She can see her breath steaming in the cool air. Her lungs burn with the cold and she watches the water vapour coil and drift away from her.
She knows that she is dying, and curiously, there is no fear.
She's too cold now to even feel the pain of her injuries, or the wet mud soaking into her clothing and staining her skin.
She knows it's a betrayal of the man she purports to love, an end to the illusions she's blinded herself with for nearly a year now, but her presumably final thoughts are not of the man who's cold metal band burns her finger, one of the few sensations her broken body is still capable of feeling.
They're of him.
On the edge of hearing the kawoosh of a wormhole draws her attention. Thinking is becoming hard, lack of sleep, blood and warmth see to that, but she muzzily reasons it means one of two things: swift death at the hands of her enemies, late arriving troops to support those decimated in a heavy fire-fight...
Or salvation.
Either would be welcome after six hours here, bleeding in the freezing muck.
She hears footsteps, booted feet perhaps, or the heavy metal armour of Jaffa warriors. She tries to raise herself onto her elbows but her strength has been sapped and all she can manage is to lift her head.
She cannot see them, her rescuers or killers, only the waving branches of the pines scattering their needles over the forest floor littered with the dead.
And suddenly someone enters her field of vision and she lets out a breath she wasn't even aware she had been holding.
He runs across to her, his face taught and eyes overbright. His large, warm hand cups her cheek and she knows that if he wasn't worried about worsening unknown injuries he would have scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the 'gate, because it's him. He's always there for her, when she needs him the most.
"I'm... glad you came..." she manages, talking harder than it should be.
He breaks, and suddenly she's scared. She doesn't need his tears, she needs him to tell her everything is going to be fine. "Don't you ever do this to me again," he says vehemently, angrily swiping away the salt-water that has overspilled his eyelid and trickled onto his cheek.
"I'm cold," she says, her tongue unresponsive and the words seem difficult to shape her lips around.
"Medic!" he yells to people unknown, over his shoulder, "You're gonna be okay, Carter. I promise."
"I know. I knew you'd... come back for... me."
The medical team have reached her and she enjoys the almost unique sensation of being handled as if she was made of glass, gently stretchered from the place where she fell to the plinth the 'gate is mounted on. He never lets go of her bloody, muddy hand until the pine forest is gone and after a moment of bright uncertainty, she is home.
The SGC is home to her, more so than the dwelling she occasionally sleeps in, and sometimes shares with Pete.
And so she allows herself at last to surrender to the gathering dark, because she knows that now she's home she's safe. She can stop fighting, if only for a little while.
She knows that, when she wakes up, sore and speckled with bruises, her wounds stitched and burning with pain, he'll be there at the foot of her bed.
Waiting for her.
And as she slips at last into blessed insensibility she promises herself that she's going to end that now, the waiting. He's been patient enough and she doesn't know what's holding her back anymore. She's sick of waiting too.
(If it's worrying you, in my head she's fine and we get some long-awaited S/J RST. But I'm leaving this as a one shot, so interpret it as you will.)