"No Bodycount" by seldear
Title: No Bodycount
Author: seldear
Summary: There is no bodycount of the living.
Rating/Warning: PG
Spoilers: Point Of View
Recipient: skydiver119
Request details: The recipient was happy with anything except Sam thinking Cam was the greatest thing since the splitting of the atom.
oOo - No Bodycount - oOo
The SFs bring her a bottle of water from the commissary and she twists the seal open with a grateful smile. She doesn't want to move, doesn't want to miss her team-mates if they need to make a quick escape.
Time gnaws on her - the time Dr. Carter didn't have and which Sam now has in abundance.
She waits for her team to come back.
--
If she doesn't think about the other woman as a person, Sam can almost believe this is just another scientist she's working with.
Almost.
Small things are drawn to Sam's memory like iron filings to a magnet.
There are things about the other woman that remind her of her mother. Movements, motions, the angle of her head as she brushes her hair from her face, the walk - less of a stride, more easy-going, the inflection of the voice like her mother. Their mother.
In others, there's no resemblance to Sam's mother and a lot of resemblance to Sam herself.
Not much surprise there. The woman is Sam. Only...not.
"The dampening field will have to be self-calibrating - I can't see any other way of doing it," Samantha says as she unscrews the capacitor and checks the wiring before glancing over the array of parts and pieces that form the disassembled device with awed disbelief. "Jack made this?"
Sam doesn't look up from the calculations. "The Colonel made it, yes. We've got two choices - work out something that recalibrates the modulator field each time, predicated on the previous field, or create a fixed modulator that can deal with varying outputs."
"You're not comfortable with the idea that Jack and I were married, are you?"
"Ya think?"
That slips out past the censors, and Samantha grins, but it only makes Sam more uncomfortable.
They are and aren't the same person - two people with the same genetic material who lived two very different lives.
But it goes further than merely being 'identical twins' - and even that term is incorrect in this context.
Identical twins have the same genetic code, but their brains are still differently mapped and their hormonal chemistry differs. There hasn't and won't be time to do a medical comparison at that level before Samantha has to go back - or completely destabilizes, but given how they talk over each other, Sam's willing to bet that the two comparisons would come up with uncanny similarity.
"Look," Samantha says, and her voice has a hard, angry note to it. "It might not be your life, but it was all I had." Yet again, Sam's seeing herself angry, the way she presses her lips together and looks away, the way her shoulders come back and her head lifts, ready for a fight. "You've still got everything. Your planet, your friends, your--"
Samantha breaks off.
In the silence, Sam doesn't flush. But the embarrassment is there anyway. And she knows the fear that's curdling in the other woman's stomach, she's felt it before.
Sam felt the other woman's pain - sensed the rending pain of cellular entropy as her own atoms resonated in sympathetic patterning to Samantha's. It was what took her to the infirmary in the first place, only to find Samantha being tended by Janet. What manifested in a blurring agony for Samantha was nothing more than a faint ache in Sam - but she felt it.
She feels Samantha's fear - and anger - now, not through cellular sympathy, but initiated in her own self.
In any universe, Sam Carter hates feeling helpless.
--
Sam sits in the dark and waits for the mirror to light up.
It's dark because the mirror blanked out as soon as her team-mates went in, and she ordered the lights down so it wouldn't be so obvious when Daniel found this reality again.
She wishes she'd argued harder to go, but both Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond were adamant.
Sam's team-mates went. She stayed behind.
--
"I'm sorry." They say it at the same time, and Sam can hear the way they match tones and cadence, their voices resonating, one against the other.
In spite of the seriousness of the moment, they both smile - humor in darkness. Then Samantha looks back down at her work again. "You honestly never thought about him--?"
"No." No need to elaborate why.
"Not protesting too much?"
Her own mouth has thinned and hardened with the question. "No. He's a good man. A good...commander." She was going to say 'friend.' But even that's a fine line to walk and a dangerous line to cross.
"And if you lost him? Or the others?"
Sam looks away. With her team-mates, she's a part of SG-1. Without them...
Without the Stargate project, she would have been nothing. Another scientist, exceptional in her own way, but not needed the way she is here - without the options she has in Stargate Command. In two years, she's found a job she loves in a challenging project, with people who know what it is to dream. She's developed trust in herself, self-confidence in her abilities, learned things she'd never even dreamed about.
But more than that, she's gained a team, made friends that are growing to be more like family with every day that passes.
If she loses that...
