You Cannot Lose My Love, a stargate: sg-1 fanfic

Title: You Cannot Lose My Love

Author: SGater926

Email: sgater926yahoo(dot)com

Status: Complete

Rating: K

Content Warnings: None

Season/sequel info: Post-series

Spoilers: Basically anything in the series that has to do with Sam is up for grabs.

Summary: Sam takes a quiet moment to reflect on her life.

Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me. The song belongs to Sara Groves. I am not making any money from this. No copyright infringement is intended. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Feedback: Please.

Author's Note: I heard this song and it reminded me of Sam and this story just begged me to be written.

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Samantha Carter sat in the dimly lit room, feeling unusually reflective. She stared at the picture of her parents that was on the dresser and recalled a lullaby that her mother used to sing to her. She smiled wryly when she thought of just how right her mother was about some of the things that would happen in her life. She focused on the words of the song and lost herself in memories as she began to hum softly.

~You will lose your baby teeth,~

"Mommy! Mommy! Mark and I were playing and my tooth fell out! Look!"

The little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl ran into the house and jumped onto her mother's lap. She held up the baby tooth for her mother to see. Her mother wrapped her arms around her and smiled gently.

"Okay, honey, why don't you go put it under your pillow. Tonight the Tooth Fairy will come and leave you a surprise."

"Okay!" Little Sam jumped off of her mother's lap and ran to her room.

Sam smiled at the memory, recalling that when she had woken up that morning her tooth was gone and a shiny quarter was left in its place.

~At times, you'll lose your faith in me.~

"How could you?! You were supposed to be here for me! Why did you leave me?!" A teenaged Sam sobbed as she sank down onto the ground. Her cheek rested against cold granite as she continued to cry: for herself, for her family, and for the mother she had lost.

Sam's heart clenched as she remembered the death of her mother. She remembered the phase she went through when she blamed her mother for her own death. She should have stayed home that day. She should have driven herself instead of asking Jacob to pick her up. She should have waited instead of taking a cab. Sam realized how irrational it was and eventually she stopped thinking those thoughts, but for a while, Sam acknowledged, she had lost her faith in her mother.

~You will lose a lot of things,~

Over the years Sam had definitely lost a lot of things, both objects and otherwise. 'To lose something is such a broad concept,' she thought. Just the other day she "lost" her favorite pen. Four years ago she had "lost" her best friend. Sam took at tenuous breath as a bit of moisture gathered in her eyes.

~But you cannot lose my love.~

~You may lose your appetite,~

Sam couldn't even begin to count how many times she had lost her appetite because of the things she had seen, the things she had been forced to do, or the things that were done to her and her team. Even now, she had to be careful not to delve too deeply into certain memories because, depending on how much she recalled and in what level of detail, they still had the power to rob her of any desire, or even ability, to eat or sleep.

~Your guiding sense of wrong and right.~

Sometimes she felt so lost. Sometimes she felt like she didn't even recognize herself. Those were the moments she feared the most, the moments when she didn't know what her own motives were. She could deal with an enemy; she would take the Goa'uld, the Ori, the Replicators, or the Wraith any day over the darkness she found in herself. Even when she was doing the "right" thing, sometimes she couldn't help but wonder if that was good enough. She wondered how many times she had done things only thinking of herself, letting her own emotions act as her guiding sense of wrong and right. Through SG-1's adventures and misadventures, through she knew just how blurred the line could get. She realized that, sometimes, trying to figure out the right thing to do was still like navigating using sound in a canyon full of fog—no ability to see and echoes bouncing all over the place.

~You may lose your will to fight,~

There had been more than a few times when she had been sure she was going to die, but even when fighting was impossible and death was staring her in the face, the will to fight did not leave her. The willingness to go on if at all possible was there even if the means were not. However, there was one time when she had actually completely lost her will to fight.

The super-soldier emerged from the rubble like something from a bad horror movie and she just knew that the end had come. She had failed. She was so tired. She couldn't fight anymore, she couldn't run, and what was worse, she realized that she just didn't care. She had lost all hope. A deep sense of despair gripped her and she just gave up. She bowed her head and waited for the inevitable...that thankfully never came.

