Our Lost Skies Reborn (Sam/Daniel) Adult
Finally. For the sd_ficathon.
Our Lost Skies Reborn
By jennghis kahn
For: linnet_101 (the lucky girl who got two fics!)
Prompt: One of the canon AU's. (Luckily I picked a different AU then moonshayde did. I almost didn't. :P )
Pairing: Sam/Daniel
Rating; NC-17 (some het smut)
Category: AU, angst, apocafic
Spoilers: Point of View
Summary: Our SG-1 saves the Point of View AU from Goa’uld invasion, but what happens after our team goes back through the Quantum Mirror? The AU Earth is a vast wasteland, destroyed by the invasion. Sam finds a familiar name on a list of survivors, and she goes to find him…
A/N- Thanks so much to shutthef_up for giving it a once over and commiserating with me while we both tried to finish our late fics. Eesh.
This was definitely written with linnet_101 in mind. I really hope she likes it. :)
Our Lost Skies Reborn
++
It’s mid-Spring when the woman shows up on his doorstep. The days are windy and warm and the nights still hold that chill of escaping winter.
He’s been watching her from the orchard as he prunes the trees and gathers up the sticks into bundles. She first appears as a speck two miles to the south, cresting the hill at the edge of town and moving slowly.
He watches her progress from the bare branches of the awakening apple trees. Gradually she makes her way along the gentle, slow dip of the old road as it cuts, straight and long, through the cornfields gone to weeds. She walks along the side, even though there have been no cars for more than a year now.
She’s been walking for a long time. He sees the weariness in her posture, the automatic and adjusted gait of someone who’s grown accustomed to the little aches and pains.
Walking down ruined highways, jagged with broken concrete, will do that to you.
He doesn’t have a chance to mistake her for someone else; someone he knows is never coming home. (And this was never her home anyway.) This woman has brilliant, long blond hair that tosses around her head in the wind. She has clear pale skin that he can see even from his perch among the trees. Sarah is freckled and has hair of flames.
Sarah is in Africa-or had been when the world ended. And even if she did survive, even if she does find a way back home, this isn’t where she will come.
When the woman is trudging up the small rise of road that leads to his house, he climbs down out of the tree and retrieves his glasses from the house before going to sit on his front step. She hesitates when she sees him, stopping in her tracks and watching him warily. She’s wearing the olive-green cargo pants of the military and a thin, plaid flannel shirt that’s several sizes too big on her. Her boots look military too, and he wonders if she really is military or if she just outfitted herself in an abandoned surplus store.
She shrugs out of the huge pack on her back and leaves it lying at the edge of his cracked driveway. She picks her way through his garden, careful to keep between the sticks he’s driven into the ground to mark the rows. He doesn’t know this woman; he has never seen her before in his life, and yet there’s anticipation inside of him, an eagerness to look into her eyes.
When she’s a few yards away she stops and stares at him, and her eyes are wide in recognition, in amazement. They’re very blue.
“Daniel,” she gasps, her voice breaking a little.
He doesn’t know her, but he feels a tug inside as her voice grabs at him. He’s been alone for a long time.
“Hello,” he says, softly, and he waits, unsure of how to start a human conversation with someone other than himself nowadays.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says, and she gives him a helpless, nervous little smile. “I saw your name on the wall…”
He has a common name. He painted it, and his general location, on the Wall of Survivors-a concrete barrier on Interstate 55 in Chicago that withstood the destruction-with all the others, even though he has no family and Sarah is half a world away with no hope of returning. Putting his name into script seemed a last act of defiance to him. I survived. I live. I go on. Twice now he’s had visitors, and both times he’s had to turn them away disappointed.
He’s no one’s long lost son or brother or husband, never has been.
But this woman looks at him as though the sun is rising in his eyes. She knows his face.
“Who are you?” he asks. He’s dimly aware that she could be a fruitcake looking to latch on. There were many who lost their minds when the bombs stopped falling.
“My name is Samantha Carter,” she replies, and he watches as she struggles for her next words. “And we’ve met before.”
++
The story she tells him is fantastic.
There was a time when he had lived and breathed ancient Egypt, and his mind had been a beautiful thing to behold. He’d been unencumbered by the politics of his chosen profession and he’d thought new, edgy theories were the best, new hope of explaining the mysteries of the pyramids.
He’d written papers and made speeches, and he might have mentioned aliens a time or two before Sarah had knocked him soundly across the head and asked him if he was crazy.
Archeology-all science-was susceptible to certain indolence. Once a theory became widely known, changing it became a monumental task. One he wasn’t prepared to take on by himself. One Sarah wouldn’t let him take on without proof.