Her stomach feels heavy, the way it does after a rich, filling meal. She notices every crease in her knuckles as her fingers stop moving on the piece she was reconnecting to the main device.
For the first time she can remember, Sam Carter wants to walk away from a problem, deliberately leaving it unsolved. She doesn't want her team going through that mirror, doesn't want them anywhere near a universe where the Goa'uld have already killed them, where Teal'c isn't free to be himself.
She doesn't want to lose them.
But if she stopped here, now, she'd lose them anyway - their respect, their camaraderie, the things that make them important to her.
Her fingers keep moving and she bends her mind to the problem, her will to the disjointed pieces of the whole. The moment of fear is gone, although the heavy stomach remains. That's usual. She'll deal the way she always does - focusing on something she can do.
An idea forms in her head, hardly more than a seed unfurling. "If we assume the naquada cell discharges energy with each blast - like the slow-draining of a battery--"
"At power levels we can't conceptualize with our energy sources--"
Sam looks up and meets Samantha's widening gaze. "Then what we need is a modulator that can deal with the decay rate of naquada per energy output."
"But we don't have--"
"We do," Sam tells her, and sees an excitement in Samantha's expression that momentarily transcends even the loss she's suffered.
"From whom?"
"An Uron child of the Orbanians," she says. "She specialized in naquada reactors and helped me build one."
"A child?"
"A very unchildlike child - at one stage." Sam thought of her last glimpse of Merrin, sitting in a room, being just 'a child.' "But yes, we've got the decay rate of naquada - or a simulation - now we just have to find a modulator that can produce the field we need."
Samantha nodded, "Did SG-1 ever visit the Marenda?"
"P7C-922? Yeah, we did." Sam looks up, startled as she remembers what marks out the Marendan planet from all the others they've visited these last couple of years. "Those tiny discs that generate the oscillating energy wave?"
For a moment, her counterpart looks disoriented, then nods. "We have the decay rate of naquada; if we can adjust the oscillations to modulate the energy output accordingly..."
"Then we've got what we need to reach the Asgard," Sam says, heading for the phone by the door to requisition the device.
They've got what they need to reach the Asgard, maybe save Samantha's world.
Fear returns, squeezing her chest in a breathless grip.
Her stomach is leaden.
--
The mirror brightens, clears, and she finds herself staring at Daniel.
Her heart leaps - they're still alive! She leans down a little, the better to see him and waves. He begins to smile, then something flickers across his face, almost regretful, and his hand lifts - but not in greeting. In farewell.
Daniel? Wait!
Sam stares as the mirror goes dark, like hope denied.
--
"Sir, I think they could use extra help on this one." Sam has her arguments lined up like ducks on a shooting range. She knows what she wants and she knows what she has to use to get it.
If she knew they would let her go, she wouldn't be having this quivering nervousness all through her body.
General Hammond glances at the Colonel. Sam follows his gaze.
The dark eyes meet hers, unashamed, unapologetic. "Carter, you've done your part with the device. We can handle it from here."
"Sir, I'm useful on a redundancy front on two counts: as backup for you and Major Kawalsky, and as someone on hand if anything goes wrong with the device or the hard-drive."
He hesitates before he answers - enough warning for Sam to stiffen her shoulders and prepare for the blow that's coming. "We've got...Samantha...on hand if anything goes wrong with the technical stuff." He stumbles over the name, but she hardly notices. "Carter, I'd rather you were here on Earth - as our backup."
It's a flimsy excuse, but he's the commanding officer - he doesn't need an iron-clad reason. Sam knows it. He knows it. General Hammond knows it.
She doesn't say she'd rather be with her team. She doesn't point out that she's a more useful backup if she's in the situation with them rather than on the other side of the mirror. She doesn't let more than a hint of her tension show - the fear of inadequacy that gnaws at her.
"Sir--"
"And there's the cascade philanthropy stuff," adds Colonel O'Neill, one hand half-lifting to cut her off. "You're not going to be any use if you're suffering from that."
"Sir, Teal'c is going on this mission, and he has a living counterpart in Dr. Carter's world. Daniel's going - and we don't have any idea of his situation over there. Cascade tremors take at least forty-eight hours to set in..."
General Hammond glances at the Colonel. "I don't pretend to understand the cascade tremors Dr. Carter's undergoing, but isn't it possible that because she's already experiencing them here, you might begin experiencing them a mite sooner than forty-eight hours?" Sam begins to protest, then pauses.
