therapist is probably telling him this is just a reaction to grief. That her bizarre behavior is about loss, that it might just be temporary. He's only half right. There is loss, certainly, but nothing about this is transitory.
She's failed as Mrs. Fleming and so all she has left is Dr. Carter, something she never wanted in the first place. But it's her last chance and she can't think of what might become of her if she fails at this too.
It's harder and lonelier than she's ever imagined and just the threat of failure is almost enough to make her walk away. But then who would she be?
It's strange, the one thing that keeps her moving; the memory of the feel of surprisingly cool naquadah beneath her fingers, a soft buzz traveling across her skin at the contact. The Stargate makes wormholes real and somehow by extension she's no longer theoretical. The things in her mind, the world she had once flirted with, this place makes them concrete. And maybe it has the power to make her real too.
"Come home, Sam," Jeff whispers at the end of his nightly call.
She can't find it in her to tell him that she's never going back, that he's just another part of her failure. But she thinks he already knows.
She lets the silence stretch long. Seconds, minutes, hours later there is the softest sigh of regret followed by the gentle click of the line dying.
Sam lets go of the last of that life and finds there are no more tears left to shed. She rubs her hands back and forth across her forearms and speculates what flying through space must feel like.
She wonders if she'll ever get the chance to find out.