From the Soul by Betty Bokor
Sam/Daniel. Sam needs someone to listen.
Spoilers: All seasons, including 9 and 10.
Disclaimer: The Stargate original characters belong to MGM/Showtime, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Film Corp. This was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt at copyright infringement has been made.

From the Soul

Chapter 6

This time I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to discuss what had happened between us, but Daniel seemed to want to handle it as before and I kept quiet. Then Catherine Langford died and something happened, or not, though we will never be certain. By the time we went to the General's cabin in Minnesota, I had decided Daniel was a closed chapter in my life. No more pinning after him if I could still be pinning for Jack, who had apparently ended his affair with Agent Johnson. Well, he was still flirting with me at least!

That turned out to be a big disappointment. He was offered General Hammond's position in the Pentagon and he accepted. So, I went to Nevada, to my Research and Development assignment in Area 51. I forged a closer relationship with Cassie, who was in desperate need for a parental figure since Janet's death, and I got used to a new life without the team and without the gate.

Daniel was getting ready to go to Atlantis when she came back. Vala. As soon as I heard about it I figured out she had come back for him. The treasure of Avalon was simply an excuse.

Cameron Mitchell, who had taken charge of SG-1, asked me to return to the team, but I refused. Jack had been replaced by General Hank Landry, Janet's place was occupied by his daughter, Dr. Carolyn Lam, and I had left my team in someone else's hands. It did not feel like coming home anymore.

Meanwhile, Vala laid her trap and got Daniel hooked into those bracelets. It infuriated me. Daniel called me soon after he recovered from passing out for the first time. I almost felt he was asking me to go rescue him from her hands, but he did not actually ask for anything, so I decided to stay in Nevada.

She became a regular in their lives, especially in Daniel's. Cam joked on the phone about her advances toward Daniel, about the numerous times when he thought something had happened –or was happening– between them, and I started to feel horribly jealous. After she was burned alive by the villagers of Ver Egen, I felt guilty about it, but as soon as I heard back from Daniel, I noticed that his attitude toward her had changed. Cam told me they were still the same, but I know Daniel better. I could hear it in his voice. He cared for her a lot more than he was telling.

Then they discovered the Ori –or the Ori discovered us– and I found a good enough excuse to go back to the team. After all, Daniel and Teal'c were already there. When Jack's orders came, I packed my stuff and I moved back to Colorado without a word.

By then, Daniel had tried all kinds of things to get rid of the bracelet-prison and had already given up. After he discovered that getting rid of the devices was not enough, he was resigned to wait until the effect of the bracelets wore off on its own. What surprised me, and hurt me at the same time, was the confirmation that there were other ties between them, invisible ties, ties that bind. In any case, I did not expect anything good to come from Vala, so it really surprised me when she destroyed the Ori beachhead on her own. Daniel was not. He had already seen the better side of her when she had tried to help the villagers of P8X-412. She had been worshipped there in the past, while she was still the host to the Goa'uld Quetesh, and she felt she owed them as much.

After Vala was lost, we got back to business as usual. First we faced Ba'al and his clones and, once again, I let down Malcolm Barrett by telling him I was not exactly single. Soon Cam discovered the Sodan warriors, and then we found Khalek. After the whole incident with Anubis' prototype, I caught Daniel as he was walking, almost running, toward his office. I called out to him.

"I have to go, Sam," he said and kept walking. I run towards him and I tried to stop him by putting my hand on his shoulder. "No!" he almost yelled. He turned around enough to get rid of my hand and he whispered, "I need to go, I need to be alone, Sam." I saw he was fighting tears and I raised my hand toward his face, but he stopped me in midair. "No. Not now. I'm sorry." He made a gesture that looked to me as a sign of desperation and he added, "I just wish that I'd been wrong." He went into his office and closed the door.

I tried calling him later that night, but he did not answer. I found out the next morning that he had requested a couple of days of leave. I never found out exactly what he did those two days, because I was completely unable to reach him. During the second day I found Woolsey walking towards Daniel's office and I asked him why he needed him. He said that Daniel had left a message in his answering machine, apologizing for his behavior two days before. I inquired about that and he simply told me that Daniel had been right all along and that he did not need to apologize.

I should have realized that Daniel was going down a dangerous path, but I failed to see it.

Soon after that, we were hit by the Ori plague and there was no time left to analyze Daniel's life. Orlin kept me busy working on the weapon against the Ori Priors, until Daniel and Cameron were capable of using it against the one who had initiated the plague. However, the cure did not work and only Gerak's sacrifice allowed so many lives to be saved. The news we got about the Ori plan to get revenge against the Ancients became our main worry.

