New Fic: Zephyr
Title: Zephyr
Universe: Stargate: SG-1
Character/Pairing: Sam Carter, team friendships
Rating: G
Spoilers: Futurefic, with general spoilers for the series.
Word Count: 2431
Beta: pellucid, who makes me take things apart and put them back together, and in so doing makes me a better writer. All errors are mine.
Disclaimer: I still don’t own Stargate, and I’m still not making any money from it.
Author’s Note: This is for abyssinia4077, who said I could write anything I thought she’d like. I hope this serves.
Summary: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” -C.S. Lewis. The future comes to pass, and Sam reflects.
***
There is a knock at Sam’s office door. She had asked explicitly not to be disturbed, taking a page from Jack’s book by specifying, “Except in case of alien invasion or apocalypse.” Her assistant is a serious young man somewhat intimidated by working directly for General Carter at Stargate Command, and Sam could only assume that meant he would abide by her wishes.
If the world was ending, the phone would have rung long before Lieutenant Ross could cross the hall to knock on her door.
“Yes?” Sam calls, looking up to see Ross poke his head into her office. He fidgets with a piece of paper, turning it over in his hands. No apocalypse, then. Just-what? Who? No one truly important-there would have been a call-but someone important enough to justify Ross shuffling, terrified of making his boss mad, tasked with delivering bad news.
“What is it?” Sam asks, feeling already like the wind has been knocked out of her, a punch to the solar-plexus, just so. It can’t be Cam; he was fine just five days ago when they met at the press conference announcing the Stargate program to the world. Vala had texted yesterday, “I’m leaving the planet!” from the spa to which she had run to escape the reporters.
Ross crosses the room and hands Sam the paper, crumpled now from the sweat from his hands. It could be Teal’c, or Landry, or-
It’s Bra’tac. Just Bra’tac, but that is an uncharitable thought. Bra’tac, who made Teal’c into a warrior and the Tau’ri into a fighting race. Who made the Stargate program what it had become.
Sam folds the paper in her hands, nodding. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” she says. Ross nods and backs across the room, shuffling his feet as he goes.
Sam leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She still feels as though she can’t catch her breath, and her gut twists under the place a punch would hurt most. It has been ten years since they lost General Hammond, and the decade has been surprisingly devoid of moments like this; Sam has watched her program turn again into a mission of peaceful exploration, recommended its successes be shared with her planet. She has celebrated anniversaries and gray hairs.
Bra’tac was not well, she knows that. Teal’c had sent word from Dakara, but Sam has been up to her eyeballs in meetings and carefully worded speeches; in the last week, she’s turned down two hundred media requests and accepted three.
Sam opens her eyes and sits up, pushing back from her desk. She hasn’t been to visit Daniel and his books in too long, and wishes only for a better reason.
**
“It was time,” Daniel says with the gravity of an Ancient, if the Ancients’ voices ever wavered with grief or lost their bravado in the face of the frailty of human-Jaffa-life.
“Yeah,” Sam says.
“You’d think we’d have this beat by now,” Daniel says.
“Death?” Sam doesn’t want to overcome death; their enemies who have tried led themselves and the galaxy to ruin looking to attain what should, Sam believes, remain impossible. “Bra’tac wouldn’t want that.” Bra’tac would want to die with his honor intact and his memory strong in the minds of those who knew him.
“No, I suppose not,” Daniel says, but to Sam’s ears, he sounds unconvinced. Perhaps that’s his quest here, locked away with his papers and books: to find a way to restore the dead, to allow the best of humanity to live forever.
She only asks after his work when Congress demands a detailed account of resource utilization at Stargate Command. Most of the time, Daniel contributes enough in translation or intuition to make it through the next budget cut, but most of the time, he stays behind closed doors, solving the mysteries of the universe.
He hasn’t had much success lately.
Sam says, “There will be a service on Dakara.”
Daniel nods. “Should be fun,” he says, though it won’t be.
Sam wants to chasten him, but the door opens and a young airman looks in. “General Carter,” he says, and Sam turns to face him. It took several years, but she no longer thinks first of her father when she hears that phrase.
“Yes?”
“There is a phone call for you from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Ma’am,” the airman says.
