The Price of One

Point for Point

Janet had dropped Sam back at home after lunch, rightfully skeptical that the Major would honor her promise to rest. Knowingly, the doctor had called the number in Sam's lab within an hour to check up on her, and to obtain another useless promise that she would take it easy.

Sam hung up the phone with a slight smile, turning back to her computer monitor. She'd been working on the same equation now for several minutes—a conclusion that should have been instantaneous—but which now eluded her with wanton abandon. The darkness of the lab, which had seemed so intimate before, ultimately served to hide her growing frustration.

Why she'd thought that she could get any work done was beyond her. But that's what she knew. Work. Sitting back on her stool, she pondered on what she'd be doing if she weren't here, and was bothered to realize that she didn't have anything else to do. At one point, hadn't she had interests other than this place? But it was hard to think of macramé when the world was in danger. Not that she'd ever done any macramé, but the point still was salient.

So she settled for sitting on her stool at her lab table, watching the lights in the various technical arrays shift and change as information flooded through them. They were pretty in their own way, as incomprehensible as they seemed to everyone else around her, and prettier to her, because she knew what they meant.

Security—or a semblance thereof.

She jumped when a shadow appeared across her table, and a look over her shoudler revealed the Colonel standing in the doorway. Backlit as he was, she couldn't see his expression, but his posture—leaning up against the door jamb with his hands in his pockets—bespoke discomfort.

Sam sucked in a breath, sitting upright. "Sir."

"I thought you were supposed to have some downtime." His voice echoed of accusation and disapproval.

"I got bored."

"So you came back here?" He shifted, shoving away from the jamb with a quick move of his shoulder, his hands remaining in his pockets. "Surely there's somewhere else you'd rather be."

Sam shook her head slowly. "Actually, there was no place else I could think of to go."

"Doc Fraiser said something about junk food and TV."

"Turns out that's not all it's hyped up to be, sir." Sam shrugged. "I thought I could be more useful here."

"How's that working for you?"

She smiled at herself. "Not well."

"How are you feeling?"

The question rang heavily between them, and Sam found herself unwilling to give a pat answer. She stood, taking a step closer to the door, only to see the Colonel shuffle slightly backwards. The corridor lighting hit his face, now, and Sam noticed tight lines drawing his mouth and eyes. His colorless lips were thin, his cheeks pale. And for some reason it irked her, knowing that he was hurting.

She'd been the one zatted twice. By him. He should be seeking absolution, not assurance.

"I've been better, sir." She shrugged. "But what can you do?" As rhetorical questions, it was trite, and she knew it.

"You could follow doctor's orders and try to get some rest."

"I could." Sam wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "But I don't see how rest is going to help the situation."

O'Neill nodded, his eyes dark beneath lowered brows. "It's only been a week. Getting away from here might help you to not think about it."

"Not think about what, sir? How I should have died twice? Or how I'm to blame for it all?"

He stood uncertainly, wary, his weight balanced for flight. With an abrupt upward movement of his chin, he caught her gaze. "Do you really think that?"

"Which part?"

"The part about it being your fault."

She hated that she hesitated before answering. "I'm not sure what to think, sir."

"Daniel seems to believe that you did the right thing."

"Daniel believes a lot of things."

The Colonel steadied himself, taking a paused, halting step forward, obscuring his face in shadow again. Carter didn't know whether it was intentional or not, but she did know that it put her at a disadvantage. She couldn't read him in darkness. Not that she hadn't tried once or twice, but he had a way of hiding behind bravado, or humor, or sarcasm, and whatever else she believed about him, she knew with certainty that he didn't let things slip that he didn't want to reveal. Surely that was part of what made him so good with black ops—what made him so valuable in his capacity with the SGC.

"Are you saying that you don't agree with Dr. Daniel Jackson? That would be a first."

Sam's chin immediately rose, and as valiantly as she tried to quell it, the exasperated breath escaped all the same.

"Carter?"

Her name had become an order. As if he could usurp her nomenclature to suit his own needs. So she steadfastly refused to answer, instead turning back to her table, her stool, and the other random components of her life.

"Major." His voice held a different tone now—resignation. Resolve.

She reached out her hand and grasped an item from her table. It was heavy, and solid, and she found something on it with which to fiddle. She tweaked it with her fingers, determined to accomplish something with it, even if it was wrong. Hoping to prove something impossible to pinpoint.

"Major Carter."

Again, he intruded. Her fingers stumbled, and she dropped the object. Cheeks flaming, Sam stood suddenly, scooting the chair backwards with a sharp move of her foot. She didn't turn to face him. "What do you want, sir?"

"I understand that you're confused."

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I'm not confused."

He paused. "Okay, then, pissed."

She had nothing to add to that.

"But I also know that you made a choice when you insisted on—interfacing—with that thing. You let your curiosity lead, instead of your training."

"Curiosity is the main component of my scientific training, sir."

"But you're a Major in this Air Force, and your responsibilities include preserving the safety of this base and this planet."

"I thought that was what I was doing."

"By blindly allowing it access into your head?" His voice had grown sharper, and he knew it—his next statement was toned down, although just as staccato. "Exactly which part of your training allowed for that?"

She stared at her hands, where they lay, numb, on the table top. Eventually they became blurred—whether by anger, or tears, or the darkness, she didn't know. It didn't matter. She had been trying to do exactly that when she'd placed her hands on that keyboard—her job. To her, the amalgamation of science and military that she practiced was right—was good—and having that second-guessed hurt more than she believed it would. Having that questioned by O'Neill—the man she'd tried so hard to prove herself to for four years—it was unbearable.

"Carter—I'm not saying that all this is your fault." He said the words grudgingly, as if only halfway acceding to their truth. "But I am saying that we averted a major incident by the skin of our teeth. And the initial choices made forced others to make harder, less desirable choices."

"I'm aware of that, sir."

"Are you really?" She heard him shift on the concrete floor, his shoes scuffed as he moved. "Because I'm not so sure you are."

"I know that in this case, my choices proved difficult. I know that things could have—should have-turned out much worse. But I also know that the Entity was something that merited study. It was a sentient being—millions of them, actually—and amazing, given their abilities to transmit themselves across the opposite channel of the wormhole. My interface with them could have been a triumph of scientific and engineering discovery."

"But it wasn't." O'Neill jabbed an open hand in her direction. "It gave us exactly jack squat."

"But if we'd just been allowed time to figure out a different form of communication—the threat of its destruction was what spurred me to try to do it myself, without additional controls."

"And you just jumped at the chance, didn't you?"

She let out a hard, harsh breath. "They had technologies that we could have used—they were advanced far beyond our own capabilities! We could have learned so much from them!"

"They wanted to destroy us, Carter! They used you—all they wanted from you was a vehicle in which to pursue their goal. And here you are, explaining why they should have been allowed to survive!"

"And yet you say that the resulting incident wasn't my fault." She turned to look at him. For a long, long moment, their gazes held, before she finally had to look down. "Which is it? Because, I was just trying to do my job, sir."

And he shook his head exactly once, his lips tight, his eyes inscrutable. "Damn, it Carter!"

"I was just trying to do my job." Who she was trying to convince, now, was immaterial. She knew her statement to be true, even as she conceded that it was little more than an excuse.

Apparent in his heavy exhale, the way his hands fisted at his sides, O'Neill believed it, too. But Sam couldn't ask him why. Couldn't think of the right words with which to frame her defense.

And she barely caught how his jaw clenched as he turned sharply and walked away.