The music poured from her, soaking the lab in her grief – and her despair. For she could no longer even remember the day she had given up – when she'd gone from hoping for a solution and imagining the day she'd return home to knowing it was futile. The moment she'd gone from searching for an answer to mindlessly moving forward only because there was nothing left to do. Because while everything else changed, one thing remained constant. Sam never stopped. Not while there was still energy left to move forward.
She'd simply stopped believing forward contained anything but more misery. And only here, with the cello her sole companion, did she freely express the depth of that loss.
Because she'd been happy, once. A lifetime ago in another place and another time. When laughter had been free and grief sheltered in welcoming arms. And while there were still smiles, and there were still arms willing to hold her, they could never replace the ones she had lost. These were mere shadows of the joy she had known only too briefly, before time had ripped him away from her as surely as death ever could.
She understood now how it must feel for amputees – to constantly reach for a missing limb only to find it gone. The constant recurring loss gradually fading into a numb tingle. Or the pain her own father must have gone through, half of himself gone, irreplaceably lost, but the others who remained needing him completely.
The grief was unbearable. It threatened to crush her. So she did not bear it. She let the cello feel in her place, the music expressing what she could not.
And so she played, and she worked, and she moved forward. Because there was nothing else she could do.
-o-o-o-
The work was finished, the sequence complete. One final key stroke and they would be free. The Odyssey would explode and then – if she were right – none of this would have happened. All of them, except Teal'c, would be returned to the moment before the time bubble was created, with no memory of the intervening years. The years of pain and loneliness gone as if they had never happened.
Because they never would have.
Yet in the final moment before hitting that final stroke, Sam looked up. Across the lab, secure in its stand, her cello stood alone. She was leaving it, too, and for one unbelievable second she felt a wave of sadness at the loss.
But just for one moment. Then the cello – and the lab around it – was lit in the sudden intense glare of the Ori blast, and she knew she had won. She had succeeded against all odds, and was finally headed back home, back to the time and place where she belonged, back to –