One second of uncertainty is all it takes.
"Carter, you're holding the fort for this one," Colonel O'Neill says. "That's an order." Dark eyes narrow at her, but he doesn't apologize. He doesn't look back as he goes to get changed, leaving her standing in the briefing room with General Hammond.
There's compassion and understanding in the General's gaze when she looks at him, but he's not going to be moved on this. Sam wouldn't expect him to, anyway. "I'm sorry, Major, but you're too valuable for us to lose."
As she and Dr. Carter say their farewells and the two strangers from another universe go through the mirror with her team, Sam thinks that valuable is not the same as valued.
But as she tells the Colonel she'll be here if they need help, he holds her gaze for a second before he moves to go through the mirror.
It leaves her shaken.
He's relieved she's not with them. He's relieved because, more than having someone here as backup, she's out of the danger they're all going into.
You've still got everything. I'm the one dealing with the inadequacy issues here.
When the mirror fades, Sam remembers an instruction by one of her mentors back at the Academy. "Make a choice, act it out and don't look back. There is no bodycount of the living, Samantha. We never get to find out what might have been."
The summer she left school, she reconsidered her academic future hundreds of times, sometimes changing her mind within an hour of the last swing. It terrifies her how different her life could have been - if she hadn't chosen the Air Force. Oh, Daniel described the other reality, but that was his experience, given second-hand to her.
Sam has found out what might have been - who lived and who died because of a choice she made.
Intellectually, she knows that it's not 'her choice' that made that much difference; emotionally, she understands Samantha's anger and guilt only too well.
She's a scientist: rational, logical, intellectual. She's also a human, and that means emotion. If her logic says it's foolish; her heart says it's real.
There is a bodycount of the living, and her team-mates in this world are dead men - walking or otherwise - in the other.
It might be selfish in the face of what Samantha's lost, but Sam's glad it wasn't her.
--
They return through the mirror, weary and injured, tired and relieved. Sam gets them through the debriefing, and takes the elevators as far as the level of the locker rooms where they get out, leaving her to return to her lab.
She doesn't mention the kiss Colonel O'Neill gave her counterpart. Neither does he.
The guys limp out and the doors close behind them.
Sam gives silent thanks to the universe.
- fin -
Author: seldear
Summary: There is no bodycount of the living.
Rating/Warning: PG
Spoilers: Point Of View
Recipient: skydiver119
Request details: The recipient was happy with anything except Sam thinking Cam was the greatest thing since the splitting of the atom.
oOo - No Bodycount - oOo
The SFs bring her a bottle of water from the commissary and she twists the seal open with a grateful smile. She doesn't want to move, doesn't want to miss her team-mates if they need to make a quick escape.
Time gnaws on her - the time Dr. Carter didn't have and which Sam now has in abundance.
She waits for her team to come back.
--
If she doesn't think about the other woman as a person, Sam can almost believe this is just another scientist she's working with.
Almost.
Small things are drawn to Sam's memory like iron filings to a magnet.
There are things about the other woman that remind her of her mother. Movements, motions, the angle of her head as she brushes her hair from her face, the walk - less of a stride, more easy-going, the inflection of the voice like her mother. Their mother.
In others, there's no resemblance to Sam's mother and a lot of resemblance to Sam herself.
Not much surprise there. The woman is Sam. Only...not.
"The dampening field will have to be self-calibrating - I can't see any other way of doing it," Samantha says as she unscrews the capacitor and checks the wiring before glancing over the array of parts and pieces that form the disassembled device with awed disbelief. "Jack made this?"
Sam doesn't look up from the calculations. "The Colonel made it, yes. We've got two choices - work out something that recalibrates the modulator field each time, predicated on the previous field, or create a fixed modulator that can deal with varying outputs."
"You're not comfortable with the idea that Jack and I were married, are you?"
"Ya think?"
That slips out past the censors, and Samantha grins, but it only makes Sam more uncomfortable.
They are and aren't the same person - two people with the same genetic material who lived two very different lives.
But it goes further than merely being 'identical twins' - and even that term is incorrect in this context.
Identical twins have the same genetic code, but their brains are still differently mapped and their hormonal chemistry differs. There hasn't and won't be time to do a medical comparison at that level before Samantha has to go back - or completely destabilizes, but given how they talk over each other, Sam's willing to bet that the two comparisons would come up with uncanny similarity.
