Chapter Three: The Wake

At 16h48 local time Professor Marina Markova's heart stopped beating. She was surrounded by friends and former students and died with a smile on her face; her right hand being held by her sister, her left by Samantha Carter – with a highly decorated Russian General standing vigil at the foot of the bed.

They had spent a pleasant day in each other's company, talking about everything and nothing. All four of them determined not to think about what would inevitably happen but eager to maintain the illusion of an ordinary day spend in the company of friends and family.

The illusion faltered whenever one of the Professor's students or friends joined them because most of them didn't have as tight a hold on the expression of their emotions.

When General Etkind arrived, Marina asked them to leave for a while. Half an hour later, they were called back and found the General standing at the foot of the bed. He stayed there unmoving, but Janet had her share of stoic soldiers to deal with and could tell that the older man was shaken to the core.

Samantha had tears glistening in her eyes but refused to let them control her, not now, not yet. Instead, so the slightly unfocused orbs told Janet, she drew on what she had learned from Teal'c to keep from falling apart.

Two nurses came in with a wash basin and some clothes to wash the body for the last time but were ushered out. At first Janet didn't understand, but when all the men, except for the General left the room and one of the women pulled the cover off, she began to understand. She started towards the door but her tall lover held her back.

"I need you, Janet," Samantha whispered and stood next to the General with Janet at her side, letting the others care for her second mother.

Every muscle of the blonde's body was rigid with tension. She stood with her feet slightly apart and her hands clasped behind her back; the picture perfect of outward composure – but the small doctor knew the truth. Only an iron will kept Samantha Carter from losing it.

A few minutes later, the door was opened and a woman rushed in, she was as tall as Samantha but with midnight black hair. The blonde Major moved swiftly and intercepted her before she had a chance to reach the bed. She was practically glowing with barely contained anger.

"Kriech zurück in dein Loch, du elender Feigling!"

Having spent some time as an intern at the 'Tropeninstitut' in Hamburg, Germany's research centre for tropical diseases, Janet knew enough of the language to recognise a few words, but she never had heard so much disdain, so much hatred in the voice of her lover, not even when dealing with one Gao'uld or the other. Why did Samantha think that the newcomer was a coward?

Svetlana intervened, "Samantha, no!" The Russian scientist put a hand on the blonde's shoulder who then turned blazing blue eyes towards her, "Anna had a good reason to do what she did at the time. Let it go, Major Carter."

"No, she's right, Lana. Marina is dead because of me. I have no right to be here. I will wait outside," the woman answered in English with a slight German accent after a short pain filled look at the bed.

Before Samantha had a chance to answer, the door once again opened and a dark-haired girl slipped in, still in the process of barking to someone outside. "Yah dahlzh-nah bweet snyay."

She took in the confrontational scene and quietly stepped in front of the other newcomer. She visibly wanted to say something, but then she saw the still figure on the bed and went over. The body had been dressed by now and laid out on top of fresh sheets with the hands folded as if in prayer.

The girl climbed up and sat at the edge of the bed. She rearranged the hands so they were lying to the left and right of the body and then bent forward to kiss the pale, unresponsive lips.

"Yah vahs lyoo-blyoo, mai-yah vtah-rai-yah math," she whispered with tears running down her face.

Anna stepped next to the girl; and even a blind man two rooms over would have seen that they were mother and daughter. The tall woman closed her arms around the slender body and let her chin rest on the crown of the girl's head.

Silence settled in the room and Janet used the momentary distraction of the others to hug her partner. Samantha gratefully squeezed back and then turned her attention back to the bed. Mother and daughter had both given up on holding back their tears and took comfort in each other's touch, and the tender scene brought a lot of memories back, of the first time the blonde had seen the tall German scientist.

Samantha remembered opening her eyes and seeing worried brown-green eyes looking down on her. She remembered a deep voice asking her if she was all right. She remembered answering that she thought so.

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A cool hand was touching her forehead and gently closing her eyes while the deep, accented voice whispered, "Be quiet and don't move."