The papers had been lost in the sea of ongoing academia while he finished out his post-grad work and spent weekends in bed with Sarah. (Well, mostly, but that was a whole other story.)
Now Samantha Carter sits at his kitchen table with a cup of his precious coffee in her hands, and she tells him that those papers had been instrumental in something the world had never known about. Something fantastic and unreal.
Something that had destroyed them all.
“A… stargate?” he asks, wanting to laugh but restrained by the sadness in her eyes and the niggling suspicion in his own mind.
She nods and pulls a thick, ripped and soiled file folder from her pack and lays it out reverently on the table. “It’s one of the only things I could save,” she explains, quietly.
He places nervous fingers over the papers and the photographs, feeling a little shock as he touches them and turns them toward his eyes and views the wonder of the stargate. He recognizes the hieroglyphs in some of them, not in others, but the fascination builds. He traces the glyphs on the gate as Samantha tells him about gate addresses and constellations and stellar drift. She has a thousand stories inside of her; he can sense it. Stories of galaxies and planets and aliens both good and evil.
And then she tells him about the quantum mirror.
“In those other realities you were a part of the program, and we all worked together. You, I, Jack and Teal’c.”
Jack, she has told already told him, is her dead husband. “Teal’c?” he asks, tilting his head.
She tells him about Teal’c. About the Goa’uld and the Jaffa and how the Earth became a target. In other realities Teal’c turns against his gods and joins Earth in their battle, but not in this one. In other realities the four of them are a team called SG-1, but not in this one. In other realities they live on and the Earth grows strong and they beat the Goa’uld and live out their lives together.
But not in this one.
He wants to call her crazy. He really shouldn’t believe any of this, except he knows the research. Making that leap to new possibilities isn’t all that difficult once it’s lined up for him. Besides, he saw the Jaffa himself as their ships landed upon a ruined city and they rounded up healthy humans by the thousands and they all disappeared into rings of light.
He’d wandered around the wreckage of Chicago, hiding from the Jaffa until they’d suddenly retreated one day and their ships had risen quickly into the sky. They hadn’t returned, and in the confusion of a destroyed world, he’d started a new life.
He glances up and sees the late afternoon sunlight in the windows. Even though the days are getting longer he’ll have to think about making dinner soon. It’s difficult to prepare a meal by candlelight. He gets up to start wood burning in the stove.
“I didn’t get a chance to fish this morning,” he says, giving his new friend a smile. “I hope you like asparagus and rice.” The asparagus is at its peak right now.
She gives him a smile. “It’s hard to be picky nowadays.”
“True.”
She grips her coffee cup and watches as he puts the rice on to boil. “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me,” she says softly.
He turns and leans against the old laminated counter-the house is old, built in the 60’s. “It’s not so much you that I believe as that file,” he admits, nodding toward the thick folder. “That quantum mirror thing though…” he flashes her a slightly disbelieving smile.
She smiles back and lowers her lashes, rubbing her thumb along the rim of her cup. “I had a hard time with it too. At first.”
“Why didn’t you just stay with the Stargate, or find another reality to escape to where all of this hadn’t happened?”
She glances away. “There are problems with moving into alternate realities that aren’t your own, and the Asgard took the gate when they put Earth under their protection. They said we weren’t ready for it.” Her eyes drift to his kitchen window and the overgrown fields beyond. “It’s hard to argue with that when most of civilization has been destroyed and seventy percent of the population killed or abducted.”
Daniel sags back against the counter. “Seventy percent?” he whispers.
She nods. “It’s a rough estimate, but the Asgard confirmed it.”
“So other nations…”
“It’s the same,” she tells him quietly.
He’d guessed long ago that Sarah was most likely dead, and if not dead then stranded, but to have it confirmed sends a thin, cold line of dread through him. He realizes at that moment how long he’s put off mourning…
“Daniel?” Samantha is looking at him with concern.
“Um…” He clears his throat and feels the despair building behind his eyes. “Watch the rice. I just have to…” he doesn’t finish and walks out of the kitchen and the house.
There’s a wrought iron bench on the side of the house, facing the gentle valley and the long road. He sits, and the breeze blows into his face from the west. The sun is setting and it will get dark soon. True dark. There are no city lights to break the shadows anymore.
It’s so different from his life in Chicago, and with Sarah. So different from hearing the constant traffic outside her apartment window. There was always that endless din, no matter the time of night. He’d wake early and listen to the traffic building as the street lamps died and the sun rose. He’d watch Sarah sleep and think about his work and hers and about her eyes and her skin and the way her mouth tasted…
He closes his eyes to the wasted world and tries to imagine it for a moment.
“Daniel?”
He opens his eyes again and fixates on the long, fluttering leaves of the young corn that has steadfastly insisted on growing in the huge field of weeds next to the house. The corn went to seed last fall and has grown up again despite it all.
