Where My Love Lies

by Sage

URL: http://www.area52hkh.net/ass/sage/lovelies.php
Summary: Sometimes Sam deals, and sometimes she doesn't

I.

Sam winces into the microscope and braces herself on the edge of the lab table. She doesn't even really know what she's looking at. It's been too long since she slept last. So long that she's actually shaking a little bit. So she holds the bridge of her nose.

And she sinks down onto her stool and lays her head on her arm.

Just before she starts to cry she raises her head and wipes her lab table clean. Glass tinkles and fractures into a billion fragments on the floor and the clang of metal still echoes in the emptiness.

Somedays, she hates her job. She hates the military. She hates the Stargate.

They only take the most ambitious, the brightest, the best around here. So when you lose someone, or an entire team of someones, you only lose good people.

And to think she fought to be here. She recited physics while she did push ups and studied when everyone slept, ate, had a life. So she could do this. So she could wash the blood off her hands and file a report and study decay rates.

They cremated almost a hundred bodies right there next to the Gate. And they took five home in body bags.

Nothing she sees in this damn microscope, nothing in this lab is worth it.

Sam really could care less about the broken glass. Or even how much it'll cost to replace. Still, the practicality of filling out the forms screams in her head. And the thought of trying to explain it, even to Hammond - sympathetic as he is - terrifies her.

She knows he's lost people like this before, but it used to make sense. When there used to be God and country. When it meant something.

Only now, it makes no sense on the best of days. Screaming Tok'ra and the smell of blood and the stale air of collapsed tunnels. The way blood never really washes out of anything.

And Sam puts her head on her arms and breaks like glass.

It surprises her when someone touches her hair, and tingle of it runs down her spine.

Her mouth is moving, but Sam isn't sure who's talking when she says, "When I stepped through the gate the first time, I knew I'd see unbelievable things. I just didn't know they'd be so terrible. We lost a whole team. We left Eliot behind to die like a suicide bomber, propped up against the tree. Madison didn't even make it out of the tunnels. We kill one and another takes its place. People die. It's too much, and it's never enough."

Sam's eyelids slide closed.

"I once brought a man back after being dead for twenty-five minutes. And I had a perfectly healthy twenty-year-old sergeant die from a blood clot in his broken leg. The human body is both miraculous and feeble. And you never do get any guarantees. It's the way life is. I know that's not much consolation, but if there was something consoling about death, we wouldn't be so afraid of it, would we?"

Sam sits up and stares down at her folded hands. She turns to Janet with teary eyes and looks up at her, and wants to be beg her for some kind of answer. She pleads when she asks, "How do you deal with it?"

"Somedays, I don't. Just ask Cassie. There are days when I want to break every dish in the house and tear down the walls and scream until it hurts. But then I remember I've got to cook dinner and that my house isn't paid for yet and that I have to save my screaming voice for work."

Sam shakes her head. "I don't know what to do."

"Come home with me. Get a good night's sleep. Start again tomorrow."

"Home?" Sam asks in a distant whisper. Like she isn't sure she knows the meaning of the word.

"Yeah. Home. With me."

Janet pats Sam's hand and leaves. Sam crunches over broken glass, locks her lab door, and follows.

II.

Sleepy and not really wanting to move, Sam searches one handedly for the comforter. Janet winds the sheets around her legs and has to stick just one foot out from under the comforter. Some strange childhood habit that Sam can't quite remember the story behind.

Sam kisses her shoulder.

"Is this how you deal?"

"If not, I say we've had a damn good crack at it," Janet answers. Sam can hear the smile in the way she speaks. The way she sounds so satisfied with herself and sometimes, Sam wonders if Janet wasn't a cat in her last life. The way she stretches. The way the muscles and bones move under her skin when she moves.

"I didn't clean up the broken glass in the lab."

"Sometimes, Sam, you worry about the strangest things at the strangest times. You're the only person I know who's burned breakfast because of wormhole physics."

"I guess I do sometimes," she admits, smiling and running her fingers over Janet's arm, admiring the smoothness of the skin and how her fingers look so pale in comparison.

"Never change."

"I can't promise that."

"I didn't say you had to promise."

"Good," Sam murmurs, edging towards sleep and unable to keep her fingers moving along Janet's arm. "Then I won't promise anything."

Janet's feet sort of wrap around Sam's legs. She's almost asleep when she thinks about how amazing it is that Janet is short. Because somehow, even though Sam is taller, Janet always looks her right in the eye.

III.

"I'd hate to see the other guy," says Jack, standing at the door to the lab while Sam sweeps glass shards into a dustpan.

Sam smiles. "Morning, sir."

"Lemme guess. You haven't even left yet," he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Sam continues to smile and sweep up glass fragments.

"Just don't walk barefoot in here, sir, and I think we should be okay," she tells him, emptying the last of the glass into the trash can.

Daniel appears at the door, with red-rimmed eyes.

"Well, my day's shot, how about yours, Daniel?" Jack asks.

Daniel looks at Jack like not only does he not understand what language Jack speaks, but he's slightly frightened by him. "Huh?"

"What?" Jack asks back.

Sam just shakes her head and smiles.

"Does nobody around here have anything better to do?" Jack asks, glaring at both Sam and Daniel.

"Of course not, Jack. We're only saving the world, fighting the Goa'uld, making huge advances in science and technology," Daniel tells him.

Sam smiles that naughty smile that she smiles when she isn't supposed to. Jack gives her a look that probably, once upon a time, would have been a glare. Even a warning. But she's been around Jack too long to take it seriously. She knows his serious face.

It looks nothing like what he's wearing right now.

Jack takes a seat and Daniel leans against the door.

"You know, I've already ordered Carter to get a life. Don't make me order you, too."

"I'm a civilian, Jack, you can't order me," Daniel snipes back.

Sam is still grinning when she puts the broom and dustpan away. She senses Teal'c before he shows up at the door and silently waits for the banter between Jack and Daniel to subside.

"Party in my lab and everyone's invited," Sam says, with an over-the-top grin.

"Major Carter," Teal'c says, "I have come to inquire as to the memorial for Lieutenant Eliot."

"Actually, so did I, among other things," Daniel says, "Inquire, I mean."

"The memorial service is Wednesday, at 1300. The wake is at Satterfield's house."

Daniel nods. "I just keep thinking of his family. I wish there was something we could say besides 'he died for his country'."

"It's the way life is. I know it's not much consolation, but if there was something consoling about death, we wouldn't be so afraid of it, would we," Sam says, leaning against the table in her lab. And it did sound a lot better when it Janet said it yesterday.

"You should write Hallmark cards," Jack says and turns to Daniel, "So what do you two plan on doing while we're on stand down?"

"I have some translations from PX3-607. What about you, Sam?" Daniel asks.

"Actually, I think I'll go home," Sam says.

"Home?" Jack says, with a smile, "Am I hearing right, Carter? You're actually going home? Away from work?"

"Believe it or not, sir," Sam says, like she's got something to hide.

"But what will physics ever do without you?" he mocks.

Sam smiles fondly at him, "Physics will just have to deal."

- END -