At the same time a door close by opened and a male voice boomed in. "How are our newcomers? Already awake?"

The answer came quickly, but she thought not too quickly. "Not yet, Sir. Give it a few more hours; whatever your men hit them with had quite a punch."

The door once again closed, some kind of bar was pulled from the outside and Samantha was sure to hear someone entering a code on a panel.

"You can open your eyes now, both of you. He will be back soon; we have to prepare you for the Commander's first inspection." Samantha obediently opened her eyes and looked straight into the brown orbs. "What's your name?"

Military training reasserted itself when Samantha answered. "Captain Samantha Carter, United States Air Force, matriculation …"

"I'm not your enemy, Captain Samantha Carter."

Strangely enough the blonde officer believed the woman whose name she didn't even know.

"Call me Sam then," she answered in a slightly raspy voice.

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They had cut her hair. At the time it had been falling quite a bit over her shoulders whenever she chose to wear it open. Short hair had not been something the leader of the facility she had landed in fancied; so she had been mercifully left alone.

Samantha remembered Anna's even then long, thick black hair – and only now, looking at her next to her daughter, began to understand the price the German had willingly paid to keep the rest of them from the unwanted advances of the Commander. In comparison, what happened later no longer seemed to be of much importance.

Why hadn't she been able to see it earlier?

The raven-haired beauty slowly regained her composure and retreated from the bed. She looked at Svetlana and said. "We'll be waiting outside. Call us when it's time for the funeral service."

"Anna, stay, please," Samantha found herself saying. "The men will be back soon for the wake. Stay with us. You belong here, you and your daughter."

The German turned towards the blonde and looked at her with big disbelieving eyes. She asked, "Are you sure, Samantha?"

"Yes, I am, Anna. Please stay. Bitte verzeihe mir, daß ich so lange gebraucht habe, um es zu verstehen."

„Es gibt nichts zu verzeihen." The woman answered with resignation in her voice.

"Ich…, ich…" not finding the words she wanted to say the blonde resorted to a more familiar language. "Yes, there is. I held you in contempt for so long. I let one single moment erase all the months you sacrificed yourself to keep all of us safe, and even then all you did was to try and keep another life from harm. Bitte vergib' mir."

Janet could hear the pain and self-mortification in her partner's voice and instinctively stepped closer, throwing caution completely to the wind. Samantha needed her now.

"Thank you, Samantha," the woman answered and returned to her daughter's side.

Silence still permeated, even when one after the other the men who had left the room earlier started to come back about a quarter of an hour later. They took their places around the bed as if in a choreographed dance.

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But the wake didn't stay this eerily quiet. After some time the door to the room Samantha and Svetlana had spent the night in was opened, nurses and doctors brought large chandeliers with white candles and placed them around the bed. There was a cold buffet waiting next door and over the evening the mourners escaped there in pairs or small groups.

Though she didn't understand a word; she could hear them talking and crying and laughing. On a certain level she could understand what they were doing. They were sharing their memories of the dead woman; it was their way of keeping her alive, of keeping her memory alive.

She remembered attending the funeral of an old Irish friend of her grandfather to which he took her when she had been barely out of high school. But then it had been the other way round: They had buried the body and the coffin and then met in the house of the deceased to remember his life, to eat and to drink, to cry and to sing. When they had returned, late in the evening, she had had the feeling that she had known this man she never had seen in life and that she would miss him.

A part of her longed to take part in this mourning ceremony, but there was something more important. Janet stayed close to her lover; she didn't care what anyone might think about her presence or their closeness, and she didn't care if her actions could have any repercussions later when they were back in their own country.

She only knew that her lover needed her right next to her, needed to feel her presence. Part of her marvelled at the inner strength of the stubborn blonde; part of her dreaded the moment when all her reigned in emotions would come tumbling down. She silently vowed that she would be there for her partner when the time came, if she wanted her to or not.

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A couple of hours before sunset Svetlana led Samantha and Anna to the adjoining room. Janet and a very sleepy dark haired girl instinctively followed. The Russian scientist gave each of them a letter. They read it and then stared at each other, completely oblivious to everyone else in the room.