She sits down beside him, careful not to touch him. “I’m sorry,” she says, and there’s real pain in her voice. “There was someone...?” It’s a gentle inquiry, but she leaves the words out there for him to direct as he wishes.
“Sarah,” he tells her. “There was… Sarah.”
“Where was she?”
“Egypt.”
Samantha is quiet for a moment, and he glances at her. She’s worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. He thinks that’s probably a bad sign.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Egypt was hit early and hard. There was a… history there with the Goa’uld. They destroyed the region.”
Daniel swallows down his tears. He hears her sigh beside him and it’s a long, heavy, tortured sound. “Do you want me to leave?” she asks.
He’s surprised at that, and he knits his brows together as he leans down over his knees to rest his elbows on his thighs and hide his eyes from her. “I…”
“I’m the one who got the gate working,” she confesses, softly. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t…” She trails away.
He’s still a bit confused, although he can see why she’d think the way she is. “No,” he says, and he finally glances at her to find her staring out at the same field of corn, jaw tight as she fights the wetness in her own eyes. “Stay,” he says, and is a little amazed at how much he means it.
++
They eat the rice and the asparagus after dark. It’s cold and a little over-cooked, but he has plenty of salt and it isn’t bad. He has bags of the rice in plastic storage containers in the basement, but it’s really reaching the end of its shelf life now.
He tells her about the new settlements he’s heard about: the Menominee Indians to the north who are raising wild rice and hunting the wild game that is quickly recovering their lost numbers in the absence of humans; and a fishing settlement to the east, on Lake Michigan. The Naval base was destroyed, but the numerous coastal villages are starting to gain momentum again, pulling salmon from the lake in great numbers.
She tells him about her journey through the deserted plains, and the pirates they met on the Mississippi River. It’s a waterway that’s become suddenly important again. Not for logging and gambling but for survival and quick transportation.
”Why did you come here alone?” he asks suddenly. She’d been traveling with the survivors of Cheyenne Mountain.
She meets his gaze over the flickering candle on his table. “I wasn’t planning on coming here, but… we got to Chicago and heard about the Wall. I saw your name there… and I just…” She shakes her head slowly. “Charlie and George are family, but… in all those other realities there was something special about SG-1, and I… had to see if it was you.”
“They just let you wander off alone?”
She shrugs. “No. We started south toward all the big settlements, but a few days out I just had to come back. They wouldn’t have understood, and the group of civilians we had along needed them, so I just wrote Charlie a note and snuck away one night.” She raises her brows thoughtfully. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he figures out where I’ve gone and shows up, but I wrote that I’d meet them in New Orleans at the end of summer.”
There are big signs on the Wall of Survivors telling people to head to New Orleans and help create the new America. Daniel had considered it early on and then quickly discarded the idea. He wishes them well, but it had smelled of chaos to him. Besides, at the time he hadn’t been quite willing to accept that Sarah was never coming back.
He reads a few of the mission reports by candlelight in bed. Samantha is stretched out silently in her sleeping bag on his floor, arm curled delicately beneath her head as she stares at the flame and answers questions softly as he asks.
“This is amazing,” he says, his voice breathless with the wonder of it all.
She’s less enthused. She gives a faint smile and her gaze doesn’t move from the flame. “Maybe if you’d been there things wouldn’t have gone so horribly wrong.”
He frowns. “I don’t think I’d have stopped anything, Samantha.” Her name feels foreign on his tongue. He wants to shorten it.
“You might have. In all of the realities we found that hadn’t yet been destroyed, you were a part of the program. You’re important somehow.”
He meets her gaze through the dull, yellow corona of the flame and he’s silent. He can’t imagine having that sort of power. He can’t imagine what he might have done to stop all of this.
“Maybe our first mistake was keeping you out of the program,” she says. “It was all military. Civilians were kept to a minimum and weren’t allowed off-world except for purely scientific research purposes.”
“Even so,” he says. “This is amazing. I wouldn’t have stopped you from opening the gate, Sam.”
She doesn’t even flinch at his shortening of her name. “Still…” she insists, softly.
He doesn’t say anymore, and when he looks up from the next report, the candle has burned low, and she’s turned away from him, her shoulders rising and falling rhythmically in her sleep.
++
He wakes early, too enthralled with all he’s learned over the past day to sleep. His guest is still sleeping, and he listens to the deep cadence of her breathing as he dresses in the early morning light. He doesn’t sleep in the small bedroom of the house. He uses that for storage. The wood-burning stove keeps the kitchen and the small living room cozily warm during the cold winter months once he’s closed off the rest of the house, so he’s dragged the mattress into the living room and build a small frame for it, low to the floor. Summer will bring humidity and heat, and the living room has windows on all sides except where the kitchen branches off. The cross breeze is wonderful.
