Memories of the Heart by Betty Bokor
Sam/Daniel. A mission goes horribly wrong while Sam's life is changed forever. Spoilers: All seasons, including 10 to the end.
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.
Memories of the Heart
Chapter 5
Sam was having lunch in the Atlantis cafeteria when the news came in. She felt completely helpless, unable to participate in the search parties General Landry had ordered. She impatiently awaited the results of every search, only to renew her frustration at the lack of results.
She was not willing to accept that Daniel was not coming back. She had hopes of starting a new life with him and she refused to believe that they would die so soon after being born.
A whole week went by without any positive results. However, the number of members of the search party who admitted having heard or felt Daniel in some way grew daily. Sam clung to those reports as her only hope.
By the end of the week the search was called off. There were no traces of Daniel −or of the people who had taken him− anywhere. Landry did not see any reason to keep spending resources on a useless search and he was also concerned about the amount of accidents and injuries suffered by members of the expedition, all related to episodes involving Daniel's voice or imagined presence.
Sam disagreed. She believed that few people deserved an extraordinary effort more than Daniel. She was tired of the "we wouldn't do it any different for anyone else." Daniel was different. He had proven his value more times than necessary and here they were, again, taking his death as an acceptable loss, as a reasonable price to pay for the weapon they had found.
Sam got in touch with Jack and tried to push him into ordering more searches. Jack denied having given up, but explained all the bureaucratic obstacles that were stopping him from searching much longer. Sam was stunned. She remembered the day after Daniel's first ascension, when she had gone looking for comfort and had only gotten a cold "What do you want me to do? He's gone. We've got work to do." She knew how important Daniel was for Jack, so she could only imagine that that was Jack's way of coping with yet another loss in his life.
Nonetheless, Jack got Landry to extend the search for one more week. Sam spent most of that time sitting in the darkness in her Atlantis' quarters. She did not cry, because crying would mean recognizing that Daniel was gone. She just felt unable to engage in meaningless talk with other people, so she only got out to fulfill her duties and she avoided any unnecessary social interaction.
Sometimes she felt furious; furious at Daniel for probably dying one more time; furious at herself for putting him right there in the path of her curse. It had to be a curse. All the men who had been close to her in the last ten years were dead or MIA. Jonas Hansen, Narim, Martouf, even Joe Faxon… or Orlin, who would never be himself again. Jack O'Neill was alive, but he had been smart enough to keep their connection at a fairly distant level.
Other times she just felt mad that she had put herself in a more vulnerable position. If only she had not kissed Daniel that last night, if only she had left him to sleep alone and never discovered what they could have had together… Would her pain be any less? No. There was no way to diminish that kind of pain; it had been as bad since the times of Nem and trying to blame one of the best memories of her life for it was unfair. At least, now she could draw comfort from every second of the night they had spent together.
With every day that passed, Sam found it harder to sleep. She felt that it was wrong to lie there, resting in her bed, while Daniel was lost. One night, she got up and looked in one of her dresser drawers for a small paper she had kept there. It was the representation of the Astradan symbol Daniel had made while explaining its meaning to her.
She walked back to her bed and sat down on the edge with the paper in her hand. There was something in it that gave her strange comfort. There were paths that led to reward and stopped there; the story not always ended in death. The problem was that all the possible outcomes had to go through torture and pain, which meant that if Daniel was still out there, he was suffering. But he could be out there…
The next morning she decided to confide in someone. She needed to talk about what she was going through or she would go mad. She walked to the Infirmary and sat down to talk with Jennifer Keller. She did not know exactly why she had chosen the young doctor, but she opened up to her almost as much as she used to do with Janet Fraiser.
Jennifer felt so comfortable with Sam that she dared talk about her mixed feelings over Atlantis and her position there. She also talked about how isolated and lonely she felt.
Sam knew she had found a new friend.
After their long talk, they both felt much better and they promised to help each other in any way they could.
Meanwhile, in Astrada, the search party was about to pack up and go home. The afternoon before the scheduled end of the search, they finally got results, but the complete opposite of what Sam had been hoping for. A unit combing an area north of where they had seen Daniel for the last time found many of the pieces of the equipment he had taken for the mission. Books, notebooks, even food rations were spread along a narrow path. However, it was what they found on his stuff that bothered them the most: blood. Almost every item had been stained by blood and the dry trail of the vital liquid followed irregularly the length of the path.
The samples that were sent to the laboratory confirmed what they had already guessed; it was positively Daniel's blood.
For two days Cam, Teal'c, and Vala followed the trail. They felt it was strange that all those discoveries had happened right when they were about to abandon the search. Cam felt that someone was trying to make them desist from coming back to search again.
As they walked along the path, sometimes they found long stretches of road without any blood, as if Daniel had finally been able to stop the hemorrhage, but sooner or later the dreadful stains came back to point the direction of his journey. On the second afternoon of their march, they reached a sandy beach that touched the edges of a peaceful lake. On the clammy sand that had not been disturbed by the high tide, they observed what seemed to be the insecure footprints of the injured Daniel. His jacket, torn in many places, his socks, and his boots lay near the water.
The footsteps seemed to walk into the water, but they never came back.
After an extensive search of the area revealed no more signs of Daniel, General Landry officially declared the rescue mission ended and Daniel dead. Nobody could come up with any reason to keep him from doing it.