Unending: Until the Lights Fail
This fic is Unending, and is focused on Sam and Cam (friendship only, with a touch of UST) and has a very small beat of Sam/Jack, and the others. It's rated G, and just to warn you, it's centered on Alzheimer's disease.
With thanks to my wonderful beta,
hariboo_smirks :)
Until the Lights Fail
On his morning run, Cam slowed as he passed Sam's lab. For all he'd been hard on her in the meeting the day before from frustration, he honestly believed she'd get them out. She was smart like that. He believed she would do it. Or if she couldn't, that no one else would have been able to. He had faith in her like that.
Forty-nine years later
Little moments break the heart, and slowly build to an undeniable avalanche that you realise just a moment too late to get out of the way.
"Sam?" Cam stopped on his morning walk around the ship, hovering at the door of the lab and watching Sam shake herself to attentiveness.
"Hmm?" She looked at him and smiled. "What is it, Cam?"
Cam frowned and took a few slow steps into the room. "Are you okay?"
Sam rolled out the muscles in her neck and smiled, nodding. "I'm fine," she frowned as if she meant to say something else but continued, I'm just taking a break."
Cam nodded, suspicious still, and walked to the door. Placing a hand on the wall, he turned. "Want anything from the kitchen?"
Sam shook her head with the same slightly too serene smile, and Cam thought little of it but that another day in the lab had gotten the best of her spirits.
One morning, a few weeks later, they were sitting around the breakfast table, laughing at some old story - aren't they all, Cam thought - he saw Sam get up and approach the bar where they laid out cereals and milk, then turn and frowning, sit back down. She shrugged at Cam's inquisitive look. "I'm being silly - I forgot what I went to get."
Vala smiled softly and nudged her with a little of her old playful spirit, and it was forgotten.
Weeks later, again, Cam stood in the kitchen. Making dinner, he looked up when Sam came in. "Hey."
"Hey," Sam replied distractedly, looking around the room. "Have you seen my sweater?"
"You left it in the lab," Daniel called through from the table. Sam blushed slightly and nodded, leaving. Cam put both hands on the counter and sighed, closing his eyes. We're all getting old. I forgot where my sweater was this morning. It doesn't mean anything.
He managed to deny it until, days later, they were in Daniel and Vala's room playing cards.
"Samantha Carter, I believe it is your turn," Teal'c inclined his head in her direction.
"I'm picking from-" Sam stopped and blinked. She opened her mouth and closed it, frowning as she looked at Cam.
"Sam?" Vala asked quietly after a beat.
"Cam," Sam nodded, with a relieved smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"It helps if you remember it rhymes, I find," Daniel put in with a gentle smile and earning himself a slap on the arm.
Cam stood outside the door to Sam's lab, taking deep breaths and trying to prepare a speech that was more tactful than his normal vocabulary and failed. Walking in, he paused at the edge of the desk. "Sam?"
Sam looked up and nodded. "What is it, Cam? I'm a little busy."
Cam swallowed.
"I have to hurry with this, you know. I have to get us out of here," Sam continued.
Cam frowned. "Sam, it's been forty-nine years - it's the one anniversary we all remember but never celebrate, remember?"
"I know that, Cam," Sam replied defensively, "It's just-" She sighed. "That beam is going to hit us soon."
Cam sat on the tacitly offered stool. "Is that all there is?"
Sam blinked quickly and stared at the desk in front of her. Voice low, she met his eyes unflinchingly. "I'm running out of time to do this."
Cam let out a sigh. "You've noticed?"
"Of course," Sam answered with a crooked smile. "I'm the most pedantically organised person I've ever met. When I started losing track of days, appointments like when dinner was, when I started to get the corridors confused-"
"Well, you would," Cam put in, "They're all the same."
"- When I started to struggle with names every now and again," Sam continued, looking at him. "I've been on this ship with the same group of people for forty-nine years. I'm hardly about to start getting lost or forgetting what to call you. And I've been getting more confused about little things for a while now."