"Look," Samantha says, and her voice has a hard, angry note to it. "It might not be your life, but it was all I had." Yet again, Sam's seeing herself angry, the way she presses her lips together and looks away, the way her shoulders come back and her head lifts, ready for a fight. "You've still got everything. Your planet, your friends, your--"
Samantha breaks off.
In the silence, Sam doesn't flush. But the embarrassment is there anyway. And she knows the fear that's curdling in the other woman's stomach, she's felt it before.
Sam felt the other woman's pain - sensed the rending pain of cellular entropy as her own atoms resonated in sympathetic patterning to Samantha's. It was what took her to the infirmary in the first place, only to find Samantha being tended by Janet. What manifested in a blurring agony for Samantha was nothing more than a faint ache in Sam - but she felt it.
She feels Samantha's fear - and anger - now, not through cellular sympathy, but initiated in her own self.
In any universe, Sam Carter hates feeling helpless.
--
Sam sits in the dark and waits for the mirror to light up.
It's dark because the mirror blanked out as soon as her team-mates went in, and she ordered the lights down so it wouldn't be so obvious when Daniel found this reality again.
She wishes she'd argued harder to go, but both Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond were adamant.
Sam's team-mates went. She stayed behind.
--
"I'm sorry." They say it at the same time, and Sam can hear the way they match tones and cadence, their voices resonating, one against the other.
In spite of the seriousness of the moment, they both smile - humor in darkness. Then Samantha looks back down at her work again. "You honestly never thought about him--?"
"No." No need to elaborate why.
"Not protesting too much?"
Her own mouth has thinned and hardened with the question. "No. He's a good man. A good...commander." She was going to say 'friend.' But even that's a fine line to walk and a dangerous line to cross.
"And if you lost him? Or the others?"
Sam looks away. With her team-mates, she's a part of SG-1. Without them...
Without the Stargate project, she would have been nothing. Another scientist, exceptional in her own way, but not needed the way she is here - without the options she has in Stargate Command. In two years, she's found a job she loves in a challenging project, with people who know what it is to dream. She's developed trust in herself, self-confidence in her abilities, learned things she'd never even dreamed about.
But more than that, she's gained a team, made friends that are growing to be more like family with every day that passes.
If she loses that...
Her stomach feels heavy, the way it does after a rich, filling meal. She notices every crease in her knuckles as her fingers stop moving on the piece she was reconnecting to the main device.
For the first time she can remember, Sam Carter wants to walk away from a problem, deliberately leaving it unsolved. She doesn't want her team going through that mirror, doesn't want them anywhere near a universe where the Goa'uld have already killed them, where Teal'c isn't free to be himself.
She doesn't want to lose them.
But if she stopped here, now, she'd lose them anyway - their respect, their camaraderie, the things that make them important to her.
Her fingers keep moving and she bends her mind to the problem, her will to the disjointed pieces of the whole. The moment of fear is gone, although the heavy stomach remains. That's usual. She'll deal the way she always does - focusing on something she can do.
An idea forms in her head, hardly more than a seed unfurling. "If we assume the naquada cell discharges energy with each blast - like the slow-draining of a battery--"
"At power levels we can't conceptualize with our energy sources--"
Sam looks up and meets Samantha's widening gaze. "Then what we need is a modulator that can deal with the decay rate of naquada per energy output."
"But we don't have--"
"We do," Sam tells her, and sees an excitement in Samantha's expression that momentarily transcends even the loss she's suffered.
"From whom?"
"An Uron child of the Orbanians," she says. "She specialized in naquada reactors and helped me build one."
"A child?"
"A very unchildlike child - at one stage." Sam thought of her last glimpse of Merrin, sitting in a room, being just 'a child.' "But yes, we've got the decay rate of naquada - or a simulation - now we just have to find a modulator that can produce the field we need."
Samantha nodded, "Did SG-1 ever visit the Marenda?"
"P7C-922? Yeah, we did." Sam looks up, startled as she remembers what marks out the Marendan planet from all the others they've visited these last couple of years. "Those tiny discs that generate the oscillating energy wave?"
For a moment, her counterpart looks disoriented, then nods. "We have the decay rate of naquada; if we can adjust the oscillations to modulate the energy output accordingly..."
"Then we've got what we need to reach the Asgard," Sam says, heading for the phone by the door to requisition the device.
They've got what they need to reach the Asgard, maybe save Samantha's world.
Fear returns, squeezing her chest in a breathless grip.
Her stomach is leaden.
