Chapter Three: No Light in this Tunnel

A/N: This story is creating such turbulent feelings in so many of you, I just wanted you to know I feel the same way! Which is sad, because I'm writing it. But it's dredging up emotions about these characters that I haven't felt in years…you know, since before fangirling was cool.

References to: 'Seth,' 'Point of View,' 'Forever in a Day,' 'The Devil You Know,' 'A Hundred Days,' 'Shades of Grey.'

Enjoy!

The car moved silently through the night, headlights cutting a hazy path in the gloom and fog. Darkness pressed in on all sides as the night wore slowly on, no streetlights or ambient pollution to help fight the blackness on this stretch of country road. Even the stars seemed to have gone out.

The drive from Area 51 to Cheyenne was a long one, but no one on SG-1 was willing to stay another night in that desert waiting for the next jet back to Colorado. It was bad enough that they were barely speaking to each other, but they didn't even have separate quarters to avoid each other in.

Sam swallowed against the persistent lump in her throat, feeling carsick for the first time in her life. She wanted so badly to close her eyes and just sleep…let the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness take away the phantom dry heaves and constant ache in her heart.

She couldn't remember the last time she felt happy—actually happy. All Sam felt when she thought about everything that had happened in the past year was helplessness. It made her sick to her stomach to remember, but, true to form, she couldn't find it in herself to forget.

When had everything gotten so screwed up? When had they all become such…such…strangers? Sitting here in this car on this abandoned road at this ungodly hour of the morning, Sam Carter fought like hell against the vast chasm of desolation that was threatening to swallow her whole. She wanted to scream or cry or do anything else that would scare the darkness away.

The light at the end of her tunnel had gone out when he had left her in the dark.

Too much had happened, too much had gone to hell. And not even just figuratively. They had literally been to hell and back this past year and Sam would trade her current pain for Netu and its tortures a hundred times over. A thousand times. An infintite amount of times, for godssakes.

She was going to throw up.

She hadn't even eaten anything today, so she was sure those hot slithers clawing their way up her throat were her insides high-tailing it out of their fractured and defective prison. Sam had never wanted it to be like this—she had never wanted to be this person.

If she could just erase the last twelve months from everyone's memories, everything could go back to normal and everything would be okay. If they could just go back…

Sam's lips thinned as her jaw clenched against the bile that now mixed with her self-loathing and self-seclusion. She was going to explode and all the little tiny pieces of what had once made her everything she was would blow away and away until nothing that even remotely resembled her was left.

How could they recover from this?

Opening eyes that were hot and itchy from secret tears, Sam looked at the strong figure cutting through the inky darkness in front of her. Teal'c. The ever stalwart member of their team—the reliably infallible level head. 'Oh, Teal'c.' Sam's heart broke anew even though she had been sure all of her heartbreak had already been used on her own selfish, shattered desires.

She had never met a stronger, more loyal man and she envied the way he never wavered—not once—when right and wrong and easy all splintered into fragments too slippery to ever put back in order. Teal'c, the glue in their splitting seams.

Teal'c, the man who had killed Sha're.

The man who had to make that decision—who'd had to look into his friend's eyes and know that, even as he saved his life, he killed the fire in his heart, extinguishing the light of Daniel's tunnel. A man who had apologized, but could never be sorry for what he'd done in that tent. Sam had a sneaking suspicion that Teal'c felt more deeply than the rest of the three of them altogether. But he never let anyone else suffer with him—he never let his pain define him.

Sam pressed her sweater covered fist over her mouth as she felt the first sob wrack her body. She would not let them see her cry. She would not let them know that this was the moment. This was the moment she gave up.

Willing her burning eyes to just close, she felt fire rip through her heart when she turned to her left, where Daniel's messy brown head was pressed against the black glass of the car. His breathing was deep and even, but Sam knew he wasn't sleeping. He had tried, hours ago, back when the sun was just starting to set…blood-red light crystalline through the car's windows. Sam had reached for his hand, wanting to offer whatever comfort she could, and he had taken her chilled fingers and he had squeezed them with his own warmer ones.

Another sob filled her throat as the recent memory washed over her. Daniel was always so nice. The sweetest, most selfless person she'd ever known…would ever know. He deserved more than this world had given him—certainly not everything it had taken from him. His parents, his childhood, his wife…

And, more recently, his best friend. And then his trust in that same friend.

He had refused to tell them exactly what had happened at the colonel's house that afternoon a few weeks ago, but Sam didn't need to hear the words to know what had been said. She'd never seen Daniel that closed off and she hadn't had a clue what to do. So she hadn't done anything.

She'd let him down.

Sam moaned against the backs of her teeth, muffling the sound enough so that it was inaudible to the other three in the car. How could all of this had happened? And all of it in one goddamn year.

She had killed a man using that awful hand device, watched his body bow unnaturally into the dust and the dirt and she had felt her will move through that infernal thing and out into the world and it had been used to kill. And she had felt a thrill. And then she'd looked into her CO's eyes and heard him give her words of praise that actually meant, 'you did what you had to,' and then she'd gone and thrown up because she wasn't sure that was true.

And then her doppelganger had shown up- all long hair and lilac and doe eyed—and Sam had felt nothing but jealousy for the life that Samantha had had and grief for a loss Sam hadn't. She had watched her colonel begin to look for the other woman in Sam; had felt his eyes on her whenever she wasn't looking, long after Doctor Carter had returned to her own FUBARed reality.

And Sam had felt the parts of her that made her a major instead of a doctor start to waver and falter and begin to want to fall away. She hated herself for that. And she hated him for doing that to her—for kissing the Carter wasn't her and then never saying a word about it. The first real crack in their relationship—in their attempt at normalcy—and he hadn't even had the decency to say something.

And then he'd gone away. Everything that had made the SGC the SGC had disappeared with him, light and life and routine gone when that wormhole had flickered and then disengaged. It had taken her three months to figure out a way to get him back and three seconds to figure out that she never should have tried in the first place.

Even less than that to swear that she'd never forgive herself for becoming that desperate.

Sam felt her insides clench and she squeezed her eyes closed, tears slipping from between her lashes. She just had to breathe. If she could keep breathing then she could keep up the illusion that she was fine and that everything was normal and that this drive was not absolutely killing her.

He'd blamed her. Openly admitted that she had an effect on him and that now he was over it. It didn't matter that it had all been for show—it didn't matter that it was all just a really convincing act. He had calculated the swiftest and most accurate way to wound her and he'd been dead on. He'd exploited her. She had trusted him.

She had trusted him.

Sam's fingers blindly felt for the window release, needing desperately to breathe air that he hadn't. She was going to be sick, even if all that came up was acid and a death rattle. But she couldn't find the damn button. Her fingers were too clumsy, numb and thick from all the things she hadn't allowed herself to acknowledge, let alone say out loud.

They were so broken. So far from the family they had once been and Sam didn't know how they would ever be able to get back to that. She wanted so badly to look around the dark car and feel solidarity and love and familial familiarity. She wanted to be those people again.

Sam thought back to that car ride all those years ago when the dark and the quiet had comforted her instead of filling her with agony. Tears blurred the edges of her vision as she stared hard into that tiny rectangle of hope—the mirror that held the last vestiges of her resolve.

But he never looked up.

TBC

A/N: Poor SG-1 The next chapter is actually an uplifting one, I promise!