"You've always had creative answers on the last one." Cam realised he was nervous, almost in denial. He'd come to imply to Sam that something was wrong, and here she was telling him the answer, the truth, and he couldn't hear it. He took a breath to steady himself and looked at her. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure enough." Sam nodded in a movement eerily similar to Vala. "I need to finish this before I-" She looked away. "It's not too bad just now, but it is going to get worse."
"Are you scared?" Cam fought not to say, I am.
Sam sighed and looked at the monitor screen. "'Poor or decreased judgement' - at least I don't have to worry about giving my money to telemarketers - 'may have unusual difficulty performing abstract tasks, like forgetting what numbers are or how they should be used' - 'loss of iniative, may become passive, may suffer from changes in mood.'" In the silence Sam looked at him, and Cam could see her hand shaking at the keyboard, and heard the effort in trying to keep her voice even. "I just read out a list of things, Cam, that make me who I am, but in reverse. I can't forget what numbers are for, or how to make decisions, or even how to want to make decisions. I can't. I mean, if nothing else, what'll happen to the rest of you?"
Cam put a hand over hers. "You're you, Sam. Nothing can change that, and not this. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, sir," she rolled her eyes. "But in all seriousness-"
"What might happen anyway," Cam broke in. "That beam might hit us anyway. We might have an accident on the ship. No one knows how it could end. Is there a way to treat it?"
"It's chronic," Sam smiled sadly, "So it will get progressively worse." She looked away and then back. "Alzheimer's, I mean. That's what it's called, after all."
"Sam, is there a way to treat it?" Cam made himself ask again as she got lost in thought.
She blinked and focused. "There's no cure, but there are some things I can try to manage it." She scrolled through the page, voice calmer but hands slightly unsteady. "For drugs it's mainly cholinesterase inhibitors - they would help with my cognitive abilities for longer, slow the breakdown of the neurotransmitter closely related to memory. I could make those using Asgard technology." She smiled softly, "I can switch to drugs that take a different approach as it gets worse, but for now I should start on a course of drugs and take vitamin E twice a day. All of this might not help," she warned him, "but it might give me time to work."
The acceptance in her voice caused a tight feeling in his chest. "What about the Asgard-"
"Given how they ended their lives, and the differences in physiology-" Sam paused. "I'm not confident enough in my ability to use their medical technology, Cam, I'm not a doctor of medicine. I don't know that I'd know what I was playing with." She sighed under his gaze. "I'll look into it, but I can't guarantee."
As he left, he heard her quietly call out his name. He turned. "Can you keep this between us? I just- I'd rather the others didn't-"
Cam nodded and she sighed in relief.
And so the waiting went on.
If Sam slipped in public, he tried to compensate, to draw the attention. He'd only found her lost in the corridors once, only been on the sharp end of her irrational and unintended anger once, but he knew it was getting harder for her to cope. She spent every waking hour in the lab, trying to find a solution before she forgot how. Cam didn't protect the others from awareness of what was going on, knowing that they had picked up on it and were certain to have found out by now, but he religiously protected Sam from the fact of their knowledge. If it made it easier for her, then he would.
Months later, he stared at his wall, tempted to throw things much as he had all those years ago, and worried that his fragile-feeling limbs would fail in the attempt. Then again, the heat and anger that seared his very bones made it impossible to keep the anger within him - he worried that doing so would fracture those same bones anyway.
It was the injustice of it, piled upon injustices. He didn't know how to articulate exactly how cheated he felt by life and the universe. It wasn't an egotistical statement that he was trapped on a ship with at least three of the most influential people to ever live, and he, Vala and Landry hadn't been quiet on the universal scene since being recruited. They had seen and done things most people would never do, had packed so much into the first halves of their lives that it was an irony beyond comprehension that they spent the rest of those lives waiting.