“Of course,” she says, nodding. The airman closes the door behind him, and Sam looks back to Daniel.
“Go,” he says, waving a hand. “The world needs you.”
**
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wants Sam to put together a story about her years in the Stargate Program. Today, if she can swing it; the contingent of journalists camped upstairs at NORAD is hungry for a story, and surely Sam could spare a moment. The universe is quiet today, he says.
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” Sam says, though she isn’t. She remembers Julia Donovan too well to ever appreciate reporters. And even if talking to the media was among her favorite things, somewhere near flying and playing with Cam’s little girl, she would not be sorry to decline today. “I just received word of the death of a dear friend.”
There is a long pause on the other end. Admiral Harris has been something of a friend as long as Sam has been in this job, and he has claimed to understand her frustrations with the process of sharing information: “I don’t like it either, Sam,” he has said, always followed by, “But you must recall, you recommended that we open the program to the public.”
Today, she wishes she could take it all back, take her friends and travel to Dakara, unnoticed for a little while.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sam,” Admiral Harris says. He takes a breath, then another. “But you must understand. You are the face of this program, the one people want to hear from. You can’t simply vanish without a word.”
“I’m going to a funeral, Richard,” Sam says. “Not decamping permanently.”
“I know that, Sam,” Harris says. “But that’s not what the media will say. You will need to speak with them before you leave, and schedule additional time when you return.”
Of course she will. Her life has not been her own since she first set foot on Abydos, those many years ago.
**
The cacophony is nearly deafening. Apparently, leaving the planet for two days is not in the best interest of calm relations with the press. All Sam can hear is her name: “General Carter!”
Someone has a hand up, so Sam points to that reporter, hoping to turn the din into something more controlled. “Yes?” she asks.
“General Carter,” the reporter begins. “Can you advise us where you will be traveling for the next forty-eight hours?” Apparently, the statement she released with this information was inadequate; the journalists need a sound bite.
“Yes,” Sam says. “I will be on Dakara, the capital planet of the Jaffa people, to attend the funeral of a friend.”
Admiral Harris had cautioned her about sharing the fact that she and others used the stargate for reasons other than exploration and conquest. “Someone’s going to want to start a personal interplanetary travel service.”
“They’d have to get through me first,” Sam had said, which Harris had to acknowledge. Still, the noise that starts up again after her announcement leads her to think she should have taken his advice. She hears comments of disgust and awe, and she wishes she was already on Dakara, looking up at the stars on a world that had long since stopped feeling alien.
“Do you do that often?” One voice rings out above the rest, and Sam holds up a hand to quiet the crowd.
“No,” she says. “I don’t. We reserve the stargate almost exclusively for contact with our outposts and allies on other worlds. We continue to explore new frontiers and work to maintain peace where our treaties require it.”
“We defend alien worlds?” someone shouts.
“With what?” says another.
“Spaceships,” says a third.
“What’s the annual cost of protecting other races?”
Sam tries to interject. “Congress evaluates the Stargate program as part of its annual budget,” she says.
“I thought NASA scrapped everything we had.”
“That was ages ago.”
Sam has become irrelevant at her own press conference; she had wanted to tell them about Bra’tac, about the Free Jaffa, about the worlds under her protection and the people who inhabit them. Instead, the reporters are arguing about the space shuttle program-someone has mentioned the Russians, but Sam doesn’t smile. She turns on her heel and wonders if anyone notices as she leaves.
**
They stand together in front of Dakara’s gate, the first men and women to wear SG-1 on their shoulders. Their pictures have been flung across the Internet, the intrepid explorers who conquered space, so much younger then. Sam wonders, idly, what the public would make of this Jack O’Neill, now white-haired and heavyset. What they would think of Cam’s titanium joints or Daniel’s sarcastic wit, more cutting with each passing year.
How they could ever respond to Vala, who announces their arrival on Dakara with, “Jaffa ceremonies are almost as boring as Tok’ra ones.”
“Indeed they are not, Vala Mal Doran,” Teal’c intones by way of greeting, bowing his head in traditional form even as the group begins to cluster around him.
“Muscles!” Vala says. “Are so!”