"Will you do it?" Svetlana finally asked but got no reaction from the two of them.

The girl almost instinctively stepped closer to the small doctor who couldn't help but sneak a protective arm around her shoulders. Svetlana smiled at them but then refocused her attention to the still ominously silent women.

"Will you do it?" The impatient woman once again asked.

Anna and Samantha exchanged another meaningful look and then they both nodded slowly.

"Yes, we will sing for her."

"Samantha…"

"Yes, I will stay. I owe her this much…" The blonde turned her head towards the German, "I owe you both this much, Anna. I cut her short every time she wanted to talk about you. I didn't give her the chance to make me understand. Janet, I… I can arrange for you to return to Colorado Springs if… if you want to."

"Do you want me to go?" the brunette asked softly, careful to keep her hurt feelings out of her voice.

"No, my love. I want you to stay. I just thought that with this reporter coming to the base you wanted to be there. And then there's Cassandra."

"Then I will stay. You are more important than any reporter, Sammy, and Cassy is a big girl. She can look after herself, and she has any number of devoted uncles waiting for the chance to care for her."

Janet's free hand lightly touched the blonde's cheek and Samantha closed her eyes with a deep contented sigh. Shortly after, they snapped open again, signalling to her lover that she was not ready to let go of her tight control.

The girl next to Janet stifled a yawn, and her mother got down on a knee and said. "Warum isst du nicht eine Kleinigkeit und legst dich da drüben aufs Sofa, Mari? Ich wecke dich, wenn die Zeit gekommen ist."

"Ich will aber nicht allein hier draußen bleiben, Mama."

Samantha stepped closer to her smaller partner and translated what they were talking about. She told her that Anna wanted her daughter to get some rest and that she would come for her when it was time for the funeral service but that Mari, the girl, didn't want to stay alone.

Janet then turned her attention to the girl. Knowing that she understood English, she said. "Mari, I'm a bit hungry. Would you keep me company? I don't want to be alone out here with all these people I don't understand."

Mari nodded enthusiastically and led the Air Force doctor to a table where a variety of different dishes were waiting for consumption, most of them unfamiliar to the American woman.

Only minutes after they had cleared a plate with a selection of finger-food the dark-haired girl curled up at Janet's side and fell asleep with her head in the brunette's lap.

From time to time Cassandra still slept this way in the comfort of their living room. It usually happened when she had had some kind of trouble at school or with a friend, or when her blonde mother was overdue on a mission and Janet's own worry influenced her.

Janet remembered a time when they were sitting this way on the rather uncomfortable chairs in one of the observation rooms, waiting for Samantha to wake up after the entity had taken over her body.

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The doctor in Janet knew that her lover would be all right. Her physical responses were normal and she had recognised all of them, had even given one of her special smiles to her. She had been sedated to help her get over the trauma – and now, sitting next to her Janet had to admit that she still was in shock herself.

She almost had lost her to the entity; almost had killed the love of her life by stopping her life support. Had it not been for Colonel O'Neill asking her to wait and for Daniel who recognised that her lover's mind had been transferred to the computer mainframe the entity had built, Samantha would have died.

The small doctor sat at the blonde's bedside, monitoring her vitals, holding her hand and waiting for her to wake up. After the first tests to make sure that the Major really once again was herself, and the surprising discovery that the whole time she had been aware of what was going on, Samantha had fallen into a deep sleep. Janet knew that she needed the rest to get over the physical as well as the mental trauma.

'If not for O'Neill and Daniel I would have lost her.'

Janet was still in the middle of berating herself for giving up too easily on her resilient lover when she heard loud voices coming through the only half-closed door. She immediately recognised her daughter's voice closely followed by the exasperated tone of Daniel telling her to slow down and that everything would be all right.

"I don't care Daniel. I want to see them, now!"

The door to Samantha's room burst open; Cassandra stormed in, and stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes fell on the tall woman's still form, her closed eyes, the monitors she was hooked up on, the IV-line going in her arm.

"Mum?"

