Title: Through the Looking Glass
Rating: PG
Characters: Sam Carter
Word Count: 326
Warnings/Spoilers: AU
Summary: The quest for home.
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 belongs to MGM.
There was the one where Jack died in her arms.
After that was the one where General Hammond had retired and never taken charge of the SGC. A few after that was the one where the Goa'uld had never been chased away from Earth. Directly before that was the one where Sweden was a world power and held the Stargate. Once she had come across one where she had a kid.
There was also the one where she had never been born. She almost stayed there, because there was only one of her and no chance of catastrophic cascade failure, and because it was close to her own world. But Teal'c watched her suspiciously, and Daniel never knew what to say around her, and the colonel looked right through her in a way that kept her awake at night. They were familiar to her, but she was a stranger to them. She didn't stay long enough to find out if that could change.
She kept waiting for the one that had a working controller. She knew the math, probably better than anyone. The chances of her coming across her own world by chance were astronomical, even if one assumed there weren't in fact an infinite number of alternate universes.
But there almost certainly was.
A working controller was all she needed. Then she could improve the odds of finding her way back home. She would no longer have to take the chance that the next world would be the one where the mirror was underwater, or packed tightly in a crate, or owned by hostiles.
But all the controllers she came across were as broken and useless as her own.
She kept looking; let no one ever say she was willing to lie down and give up. Touching surface after surface of the same mirror in endless variations, she spun through the multiverse, the taste of a thousand worlds left behind on her tongue.