He eases silently from the house and grabs his fishing gear, heading down to the small stream that winds its way across the backfields of the old farms that surround his house. The house he adopted wasn’t a farm itself, but part of a small, country sub-division. He’d found it in late summer last year, only a few short months after the apocalypse. He’d wanted to find some place far enough from Chicago to keep him away from the desperate humans banding together and preying upon others in order to survive, but close enough that he could still venture there within a few days if he needed to.
The orchard had just been starting to ripen with fruit, and he’d explored the farms and found canned goods, gear, books on every agricultural process known to man. The small town that had supported the farms had a library and a hardware store. He hadn’t needed anything else. He’d found no people here. They’d all either moved south or been abducted.
Tentatively, he’d set down roots, and he’d waited for Sarah to walk up his sidewalk and through his front door.
Instead, here is Samantha Carter, covering herself in the reaper’s cloak and offering apologies but seeking him out through some sort of misplaced sense of destiny.
And he wants to hear more.
He looks up at the cloud-strewn sky as his line sinks into the clear water of the stream, a worm on the hook to tempt the perch. The sky is as silent as the Earth. The clouds drift slowly, and it’s been a long time since a white jet-trail sliced across the blue.
He’d been so unprepared for how time had simply ceased once civilization ended.
++
She stays with him as he reads the rest of the mission reports over the next few days. He’s excited that his research helped open a gate to other worlds. He wants to know all about them, and he imagines walking on alien soil, exploring alien ruins. She tells him anything he wants to know, but there’s always a reserved sadness to her words. She can’t see it in quite the same way he views it. Not anymore.
Eventually, he runs out of questions, and she runs out of apologies, and he wonders if she'll leave. She seems lost, as if she can't quite decide herself what she should do. She has people waiting for her in the south, but she languishes in Daniel's orchard while he prunes the branches, and she takes turns cooking with him in the evenings; she goes with him to forage in the nearby neighborhoods.
She's quiet and unlaughing and she'd leave at his word, but he doesn't want her to go. Somewhere in the middle of all the mission reports and the stories and all of their pain, she became familiar to him. So quickly.
"Come here," he says, one day while he's weeding the garden. She's hauling buckets of water from the cattle trough he'd set out to catch rain.
She lifts her brows and studies him, hesitating with her bucket. He waves her over. "Come here," he says again, a smile tugging at his lips. "If you're going stay awhile and eat my food you can start helping me weed this damn garden."
She flashes him a mordant glare, but he can see she's not serious. Still, he likes the spirit. She sets the bucket down and walks carefully through the rows of sprouting plants toward him. "I know nothing about plants," she warns him as he gestures for her to get down on her knees beside him. "I’ve killed every poinsettia ever given to me at Christmas."
"Well, now you can put your botanical homicidal tendencies to good use and kill weeds," he remarks.
The mordant glare comes back but there's the tug of a smile as well. She watches as he shows her the deep purple of the beet leaves and then the tiny vines of the beans. "They're mostly in a straight line," he instructs. Pull everything else and toss it over there. They rob nutrients from the soil."
He waits as she tries, correcting her as she goes. She's yanking the weeds from the ground and then brushing her hands off, and he watches, amused, for a moment before suddenly reaching out and grabbing her hands in his. He pushes them deeply into the soft soil and forces them closed around big handfuls of dirt. "Get them dirty," he exclaims. "It won't hurt you."
She glances up at him, and her blue eyes flash a bit. "I'm not afraid of dirt," she says quietly. "Or blood." He holds her gaze for a moment, his grip turning soft on her hands, well aware of how the side of her thigh is pressing against his. She doesn't jerk her hands from his grasp. She sits quietly while her eyes run over his face. She relaxes and changes the subject. "Did you have a green thumb before all this happened?"
He slides back onto his heels, releasing her hands. "It's hard to be an archeologist without picking up some sort of agricultural technique. It's the basis of survival for most of modern and primitive man," he says. Then he shrugs. "Of course, there's nothing like the end of the world to teach you how to grow your own food. There were a lot of books about gardening in the house when I found it, and a few more in some of the farms around here. I read a lot."
She gives him a faint smile at that, and glances back down again as she pulls a few weeds and then breaks up the turned soil, pushing it back over the tops of the baby beets like he'd shown her. "We had a beautiful yard... before." She hesitates then, and her hands stop. "Jack took care of the yard. I never had the time." Her face grows somber again. "He enjoyed it."
Suddenly they're back in the darkness again, the joking gone. Daniel lets a long breath out, feeling Sarah's ghost pass over him as well. "I'm sorry," he says. Sam nods, and then she goes back to the weeding. He watches her for a while and then leaves her to it, moving over to start his own row.