Those days I neglected Daniel again when Cameron, who has been my friend for so many years, got into trouble on Galar. We all concentrated our efforts in helping Cam, until he was exonerated from the crime he had been accused of by the planet's authorities.

What happened next took a heavy emotional toll on all of us. It stands among the hardest experiences the gate would take us through and among the best at the same time. The Ripple Effect affected all of us, except probably Teal'c. Daniel looked even more withdrawn after it and I could not figure out why. Seeing Janet and Martouf was the hardest part of it for me, because I had to let them go one more time. For a while I thought that perhaps it was Janet's presence that had upset Daniel, but I could not prove it. They had been close and he still felt guilty about her death. In any case, I did not find out, because Daniel evaded me very successfully during the next weeks, especially due to the multiple problems Cam and Teal'c got into.

I felt I had to help Cameron. He is new and I am the only one who knows him from before he joined SG-1. Besides, I have seen him looking at Daniel and Teal'c as if they were his childhood heroes. I know he admires them, though he will probably never admit to it. He has memorized some of our reports and he listens to every word they say as if his life depended on it. Well, sometimes it does. It is different with me because we were friends before. It is hard to see your neighbor as a hero, right? It is the same with your old friends.

Cam told me that, after Major Ferguson died and we were back from Ba'al's ship, he had a little talk with Teal'c. It helped him that Teal'c recognized his participation in his rescue and, consequently, in the Jaffa's fight for democracy, but the death of his friend still had him down. I invited him to have dinner that day and he accepted. Right after I got out of the elevator in the base parking lot, I saw Daniel and Teal'c leaving together. I felt better. They are very close friends.

After dinner, I drove Cam to his house and I went home. All the way I kept thinking about Daniel and Teal'c and how they have been able to develop such a friendship in spite of how tragically their lives crossed the first time. I do not know if I would have been able to forgive and get over the fact that Teal'c was the one who chose Sha're to be kidnapped as future host of Amaunet. That is simply a testament to Daniel's strength of character. If you had heard him defend Teal'c during his Cor-Ai on Chartago, when not even a year had passed after Sha're's abduction, you would have been moved to tears. I remember we talked about it afterwards and Daniel simply said that he had been honest and done what was fair. I should have known he would, since he had let go much of his hope to save his wife the day he destroyed Thor's Hammer to save Teal'c. I always feel that our Jaffa friend has imposed upon himself the mission to protect Daniel from as much harm as he can, but on many occasions it has been Daniel protecting or fighting for him. I remember his trip to Russia when Teal'c was trapped in the gate or his visit from the ascended plane when Bra'tac and Teal'c were trying to survive with one symbiote as they waited to be rescued. I have many times wondered why they were the only survivors of such a massacre.

At any rate, we were all still recovering from the mission to rescue Teal'c from Ba'al's mothership, when Jared Kane asked for our help. None of us foresaw the catastrophe that was going to break over us. So many lives lost, so much destruction. I tried to talk to Daniel after we both came back, but when I went by his office he was already talking to Cam. It seemed serious and I kept on going.

During the memorial Daniel talked about Ethon, the mythological eagle that gnawed on Prometheus' liver, as a representation of the kind of threat the Ori had become. Though I thought about Colonel Pendergast and his men killed in battle, that night the image became part of a nightmare in which Daniel was chained and devoured by a dark monster.

The next morning I tried to talk to him again, but, just as before, he eluded me. This time I was not going to take it. I cornered him in his office and I got him to pay attention. He finally agreed to have a coffee with me, downtown, after work. He drove his own car and met me there. We got our drinks and sat in the back, where there were less people and we would be able to talk more privately. I asked point blank what was going on, why he was avoiding me so blatantly. He remained quiet for a while. Then he said that he really did not want to talk about it, that it was something private, that he could not share it. I was dumbfounded. He could not share it with me? I told him how hurt I was by his words, how he could trust me and tell me what was going on. He dropped his head down as he does when he feels defeated and then said, "You have no idea, Sam, how I felt when I thought Teal'c and you had died with the others in the Prometheus… Just death all around us. Even Leda is gone… and all for nothing. They killed each other anyway." He took a few seconds and he stopped me from replying with a gesture of his hand. "I'm having very confusing feelings right now. I need to sort them out on my own. This is too big for me; no amount of comfort sex is going to help me." He looked at me with so much pain in his eyes that mine filled with tears in a second. He reached out and squeezed my hand and, before I could say anything, he was gone.

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