"Sam will be all right, sweetheart. She's just sleeping."

"Daniel said she almost died. I didn't want her to be alone, without her family," the teenager said in a quiet haunted voice that told the doctor more than enough about the level of her worry and exhaustion. She knew from experience that Cassandra didn't sleep whenever she and Sam had to stay at the base unexpectedly.

Janet closed her arms around her daughter and held her tight. She murmured soothing and comforting words, well aware of the fact that the girl only really could be reassured by Samantha opening her eyes. So, she signalled Daniel who was hovering at the door that she would take care of Cassandra. She pulled her down to sit on the second chair, left from O'Neill's earlier visit with her arm still around her shoulders. Her daughter needed to feel that she would not lose another parent.

"Keep me company, would you? We'll wait for Sam to wake up."

"Daniel said that a computer virus almost killed her. Will she really be okay?"

Having long ago learned that the alien teen tended to worry more if she felt that someone didn't tell her the whole truth, Janet related the whole story of the entity and its artificial intelligence. She told her how it took possession of Samantha's brain and how it saved her after Colonel O'Neill threatened to send more damaging radio probes to its planet.

With Samantha's regular breathing and the accompanying rhythm of the EEG and EKG the girl soon succumbed to her fatigue and fell asleep with her head in her mother's lap. Surprisingly Janet's self-recriminations abated at the contact, with one hand stroking the girl's hair and the other curled around Samantha's fingers. They were far from the comforts of their living room but nevertheless she felt at home.

They still were in this position when the blonde Major opened her eyes a couple of hours later and smiled at them.

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A quiet voice talking to the girl brought her back to the here and now. Anna told them that it was time for the ceremony and that they had to go now.

They returned to the dead woman's laboratory. The body had been wrapped in light blue cloth straps, criss-crossing each other and following an intricate pattern that vaguely reminded Janet of Ancient Egypt. General Etkind reverently placed a square piece of cloth over her face and head, and the six men in the room lifted the corpse onto their shoulders. A procession formed with the Russian General in the lead, followed by the six men, followed by Svetlana, Samantha, Janet, Mari, and Anna with the girl holding tight to Janet's as well as her mother's hand.

They left the hospital through the front entrance, rounded the house, and entered a big, well groomed park. In the middle of a freshly cut lawn a man-sized, thigh-high stack of almost identical pieces of wood was waiting. The General took position at the other side of it and the six men gently posed the body on the even surface of the funeral pyre. Though Janet had never seen one before, she was sure that this was what the wood pile would be used for. She scanned her cultural knowledge for hints on this type of funeral traditions being used in Russia or with the Orthodox Church but came up empty.

"Ich möchte, daß du bei Janet bleibst, Liebling. Sam und ich müssen zu Onkel Grigori. Janet wird gut auf dich aufpassen."

Surprisingly the girl didn't protest but just reaffirmed her grip around the doctor's fingers. Samantha whispered to her lover that Anna and she would have to join the General for the ceremony and begged her to keep an eye on the dark haired girl.

The brunette would have felt infinitively better if she had a better idea of what was going to happen but all she could do was stand her ground and wait.

Her lover's body language had told her that the proud blonde was a good step closer to her breaking point than she had been a couple of hours earlier, but there was another change in her that wasn't as easy to pinpoint. 'It was almost as if she had made some kind of peace with herself', and though the doctor didn't know any specifics she was certain that this had something to with the German scientist and her daughter.

People were arranging themselves in a half circle around the pyre. Janet quickly scanned the crowd and found not only the people she had seen before in Marina's rooms in attendance but a good three to four score more, some in dress uniforms, some wearing lab coats, some in pyjamas and robes. It was as if the whole building was assembled to pay their last respects to a very special person.

Janet could feel that the tall girl at her side was inching closer and seeking bodily contact; so, without letting go of her hand she slid behind the slender body and draped her other arm around Mari's shoulders. The girl immediately accepted the physical comfort and relaxed slightly but she still stood proudly on her own. The small doctor couldn't help but be impressed with this girl who visibly had inherited her mother's genes for height.