They work in silence.
++
The questions run out, but the need for company doesn’t. She just… stays. And soon she’s up before him, out tending the garden with confident hands and a distracted mind. He thinks she likes the solitude, and so he eventually gives it over to her and lets her work it alone. He fishes or cuts wood or works in the orchard, and he pauses occasionally to watch as she pulls weeds silently, the weight on her shoulders seeming to hold her down, close to the ground. She won’t use gloves, and when she comes in during the late afternoon, there’s dirt under her fingernails and a relieved tiredness in her eyes.
She doesn’t talk much once the Stargate falls away, and he figures that maybe they’re both mourning in their own way. And that’s okay, because she stays.
But still, one evening as she comes in for dinner, her arms covered in dirt up to her elbows, that weariness in her eyes and her stance, he stops her in the doorway, one hand circling her wrist warmly, gently. She meets his gaze, leaning into him just slightly.
"You need to find a way to live with this," he tells her, quietly.
She doesn't say anything for a while, just stares over his shoulder and out the kitchen window at the setting sun. He rubs his thumb over the sharp protrusion of bone in her wrist, and she shifts her glance to his. "How do you live with destroying the world?" she asks.
He picks a piece of dandelion fuzz out of her hair. "You help those who are left?" he offers.
She takes a long, slow breath. He lets her go so she can wash up. Her fingers tangle briefly with his before she walks away, and he stares after her. Fixing this woman will take a miracle. She may never heal right. But he doesn't seem to care. He wants to keep digging deeper, like she's the buried tomb of an unknown pharaoh.
The more he finds the more he wants.
++
“What are you reading?” she asks that night as she stretches out on her sleeping bag beside his bed. He glances at her through the dancing candlelight.
“Last of the Mohicans,” he answers. “I’ve always wanted to read it, never had the time… before.”
She smiles faintly. “Story of my life.”
He smiles back. “I’ve got stacks in the basement. There’s a library in town, and some I just find while I’m foraging in other houses. I have some rare books I rescued from the archeology library in Chicago, but those are in plastic cases.” She glances at him and he shrugs. “Some of them are one-of-a-kind. I couldn’t let them burn or just lie there, buried.”
“Mmm,” she murmurs in agreement. “I had a whole bookshelf at home of books I intended on reading once I had the time.”
He watches her for a while as she stares at the shadows on the wall, remembering. He shifts under his sheets. “Why don’t I read it to you?”
Her gaze slides to meet his. “You’re already partway through it.”
He shrugs. “It’ll conserve candles if I read it to you, and I’ll just start over.”
She hesitates, but there’s a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth. He flips the book back to the beginning and starts: “Chapter one. Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared: The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold: Say, is my kingdom lost?” He hesitates over that, a small ironic grunt rising in his throat.
"Apt," she says, wryly.
He glances up at her. “Shakespeare,” he explains. She nods silently and looks at him expectantly. He continues: “It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet…”
She listens raptly, and he reads until her eyes close and he can hear the slow, rhythmic breaths of her slumber.
++
“I think maybe… I didn’t want to go with the rest down to New Orleans,” she says one late afternoon as they sit on a neighbor’s deck after a day of foraging. The fields of corn have come in thick, regardless of the weeds, and the plants are tall, the rows loud with the sounds of crickets in the deepening shade.
“Why not?” he prompts, passing her the jug of water they’d carried with them.
“People are rebuilding their lives there, rebuilding civilization. What would I tell them about what I did? How would I tell them the truth?”
Daniel stares out at the field thoughtfully. “Maybe you don’t tell them anything.”
“They deserve to know.”
He glances at her. “They deserve to start again, not carry your guilt for you.”
It’s a little stronger than he intended, and she winces, but she takes it well. She nods and stays silent. He feels the sudden urge to touch her. They’ve been very proper about distance over these past weeks, despite being the only two people for miles around. Despite being male and female and, he thinks, somewhat attracted to each other. The wall she surrounds herself with seems so vast…
“Sarah wasn’t ever coming back here,” he tells her quietly.
“What?” she looks perplexed.
“She left me a few months before all this happened. She had an opportunity to go to Egypt and work on an important dig, and I couldn’t make her stay. I was always so distracted by my work…” He trails away, feeling the old familiar ache that Sarah’s departure had brought. “She said it was better for her to just move on. She couldn’t wait around for me to catch up anymore. She went to Egypt and I stayed in Chicago, and truth be told… I was a little relieved that I didn’t have to worry about anniversaries or birthdays or anything else that interfered with my research.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, and then she huffs out a soft laugh. “I know how that goes. The relieved part. Theoretical Astrophysics is as entrenching and time-consuming as archeology. You never know everything.”