~But you cannot lose my love.~

~You will lose your confidence.~

So many people relied on her for so many things through the years. Sometimes it was just overwhelming. Sometimes she felt completely inadequate. "You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water." It was a statement that, though a joke, was delivered from a place of deep-seated insecurity. She knew better than anyone that many times, despite her most "brilliant" plans, careful calculations, and "heroic deeds," they got through some things by the skin of their teeth and only then because fortune happened to be on their side that time. She wondered when the time would come when what she had to offer wouldn't be enough.

~In times of trial, your common sense.~

Yes, Samantha Carter said and did stupid things sometimes. She shook her head when she thought of some of them. Some were worse than others, she mused. For instance, the day she reported for duty at the SGC. She had been challenged by O'Neill and his men and she almost did feel like she was on trial. Her common sense apparently fled and she let her mouth get away from her. "Just because my reproductive organs are on the inside instead of the outside, doesn't mean I can't handle whatever you can handle"—who would ever say that?! Well, apparently she would...and did. However, to this day, she still maintained that she must have been suffering from a momentary case of insanity.

Another incident that came to mind that was quite a bit less lighthearted was the debacle when she had first encountered Orlin. She knew better, and if she had stopped to think instead of just acting out of an emotional response, she never would have done it, but she had harbored an alien in her house. The reasons were two-fold really. First, she was hurt by the lack of trust her team demonstrated and she was afraid of what they would think and do if she attempted to talk with them again. Second, she liked the way Orlin made her feel. He understood her, knew her, appreciated her. She just neglected to take into account that it was because he had invaded her life and her home to gain that information. And even though he asked her permission the second time, and he seemed to reject the thought of an "invasion of privacy," that is exactly what he did. She shuddered to think of what could have happened if Orlin hadn't been a "good guy."

~You may lose your innocence,~

She had seen too much, done too much to ever consider herself innocent again. She knew too much of the evil in the universe. Even in fighting that evil, she did things that were distasteful. It went back to that oft-blurry line. Sometimes the end justified the means, sometimes it did not, but no matter how evil a person was, killing them always robbed her of a little more of her innocence. She thought back to what then-Colonel O'Neill said to her in those very early days about the sixth commandment. "No matter what the reason, every time you break it, you take one step closer to Hanson." He was right; she just hadn't realized how right he was at the time.

~But you cannot lose my love.~

~Many things can be misplaced;~

She had misplaced many things in her lifetime. She had misplaced toys, books, shoes, car keys, and other material things. More significantly, there were times when she misplaced more important things...like her trust. Sometimes it was hard for her to trust anyone anymore. She had been burned too many times to just waltz into a situation with the same bright-eyed, idealistic enthusiasm she'd had ten-plus years ago. She tried not to be cynical, she really did, but sometimes she felt like she was fighting a losing battle.

~Your very memories be erased.~

She had been situations where her memory was messed with more than once, but one instance stuck out in her mind: the ice planet. Okay, so their memories weren't really erased, but they might as well have been for the time the memory stamp was in effect. And though the memory stamp faded and her own memories were allowed to surface once more, the fading of the stamp had no impact on her memories of what had happened while she lived as Thera, and many times she had puzzled over the strange contentment she had felt living a life so wholly unlike her own.

~No matter what the time or space,~

Various missions she'd been on over the years flashed through her mind, her "everyday" journeys through the stars—the different planets, ships, galaxies, alternate universes, and moments in time. She had certainly seen her fair share of time and space whether it was Earth in 1969 or the Pegasus Galaxy in 2009. She had been all over the universe, seen and done things that her mother could never have even imagined.

~You cannot lose my love.~

As a little girl dreaming of the stars she had no idea where her life would lead her or who she would grow up to be. She had no idea that at fifteen years old, baking cookies in the kitchen, she would find out had she lost her mother. But despite the many differences between that little girl on her mother's lap and the woman she was today, everything from lost teeth to lost innocence, one thing was constant. Sam knew that through everything, despite all she had seen and done, the good and the bad, even if her mother had been there to see every detail, there was nothing Sam could ever do to lose her mother's love.

~You cannot lose,
You cannot lose,
You cannot lose my love.~

And as her husband entered the room and came to stand by her side to look down with her at the small bundle in her arms, she knew exactly how her mother felt.

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AN2: Thanks for sticking with me. I hope you enjoyed it.