“Nothing is worse than a symbiote extraction ceremony,” Jack says.
“I don’t know,” says Daniel. “Do you remember the fertility rites on P4X-171?”
And Sam has to smile-though she actually agrees with Vala-because they have converged on Teal’c, and the tradition has become their own, as Cam slaps Teal’c on the back before Vala jumps into his arms as if she were still a young woman. He spins her around and they kick up sand and dust as her hair flies.
But then Teal’c sets her down and steps forward to greet his oldest friends. He turns first to Sam. “General Carter,” he says, nodding even as Sam moves to embrace him.
“I’m so sorry,” Sam says, breathing in the familiar smell of Teal’c and hand-woven Jaffa cotton and candle wax. Behind her, Daniel and Jack shuffle, and that is comforting, too.
Teal’c pulls back. “Bra’tac lived an honorable life,” he says.
Sam nods, looking into Teal’c’s lined face. “And we will remember him well,” she says. A whisper of a smile passes over Teal’c’s face as he takes in her face before turning to Jack and Daniel. Soon, they are trading bear hugs and condolences, grief mixed with joy at a rare reunion.
And then Cam and Vala crowd back in, jostling Jack enough that he complains. It has been long enough since Sam has heard that tone that she straightens up like the girl she was when she met him, then catches herself and rolls her eyes, relaxing again. Around her, updates from the last year slide into reminiscences of the last twenty, and even Daniel grins at a memory dredged from the good old days.
In a moment, they will step outside to watch Bra’tac’s body burn in proud Free Jaffa tradition, but for now, Sam looks around and wishes the reporters could see this: the soldiers who became family before they grew old.
**
When she returns, Sam sifts idly through the emailed requests for interviews; they blur together, effusive attention-seekers and boilerplate corporate memos. But there is one that catches her eye, standing out because it is so straightforward: “Dear General Carter,” it begins, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met many years ago.”
Sam couldn’t possibly forget. Instead of responding to the note, she turns away from the computer and digs out the number for Emmett Bregman.
She introduces herself. There is a long pause on the other end of the line, and Sam must assume that Bregman never expected to hear from her. “How can I help you, General?” he asks.
“Do you remember the documentary you made? When Doctor Frasier died?”
The pause is shorter this time, the answer obvious. “Of course, General.”
Sam isn’t sure how to phrase the question so it seems like the genuine favor it would be. “I was wondering,” she starts, and she’s sure her voice sounds small across the miles that separate them. “Would you be willing to release it to the public?” She takes a deep breath. “And maybe come talk to people here? I want everyone to know our story, and I think you could tell it well.”
Bregman doesn’t hesitate. “I’d be honored, General,” he says.
**
The commissary is packed with SGC personnel and journalists, all sitting in near silence as the documentary plays.
Daniel stands at the back of the room, his arms crossed over his body as if to protect himself from the images playing on the screen. Sam hasn’t seen this footage since Bregman first produced it, and she’s sure Daniel hasn’t either.
“You think this is the right call?” he asks, lowly, as on screen his younger self babbles, excited about something.
Sam shrugs. “I hope so. Bregman has already been conducting interviews with current personnel, and I’ve asked all alumni of SG teams to make themselves available.”
“You think he can tell our story better than we can?”
Sam shakes her head. “No,” she says. “But they’ll listen to him, and they won’t listen to me.”
Daniel smiles at that, barely. “I didn’t think there was anyone left who wouldn’t listen to you,” he says.
“Except you?” Sam counters.
Daniel snorts, and the airmen crowded in the back of the mess turn to stare at him. He raises an eyebrow, and the young soldiers turn back to the show.
On screen, Major Sam Carter is bright and smiling, blissfully unaware of what is to come in the next days or years. In the commissary, a few brave airmen sneak glances at their CO.
“Was I really that young?” Sam asks.
Daniel takes her hand, squeezing it lightly. “We all were,” he says.
She looks around the room, taking in the crowd of people, most completely unaware of what it means to live in a world of alien friends and space travel. Sam wants to tell them that it isn’t so different from what they are accustomed to, but she will leave that to Bregman and time.
Sam smiles, tightening her fingers around Daniel’s. “I guess we were,” she says.