“I wrote her once, but she never wrote back. And then this happened, and she’s probably dead, but even if she isn’t; even if she finds a way back across the ocean, she won’t be coming back to Chicago. She’ll go to her family in England.”
It’s silent except for the birds and the crickets and the faint rustle of the corn. Her hand slides onto his forearm, and her fingers curl around his wrist. She squeezes gently. He exhales a bit too roughly, not even realizing he’d been holding his breath. It’s the first real human contact he’s had in ages. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to.
It hurts. It gets better each day. There’s no one left who doesn’t know the feeling anymore.
++
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” Daniel hesitates, looking up from the book when a soft snore interrupts him. Beside him, her mattress and sleeping bag pulled up next to his so she can listen as he reads, Sam has fallen asleep.
They’d finished Last of the Mohicans weeks ago, along with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now he reads the brief but powerful Heart of Darkness. They seem to suit her mood.
She gives another soft snore, and he smiles. The heat and humidity are thick outside and in, and there’s a mist of sweat on her forehead. She sleeps on top of her sleeping bag, a light blanket over her bare legs. He marks their place in the book and then blows the candle out, shifting down to lie on his side and watch her for a while. She cut her hair the week before, tired of blowing the long strands out of her mouth and eyes as she bent over the garden rows. The short locks fall into her eyes anyway, and he reaches out and carefully pushes them aside, not wanting to wake her.
If he’d met someone like her before…How his life would have been different.
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
++
It’s late when he wakes again, and the room is dark, the moonlight gone. The reason for the darkness makes itself known a moment later as the quick flash of lightning flickers across the open window. The trees rustle with a sudden wind, and he feels the coolness of the air as it blows in and across his heated skin. It’s the prelude, not the main event, and the cool breeze feels good, so he doesn’t move to shut the window just yet.
He props himself up on one elbow and glances at Sam still lying beside him. She’s kicked out of the blanket; long, pale legs stretched out on top of it. He can just see the sheen of her skin where her thighs curve, where her belly dips, where her shirt drags down and reveals the shadow between her breasts. It sends a potent stab of longing through his chest and into his groin.
In another flicker of lightning he sees her eyes, open and fixed on him. He reaches down blindly and feels for her hand. “Storm,” he whispers, trying to explain, and ignore the sudden want in his body. To illustrate his point there’s a distant rumble of thunder.
She says nothing but her fingers rest lightly, tangled with his as the first fat drops of rain hit the roof and the ground outside. He breathes in the gradually growing scent of damp earth and pavement.
“The rain sounds different now, doesn’t it?” she whispers back. Her fingers are sliding slowly with his; the pads of her fingers running lightly down his palm and then back again. It sends a shiver through him.
The rain does sound different now. The way it did when he spent three weeks living with an isolated South American tribe in the Amazon Forest during one summer in grad school. Out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to protect you but a roof of mud and tree branches, surrounded by forest, the rain becomes more… immediate. It’s closer, more worrisome.
“Yes,” he agrees, keeping his voice low, unwilling to break this intimacy they’ve created. Another gust of cool air drives in through the window and her fingers tighten around his. In the ensuing burst of lightning he sees her on her back, head arched back slightly, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. Beneath the thin fabric of her tank top her nipples have risen up sharply with the breeze. He catches their faint shadow in the flickering light and it makes his mouth run dry.
The sound of the rain starts in earnest, and he glances up to see if it’s coming in. It’s not, and the cool gusts of wind come quicker now, easing the warmth of the day that had built up in the room. He gives a sigh as the sweat dries on his nape. Sam’s fingernails drag lightly across his palm again, and he turns his hand over, opening it up for her, waiting with silent anticipation. If she wants more… He’s willing to give her anything.
Her fingers hesitate but then resume their gentle scratching. It’s a maddening tickle, and he has to fight not to close his hand tightly into a fist. He feels it through every inch of his body. He hears her shift, and in the muted light of the storm he sees her profile as she turns toward him onto her side. Her fingers move slowly up his forearm. He keeps still, breathing quietly. Her touch rises, ghosting over his bicep to his shoulder, and he hears the sticky, wet sound as she swallows with difficulty, and then the soft puff as she exhales.
He wants to say something to put her at ease, to let her know he wants to go further, but he isn’t sure she wants to go further. Maybe she’s just exploring. Maybe she just wants some comfort…
Her fingers run over his jaw and catch against the short bristle of his late-day beard. He opens his mouth to say something, but he knows it will come out too loud, too abrasive. Instead he covers her hand with his, rubs his palm over her knuckles soothingly, and then he slides his hand down to her wrist and warmly down her arm.