It was an irony they lived with everyday, as Daniel and Sam pursued their research, but it had become intolerable for Cam at the quiet revelation of Sam's illness. And there wasn't anything to be done - she merely had to live with it, as did they all. Sam feared the effect on the group, that it would deprive them of the last shred of hope, and they would begin to lose sight of options beyond "wait for the beam to kill us" or "die of old age." So Cam dutifully kept silent and watched her struggle, but it caused him agony to see her frown for a beat longer on a question, to hesitate at her computer for that extra second.
Somehow, it was worse because it was Sam. He denied to himself that it was a long-running, denied love affair he wished he'd had, full of chances he wished he'd taken, but the sheer punch to his gut when she accidentally called him 'Jack' made him reconsider with painful self-honesty. He loved her, it was that simple. You'd think that at the end of the universe, almost the only two people in the world, he'd manage to face up to it, but it was only now he could - when that time was approaching an end, one way or another, and Sam was in danger of forgetting some of what had come before.
He knew that Daniel would compare it to Greek tragedies in his mind to try to process the pain of his best friend and lifelong companion, that Vala would simply want to cry but listen to Sam with a bright smile, then weep later with all-too-sharp a grasp of the ironies and injustices. Sam had been one of the ones to open the Stargate, one of the few witnesses to the most pivotal events of humanity's great attempt to fit in and change the universe. She had changed the face of physics, whatever Rodney McKay had to say about it, in ways Cam admitted he didn't understand, but comprehended that they were quiet shifts of importance akin to the tectonic plates on Earth being re-arranged. He comprehended that she was one of the most important individuals ever to have lived, and was slowly forgetting why.
Cam spent hours pouring over the computer database, learning everything he could about what would happen to Sam. He jumped between the 'for patient', 'for loved ones' and 'for practitioner' sections ferociously, frightening himself in the process. He learnt ways to get through to her when she fell out of their particular time. He had no will to correct her when she made mistakes in her speech - malaproprisms, he learnt they were called, or what day of the week they had arbitrarily designated it. She replaced words with words that sounded similar or began with the same letter when the word she meant to say escaped her. 'Visual cueing' became habit - placing her workbooks out on the table to minimise the stress of the work she couldn't bear to leave and channelled every fibre she could summon into completing, making sure the table was set for dinner. Cam did all that he could, and slowly noticed the others adopting similar habits in as quiet a way as they possibly could. Vala tended to 'drop off' things Sam left lying around before she realised she didn't know where they were - even if Vala privately confided that she'd found Sam's calculator in the fridge, and left it at that.
The jarring thing for Cam was that Sam was no invalid. She walked, talked, moved and spoke almost normally - she worked, did the most important work of them all. She just drifted away from them sometimes in space, time and memory, and he wasn't always able to bring her back.
He knew from his reading that if they lived long enough, Sam would need twenty-four hour care, and the charade would well and truly be over. After reading some more of the available literature, and noting the progression of Sam's symptoms, he cautiously began to check her medication. He wanted to believe she was taking care of it herself.
He froze, holding the label in a shaking hand, and looked over to Sam.
"Hmm?" she replied to his stunned call.
"This is Cognex. Tacrine," he added the generic name for the drug, astounded.
Sam took a breath and smiled at him. "Been reading up, Cam? I'm gratefu-"
"Sam, do not give me that," Cam broke in angrily. "You know- you have to know - the possible side effects of this stuff."
"Liver damage and lots of other unpleasant things," Sam replied distractedly. "Yes, Cam, I'm aware of them, but neither Reminyl, Exelon or Aricept had even modest effects, which this does." She set the heel of her hand on the desk and looked at him. "There's also the fact that should the tacrine damage my liver, I will still only die as quickly as that beam hits us, and if I can figure this out, I'll never have grown old in the first place."
"Sam-"
"Cam-"
They looked at each other and froze, Cam looking away first.
The fifty-year anniversary came and went, unmarked but for a moment at dinner when someone said 'fifty' rather than 'forty-nine' and silence fell.