The woman lying on this pyre had been very important to her. She had been an essential part of her family, and yet she held herself straight and tried to keep her composure. It reminded her of another girl who years ago had sought the comfort of another tall body and had attached herself to a slightly overwhelmed Captain Samantha Carter.

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Janet was brought out of her musings by a male voice effortlessly filing the whole expanse of the garden. She trained her eyes toward the General who now had Samantha and Anna standing to his left.

"Dlyah nyeh-kah-tah-rweekh rahd-noy yah-zeek nyeh yah-zeek eekh syehr-dyets. Syehrd-tsyeh Mah-ree-nwee gah-vah-ree-loh yah-zeek Shyehk-speer-ah ee Oo-eet-mehn-ah, ah eh-tah mwee boo-dyehm oo-vah-zhat."

Then he switched to English. His voice was heavily accented but easily understandable.

"Today we say our goodbyes to a friend, a mother figure, a sister, a mentor, a colleague. We say goodbye to a fiercely loyal but independent woman. We say goodbye to an incredibly brave human being. Marina herself chose the words that will guide her body out of this world; they were written by one of her favourite poets.

"Dust are our frames; and gilded dust our pride

Looks only for a moment whole and sound;

Like that long buried body of the king,

Found lying with his urns and ornaments,

Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,

Slipt into ashes and was found no more."

Then he once again switched to Russian.

"Poost vsyehg-dah svyeht vah-shyay doo-shee ahs-vyeh-shtai-yeht nah-shee zheez-nee," and repeated in English. "May the light of your soul always illuminate our lives."

The General nodded towards two torch carrying attendants who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. They stepped closer to the pyre, lowered their torches, and ignited it. The wood immediately burst into flames and the girl instinctively sought more contact. The wood must have been soaked with some kind of accelerant for the flames to engulf the body this quickly.

Janet's instincts were screaming at her that this simply was not real, but it took her a couple of minutes to realise that what was wrong was the smell. Burning human flesh had a very distinctive, sickening scent no one ever would be able to forget; and on behalf of the once again stiffening young body in her arms the physician was more than glad that this time they were spared the experience. She tightened her arms around the girl and stroked the back of the hand still holding her own with her thumb in an effort to calm her.

The sound of a single flute began to be heard over the roaring of the fire and behind the flickering curtain she could vaguely make out that it was Anna playing. Her daughter evidently recognised the melody and tears began to drop onto their joined hands.

A few heartbeats later a voice rang out, emitting something that closely resembled the death cry of an animal. Janet's eyes opened wide in surprise when with the next few syllables she identified the voice as Samantha's. She never had heard her lover sing, not in all the years she had known her, not for joyous occasions, not for sad occasions, not even at Christmas. Samantha had always claimed to be musically numb but this unmistakably was the blonde's voice.

Part of her was happy that the proud Air Force Major had found such an outlet for her emotions. Another part of her, however, couldn't help but feel hurt that her long-time lover and life-mate had never opened up enough around her to let her see this side of her personality.

Mari's tears had turned into sobs and the doctor followed her mother's instincts. She once again stepped around the girl, pressing the young face against her chest. Her until then tightly gripped hand was let go and the tall girl encircled her waist with surprising strength.

At first the voice and the flute had been at counterpoint to each other, but soon they mingled and rang out in harmony. The doctor had to admit that it sounded as if they were made to be heard together. It was as if the voice was answering the flute and vice versa.

Finally, the girl's reserves of strength ran out and she bonelessly dropped to her knees. Janet followed suite – as much as she wanted to dwell on the music and her lover's uncharacteristic behaviour, the girl's desperation was a much more immediate concern. The rest of the people watching and the brightly burning flames receded from her awareness. So, she also completely missed it when the voice and music stopped.

Soon after, she felt a familiar presence at her back. She saw Anna in the process of kneeling down behind her daughter; and without letting go of the girl, she relaxed into Samantha's touch, well aware of the fact that her partner still was only a breath away from losing her precious self control.

TO BE CONTINUED