***
Universe: Stargate: SG-1
Character/Pairing: Sam Carter, team friendships
Rating: G
Spoilers: Futurefic, with general spoilers for the series.
Word Count: 2431
Beta: pellucid, who makes me take things apart and put them back together, and in so doing makes me a better writer. All errors are mine.
Disclaimer: I still don’t own Stargate, and I’m still not making any money from it.
Author’s Note: This is for abyssinia4077, who said I could write anything I thought she’d like. I hope this serves.
Summary: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” -C.S. Lewis. The future comes to pass, and Sam reflects.
***
There is a knock at Sam’s office door. She had asked explicitly not to be disturbed, taking a page from Jack’s book by specifying, “Except in case of alien invasion or apocalypse.” Her assistant is a serious young man somewhat intimidated by working directly for General Carter at Stargate Command, and Sam could only assume that meant he would abide by her wishes.
If the world was ending, the phone would have rung long before Lieutenant Ross could cross the hall to knock on her door.
“Yes?” Sam calls, looking up to see Ross poke his head into her office. He fidgets with a piece of paper, turning it over in his hands. No apocalypse, then. Just-what? Who? No one truly important-there would have been a call-but someone important enough to justify Ross shuffling, terrified of making his boss mad, tasked with delivering bad news.
“What is it?” Sam asks, feeling already like the wind has been knocked out of her, a punch to the solar-plexus, just so. It can’t be Cam; he was fine just five days ago when they met at the press conference announcing the Stargate program to the world. Vala had texted yesterday, “I’m leaving the planet!” from the spa to which she had run to escape the reporters.
Ross crosses the room and hands Sam the paper, crumpled now from the sweat from his hands. It could be Teal’c, or Landry, or-
It’s Bra’tac. Just Bra’tac, but that is an uncharitable thought. Bra’tac, who made Teal’c into a warrior and the Tau’ri into a fighting race. Who made the Stargate program what it had become.
Sam folds the paper in her hands, nodding. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” she says. Ross nods and backs across the room, shuffling his feet as he goes.
Sam leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She still feels as though she can’t catch her breath, and her gut twists under the place a punch would hurt most. It has been ten years since they lost General Hammond, and the decade has been surprisingly devoid of moments like this; Sam has watched her program turn again into a mission of peaceful exploration, recommended its successes be shared with her planet. She has celebrated anniversaries and gray hairs.
Bra’tac was not well, she knows that. Teal’c had sent word from Dakara, but Sam has been up to her eyeballs in meetings and carefully worded speeches; in the last week, she’s turned down two hundred media requests and accepted three.
Sam opens her eyes and sits up, pushing back from her desk. She hasn’t been to visit Daniel and his books in too long, and wishes only for a better reason.
**
“It was time,” Daniel says with the gravity of an Ancient, if the Ancients’ voices ever wavered with grief or lost their bravado in the face of the frailty of human-Jaffa-life.
“Yeah,” Sam says.
“You’d think we’d have this beat by now,” Daniel says.
“Death?” Sam doesn’t want to overcome death; their enemies who have tried led themselves and the galaxy to ruin looking to attain what should, Sam believes, remain impossible. “Bra’tac wouldn’t want that.” Bra’tac would want to die with his honor intact and his memory strong in the minds of those who knew him.
“No, I suppose not,” Daniel says, but to Sam’s ears, he sounds unconvinced. Perhaps that’s his quest here, locked away with his papers and books: to find a way to restore the dead, to allow the best of humanity to live forever.
She only asks after his work when Congress demands a detailed account of resource utilization at Stargate Command. Most of the time, Daniel contributes enough in translation or intuition to make it through the next budget cut, but most of the time, he stays behind closed doors, solving the mysteries of the universe.
He hasn’t had much success lately.
Sam says, “There will be a service on Dakara.”
Daniel nods. “Should be fun,” he says, though it won’t be.
Sam wants to chasten him, but the door opens and a young airman looks in. “General Carter,” he says, and Sam turns to face him. It took several years, but she no longer thinks first of her father when she hears that phrase.
“Yes?”
“There is a phone call for you from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Ma’am,” the airman says.