Only days later, sitting around the table, Sam asked Daniel to pass the 'glass next to the salt.' Cam noticed it and saw Daniel and Vala exchange fast gazes above his hand. Even a few months before she would have said 'pepper.' He felt an irrational moment of anger, wondering why, at the very edge of the galaxy and time, they still had to leave so many things unspoken and complicated.
"When I said I wanted to get the team back together, work with you guys, learn from you," Cam began, trying to deflect the attention from Sam, "I did not mean every waking moment for the next fifty years." Sam smiled a little bitterly across the table.
"You said that yesterday," Daniel put in with a sigh, picking at his food.
"I did?" Cam feigned ignorance.
"And the day before," Teal'c intoned.
"And the day before that," Vala added.
Cam paused. "Oh. I'll just... shut up now."
Sam looked between them, a frown creasing her brow. Daniel caught the glance and wearily answered, "No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."
A moment of silence later and Sam set down her fork. "I did it."
"You did what?" Cam asked, tilting his head slightly.
"I figured out how to reverse time within a localised field."
They all froze and looked at her. It seemed inconceivable somehow that what they'd been waiting for had happened.
"What?"
"What's the matter?"
Sam's expression turned bitter. "Maintaining the time dilation field for all this time has almost completely depleted the ZPM, and the power source in the Asgard core."
Cam thought about everything they'd gone through and the tablets in his hands those weeks before - all of the risks and the waiting. "We don't have enough power to make it work?"
"Hmm. There's irony for you," Sam's gaze met his eyes in a silent apology.
Cam, not knowing what else to do, stood up and walked to the window, hearing Sam continue to talk behind him. "I create the field to buy us more time. I finally figure out how to undo it all, and that extra time is what makes it impossible." Extra time- extra time, he thought fiercely, thinking again of the liver damage Sam had risked to figure it out, the extra time she'd risked so much to gain, and for what?
He heard Daniel, shocked, ask, "Are you sure? I mean, if you had some more time, could you-"
Cam's eyes locked onto the beam that it seemed would be the end of them and almost wished it would hurry - he didn't want to die in old age, he didn't want to possibly watch Sam die in pain or see her fight an uphill battle. It was a thought that was beneath him and them, but he couldn't help it.
"I'm sure," Sam replied.
The beam-
He'd told Sam not to give up once before.
"Hey, Sam. Do you remember when we were stuck out of phase?"
He saw her frown and prayed for this to be a good day, inwardly relieved when she replied, "Which time?"
"When you got shot and you thought you were gonna die, and the Ori were gonna destroy that village."
She looked away, deep in thought. "Vaguely."
Cam thought through the words carefully, trying to phrase it in a way that would spark the clearest memory. "You had me use the power source from an Ori staff weapon to power Merlin's device."
Sam thought about it and replied, "We don't have anything even close to a power source that would be required to keep a reverse time-field working for long enough."
Cam, out of habit, looked for the nearest visual cue and found it right outside the window. "Really?" He walked over to her and held out his hand for her to take, feeling her put her hand in his. "Come with me." He walked over to the window with her and pointed at the beam with a smile. "What about that?"
Sam tilted her head and slowly began to smile.
Later, walking through the corridors, after the briefing, Cam caught up to Sam. "You okay?"
"You heard what Daniel said," Sam said thoughtfully. "We're doomed to repeat history unless we change things." She tapped her temple and Cam noticed her eyes had brightened, "How do I change this?"
Cam took a breath. "You can't," he admitted, "but you can forget. Or she can, the young you, and live a long, happy life away from this junk bucket."
"Until-"
"Until, if and when," Cam said slowly, nodding. "My point is, she'll have that 'if' all over again."
Sam nodded, and Cam was suddenly hit by the thought that Sam hadn't been so animated- so alive - as when happily planning their mass suicide to change the past, as if a little of the past aided her. Watching her walk down the long hall to the lab, he couldn't help but see her as she was at the beginning and hopefully would be again.
Standing on the bridge, strangely unnecessary for the most important of things, Cam took one last look at the black. He listened for Sam's voice.
"I'm ready."
"Do it, Sam."
THE END.
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