--
The mirror brightens, clears, and she finds herself staring at Daniel.
Her heart leaps - they're still alive! She leans down a little, the better to see him and waves. He begins to smile, then something flickers across his face, almost regretful, and his hand lifts - but not in greeting. In farewell.
Daniel? Wait!
Sam stares as the mirror goes dark, like hope denied.
--
"Sir, I think they could use extra help on this one." Sam has her arguments lined up like ducks on a shooting range. She knows what she wants and she knows what she has to use to get it.
If she knew they would let her go, she wouldn't be having this quivering nervousness all through her body.
General Hammond glances at the Colonel. Sam follows his gaze.
The dark eyes meet hers, unashamed, unapologetic. "Carter, you've done your part with the device. We can handle it from here."
"Sir, I'm useful on a redundancy front on two counts: as backup for you and Major Kawalsky, and as someone on hand if anything goes wrong with the device or the hard-drive."
He hesitates before he answers - enough warning for Sam to stiffen her shoulders and prepare for the blow that's coming. "We've got...Samantha...on hand if anything goes wrong with the technical stuff." He stumbles over the name, but she hardly notices. "Carter, I'd rather you were here on Earth - as our backup."
It's a flimsy excuse, but he's the commanding officer - he doesn't need an iron-clad reason. Sam knows it. He knows it. General Hammond knows it.
She doesn't say she'd rather be with her team. She doesn't point out that she's a more useful backup if she's in the situation with them rather than on the other side of the mirror. She doesn't let more than a hint of her tension show - the fear of inadequacy that gnaws at her.
"Sir--"
"And there's the cascade philanthropy stuff," adds Colonel O'Neill, one hand half-lifting to cut her off. "You're not going to be any use if you're suffering from that."
"Sir, Teal'c is going on this mission, and he has a living counterpart in Dr. Carter's world. Daniel's going - and we don't have any idea of his situation over there. Cascade tremors take at least forty-eight hours to set in..."
General Hammond glances at the Colonel. "I don't pretend to understand the cascade tremors Dr. Carter's undergoing, but isn't it possible that because she's already experiencing them here, you might begin experiencing them a mite sooner than forty-eight hours?" Sam begins to protest, then pauses.
One second of uncertainty is all it takes.
"Carter, you're holding the fort for this one," Colonel O'Neill says. "That's an order." Dark eyes narrow at her, but he doesn't apologize. He doesn't look back as he goes to get changed, leaving her standing in the briefing room with General Hammond.
There's compassion and understanding in the General's gaze when she looks at him, but he's not going to be moved on this. Sam wouldn't expect him to, anyway. "I'm sorry, Major, but you're too valuable for us to lose."
As she and Dr. Carter say their farewells and the two strangers from another universe go through the mirror with her team, Sam thinks that valuable is not the same as valued.
But as she tells the Colonel she'll be here if they need help, he holds her gaze for a second before he moves to go through the mirror.
It leaves her shaken.
He's relieved she's not with them. He's relieved because, more than having someone here as backup, she's out of the danger they're all going into.
You've still got everything. I'm the one dealing with the inadequacy issues here.
When the mirror fades, Sam remembers an instruction by one of her mentors back at the Academy. "Make a choice, act it out and don't look back. There is no bodycount of the living, Samantha. We never get to find out what might have been."
The summer she left school, she reconsidered her academic future hundreds of times, sometimes changing her mind within an hour of the last swing. It terrifies her how different her life could have been - if she hadn't chosen the Air Force. Oh, Daniel described the other reality, but that was his experience, given second-hand to her.
Sam has found out what might have been - who lived and who died because of a choice she made.
Intellectually, she knows that it's not 'her choice' that made that much difference; emotionally, she understands Samantha's anger and guilt only too well.
She's a scientist: rational, logical, intellectual. She's also a human, and that means emotion. If her logic says it's foolish; her heart says it's real.
There is a bodycount of the living, and her team-mates in this world are dead men - walking or otherwise - in the other.
It might be selfish in the face of what Samantha's lost, but Sam's glad it wasn't her.
--
They return through the mirror, weary and injured, tired and relieved. Sam gets them through the debriefing, and takes the elevators as far as the level of the locker rooms where they get out, leaving her to return to her lab.
She doesn't mention the kiss Colonel O'Neill gave her counterpart. Neither does he.
The guys limp out and the doors close behind them.
Sam gives silent thanks to the universe.
- fin -