“Of course,” she says, nodding. The airman closes the door behind him, and Sam looks back to Daniel.
“Go,” he says, waving a hand. “The world needs you.”
**
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wants Sam to put together a story about her years in the Stargate Program. Today, if she can swing it; the contingent of journalists camped upstairs at NORAD is hungry for a story, and surely Sam could spare a moment. The universe is quiet today, he says.
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” Sam says, though she isn’t. She remembers Julia Donovan too well to ever appreciate reporters. And even if talking to the media was among her favorite things, somewhere near flying and playing with Cam’s little girl, she would not be sorry to decline today. “I just received word of the death of a dear friend.”
There is a long pause on the other end. Admiral Harris has been something of a friend as long as Sam has been in this job, and he has claimed to understand her frustrations with the process of sharing information: “I don’t like it either, Sam,” he has said, always followed by, “But you must recall, you recommended that we open the program to the public.”
Today, she wishes she could take it all back, take her friends and travel to Dakara, unnoticed for a little while.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sam,” Admiral Harris says. He takes a breath, then another. “But you must understand. You are the face of this program, the one people want to hear from. You can’t simply vanish without a word.”
“I’m going to a funeral, Richard,” Sam says. “Not decamping permanently.”
“I know that, Sam,” Harris says. “But that’s not what the media will say. You will need to speak with them before you leave, and schedule additional time when you return.”
Of course she will. Her life has not been her own since she first set foot on Abydos, those many years ago.
**
The cacophony is nearly deafening. Apparently, leaving the planet for two days is not in the best interest of calm relations with the press. All Sam can hear is her name: “General Carter!”
Someone has a hand up, so Sam points to that reporter, hoping to turn the din into something more controlled. “Yes?” she asks.
“General Carter,” the reporter begins. “Can you advise us where you will be traveling for the next forty-eight hours?” Apparently, the statement she released with this information was inadequate; the journalists need a sound bite.
“Yes,” Sam says. “I will be on Dakara, the capital planet of the Jaffa people, to attend the funeral of a friend.”
Admiral Harris had cautioned her about sharing the fact that she and others used the stargate for reasons other than exploration and conquest. “Someone’s going to want to start a personal interplanetary travel service.”
“They’d have to get through me first,” Sam had said, which Harris had to acknowledge. Still, the noise that starts up again after her announcement leads her to think she should have taken his advice. She hears comments of disgust and awe, and she wishes she was already on Dakara, looking up at the stars on a world that had long since stopped feeling alien.
“Do you do that often?” One voice rings out above the rest, and Sam holds up a hand to quiet the crowd.
“No,” she says. “I don’t. We reserve the stargate almost exclusively for contact with our outposts and allies on other worlds. We continue to explore new frontiers and work to maintain peace where our treaties require it.”
“We defend alien worlds?” someone shouts.
“With what?” says another.
“Spaceships,” says a third.
“What’s the annual cost of protecting other races?”
Sam tries to interject. “Congress evaluates the Stargate program as part of its annual budget,” she says.
“I thought NASA scrapped everything we had.”
“That was ages ago.”
Sam has become irrelevant at her own press conference; she had wanted to tell them about Bra’tac, about the Free Jaffa, about the worlds under her protection and the people who inhabit them. Instead, the reporters are arguing about the space shuttle program-someone has mentioned the Russians, but Sam doesn’t smile. She turns on her heel and wonders if anyone notices as she leaves.
**
They stand together in front of Dakara’s gate, the first men and women to wear SG-1 on their shoulders. Their pictures have been flung across the Internet, the intrepid explorers who conquered space, so much younger then. Sam wonders, idly, what the public would make of this Jack O’Neill, now white-haired and heavyset. What they would think of Cam’s titanium joints or Daniel’s sarcastic wit, more cutting with each passing year.
How they could ever respond to Vala, who announces their arrival on Dakara with, “Jaffa ceremonies are almost as boring as Tok’ra ones.”
“Indeed they are not, Vala Mal Doran,” Teal’c intones by way of greeting, bowing his head in traditional form even as the group begins to cluster around him.
“Muscles!” Vala says. “Are so!”