She breathes deeply, and then her hand hooks around the back of his neck and she tugs. He goes. Ohhh, how he goes. He twists his body and lets her lead his mouth to hers. He kisses her lightly then presses harder, licking at her lips. She opens her mouth and her fingers slide into his hair, and he’s kissing her deeply, with great mouthfuls, tasting her, sucking at her, wanting her as close as he can get her.
She makes a muffled, desperate sound but she pulls him closer, until he's half on top of her, and her fingers curl into his bare back. He doesn’t think much after that, except about good she feels, how warm. His whole body is aching with the anticipation of sex. He's rubbing against her thigh and she's rubbing back and she’s not stopping his hand as he slides it under her shirt and over her bare breast. Instead she gives a soft moan and her hands slide down to the base of his spine, her fingertips slipping under the waistband of his shorts, and he shifts uncomfortably around an achingly hard erection. Her nails scratch lightly through the hair there and slide around to his hips, and he’s pulling back to shove his shorts down and off, shivering a little as the cold stormy air rushes around him.
Sam is pulling her shirt and shorts off as he settles back down next to her, and he hesitates, waiting until she’s bare and her hands are sliding over his chest before he embraces her, bringing her flush against his body. And God, he’s missed this…
She kisses his neck and sucks at the spot just under his chin, and he runs his hand down and over that gentle curve of her waist and over her hip. He can hear his own heavy breathing over the sound of the rain.
He has his hand between her legs, fingers pressing slowly, rubbing at her clit, his mouth at her breast, when her fingers slide into his hair and pull his head up to her mouth. “Do you… have something?” she asks, breathlessly. “Condoms that aren’t expired?”
He blinks rapidly trying to process the words. Condoms have a pretty good shelf life, but he doesn’t have any. “No,” he whispers hoarsely. “I didn’t think… it’s not something I thought about…” he stammers.
She kisses him lightly on the lips. “It’s okay. We just can’t…” She trails off, but he knows what she means. It’s a little disappointing, but her hand slides down over his belly and her fingertips brush the tip of his cock, and he’s over it.
The rain is hitting the roof and window in sweeping sheets now, and he feels the occasional wet spray of drops, but he doesn’t care. He's sucking at the skin of her throat and she's making soft sounds that are hitting him deep and low. He curls over her, head between her spread legs, tongue and lips pulling delicately at her clit while she drags absent fingers up and down his back, raising the gooseflesh there. She arches under him a bit, and he focuses, sliding two fingers inside of her. She's soft and warm and snug, and he groans with the ache of wanting to be inside of her.
He presses deep and she comes apart on him, her breath fast and shaky, her hips lifting up against his mouth and his hand. He keeps up the motions, cock aching in response, until she settles back down, body giving up the tension it had gathered.
He listens to her hard breaths slowing in the darkness, and he's hyper-aware of her scent and her sound and the wonderful fullness in his dick.
She takes a few minutes of silence to regain her bearings, and then she's turning toward him, her hand sliding over his belly, her lips meeting his. He lies passively on the mattress, kissing her back, letting her take charge. He’s still hard and heated and far closer to finishing than she realizes, but she touches him lightly at first. He lets out a long breath, and in the flashes of lightning can see her hands on him. She strokes him briefly and then scratches through his pubic hair, pulls at his tip, squeezes his balls gently. He arches his head back into the pillow and just gives in. The pleasure of it hits him in waves, and he’s groaning aloud, not able to stop it, pushing his hips up toward her asking for more. She doesn’t move faster, she just strokes with that same maddening pace that drives relentlessly forward until he’s so hard and close that he doesn’t care what he sounds like. She knows what she’s doing, and her fingers twist around the tip of his cock, and he comes with a broken groan that feels like it’s yanked from his throat. He grips handfuls of the blanket as the climax pulses through his body, and her hands keep moving… slowing eventually and then moving away to rub at the muscles in his thighs soothingly.
He sags downward in relief finally, listening to his heart pounding in his ears. Oh God, it had felt so good...
He settles beside her then, hand sliding slow circles over her hip. She turns her head and rests her forehead against his temple. It’s an intimate gesture, and he closes his eyes for a moment, savoring it.
“The rain’s coming in,” she says shortly, sounding surprised.
“I don’t care,” he replies, voice thick.
He hears an exhalation of breath from her that was probably a laugh, and then she’s shifting away from him and he hears the slide of the window. He opens his eyes and watches her shadow as she moves, reaching for one of his discarded socks to mop the mess off his belly. She doesn’t close the windows all the way, just enough to shut out most of the driving rain but still let in the cool air. She settles down beside him again, close but not pressed against him. He senses her nervousness.