“Nothing is worse than a symbiote extraction ceremony,” Jack says.
“I don’t know,” says Daniel. “Do you remember the fertility rites on P4X-171?”
And Sam has to smile-though she actually agrees with Vala-because they have converged on Teal’c, and the tradition has become their own, as Cam slaps Teal’c on the back before Vala jumps into his arms as if she were still a young woman. He spins her around and they kick up sand and dust as her hair flies.
But then Teal’c sets her down and steps forward to greet his oldest friends. He turns first to Sam. “General Carter,” he says, nodding even as Sam moves to embrace him.
“I’m so sorry,” Sam says, breathing in the familiar smell of Teal’c and hand-woven Jaffa cotton and candle wax. Behind her, Daniel and Jack shuffle, and that is comforting, too.
Teal’c pulls back. “Bra’tac lived an honorable life,” he says.
Sam nods, looking into Teal’c’s lined face. “And we will remember him well,” she says. A whisper of a smile passes over Teal’c’s face as he takes in her face before turning to Jack and Daniel. Soon, they are trading bear hugs and condolences, grief mixed with joy at a rare reunion.
And then Cam and Vala crowd back in, jostling Jack enough that he complains. It has been long enough since Sam has heard that tone that she straightens up like the girl she was when she met him, then catches herself and rolls her eyes, relaxing again. Around her, updates from the last year slide into reminiscences of the last twenty, and even Daniel grins at a memory dredged from the good old days.
In a moment, they will step outside to watch Bra’tac’s body burn in proud Free Jaffa tradition, but for now, Sam looks around and wishes the reporters could see this: the soldiers who became family before they grew old.
**
When she returns, Sam sifts idly through the emailed requests for interviews; they blur together, effusive attention-seekers and boilerplate corporate memos. But there is one that catches her eye, standing out because it is so straightforward: “Dear General Carter,” it begins, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met many years ago.”
Sam couldn’t possibly forget. Instead of responding to the note, she turns away from the computer and digs out the number for Emmett Bregman.
She introduces herself. There is a long pause on the other end of the line, and Sam must assume that Bregman never expected to hear from her. “How can I help you, General?” he asks.
“Do you remember the documentary you made? When Doctor Frasier died?”
The pause is shorter this time, the answer obvious. “Of course, General.”
Sam isn’t sure how to phrase the question so it seems like the genuine favor it would be. “I was wondering,” she starts, and she’s sure her voice sounds small across the miles that separate them. “Would you be willing to release it to the public?” She takes a deep breath. “And maybe come talk to people here? I want everyone to know our story, and I think you could tell it well.”
Bregman doesn’t hesitate. “I’d be honored, General,” he says.
**
The commissary is packed with SGC personnel and journalists, all sitting in near silence as the documentary plays.
Daniel stands at the back of the room, his arms crossed over his body as if to protect himself from the images playing on the screen. Sam hasn’t seen this footage since Bregman first produced it, and she’s sure Daniel hasn’t either.
“You think this is the right call?” he asks, lowly, as on screen his younger self babbles, excited about something.
Sam shrugs. “I hope so. Bregman has already been conducting interviews with current personnel, and I’ve asked all alumni of SG teams to make themselves available.”
“You think he can tell our story better than we can?”
Sam shakes her head. “No,” she says. “But they’ll listen to him, and they won’t listen to me.”
Daniel smiles at that, barely. “I didn’t think there was anyone left who wouldn’t listen to you,” he says.
“Except you?” Sam counters.
Daniel snorts, and the airmen crowded in the back of the mess turn to stare at him. He raises an eyebrow, and the young soldiers turn back to the show.
On screen, Major Sam Carter is bright and smiling, blissfully unaware of what is to come in the next days or years. In the commissary, a few brave airmen sneak glances at their CO.
“Was I really that young?” Sam asks.
Daniel takes her hand, squeezing it lightly. “We all were,” he says.
She looks around the room, taking in the crowd of people, most completely unaware of what it means to live in a world of alien friends and space travel. Sam wants to tell them that it isn’t so different from what they are accustomed to, but she will leave that to Bregman and time.
Sam smiles, tightening her fingers around Daniel’s. “I guess we were,” she says.
***