"I, uh..." she stammers quietly. "I just needed..."
"It's okay," he says. "I needed it too."
"I don't want to make things more complicated for you."
He doesn't see how that's possible. "We're adults," he says, and she murmurs an agreement.
They're silent for a while, and he listens to the low din of the rain and the wind as the storm pounds against the roof. "I know you have somewhere to be," he finally says. "But you could stay awhile. If you want." He waits with an ache in his chest.
"I... I'm not sure if..."
"Please," he says, softly.
She lets out a long, shaky breath that sounds as if she's been holding it for a long time. Her hand slides onto his chest, and, when he doesn't resist, she turns into him, pressing herself to his side and burying her face in his shoulder. He shifts until he can get an arm under and around her, and then he holds her close. She falls asleep like that, her arm draped over his chest, one leg tangled with his, her breath tickling his neck. He absently strokes her bare back and listens to the rain.
It does sound different now, but everything does. For the first time that doesn't seem like a horrible thing.
++
They ease into a more sexual relationship after that. It isn't quite as intimate as he'd hoped. There's still distance there, and he can kiss her neck in the middle of the garden, lay her out and go down on her and bring her to a shuddering climax; but if he gives her a random, gentle kiss, if he pulls her into an embrace and rocks with her a bit, she tenses up and becomes a board in his arms.
It's only at night, after he's read to her, and they both laze in that tremulous state between wakefulness and sleep, that her arm slides over his chest and her body curls around his. He accepts what she's willing to give. It isn't a normal world anymore, and she's wounded down somewhere deep. She was the walking dead when she found him, and he can't help thinking that she's staying because he's her way back to the living. But what happens when she leaves? If she's going to get south enough to avoid the winter snow, she'll have to leave in late summer, and that's barely a month and a half away.
Sarah left him feeling hollow inside, torn between wishing he'd been more attentive, and relieved that she'd taken herself away so he had no reason to walk away from his work. He'd always been a loner, from the time his parents had died to the numerous foster families who had taken him in, to his own life after he'd turned 18. Loneliness was a comfort...
Except, now that he has no choice, it feels more like a burden. He wonders if he can make her stay. If he can abscond with the Destroyer of Earth and keep her for himself.
He feels like a ghost. It's only Sam's fingers dragging over his skin that assure him he's solid.
+++
Her mouth is heat and softness and achingly tight. The long grass is tickling his neck and there's a stone digging into his back, but he doesn't care. Her fingers are wrapped around the base of his cock, her mouth hot around his tip. Her tongue has been teasing him for what seems like hours, and his panting breaths are being stolen away by the wind.
He can still taste her in his mouth, and the memory of how she'd cried his name out, how her fingers had grabbed handfuls of his hair, her nails scratching against his scalp, washes through his mind. He'd had to press his erection against the ground while he lay between her legs, aching to rise up and slide inside her but still frustrated by the lack of birth control.
He imagines it instead, as she licks and sucks at him, her fingers sliding down, stroking the skin beneath his balls. He imagines how it would feel, the warmth and the snug pressure all along his shaft, the slick sliding motion of the sex. Her legs would circle his waist, her fingers curling into his back, and she'd pant into his ear, breasts sliding against his chest.
He groans and feels the tightness between his legs. He whispers, "God, Sam... I'm going to..." It hits him before he can get the words out, and it arches his neck and forces his teeth together, hard. Her hand slides up and down, and he's lost inside of it.
She rests between his legs as she waits for him to get his bearings back. Her cheek is smooth against his thigh, and when he glances down, chest expanding with the great gulps of air he's taking, she's smiling absently, fingers smoothing down the short, soft hairs on his leg. He slides his fingers into her hair affectionately, and she doesn't pull away.
"Tell me a joke," he says, hearing the sex in his own voice.
"What?" she lifts her head and glances up at him. She looks so surprised that he laughs.
"Tell me a physics joke," he urges her. "Come on. I know all you hard science dorks have a ton of jokes."
She shoots him a dry glare, but then she’s pensive. "How does Santa deliver presents all over the world on Christmas Eve?"
"Ummm. I have no idea."
"With Rudolph the Red-Shift Reindeer." Sam snorts and grins.
Daniel frowns. "I don't get it."
She laughs, and he decides he doesn't care. She has an adorable smile. "I'm sorry I asked," he says, shooting her a wry grin.
"Tell me one now," she says.
He furrows his brow. "I don't know any."
She gives him a pointed look. "Oh, come on. There has to be a thousand jokes about archeologists having big artifacts or something."
He laughs. It feels good. He thinks. "Well... there was that T-shirt I saw during grad school. 'Archeologists do it in the dirt'."
Sam snorts again and lifts her eyebrows. "Well, I can't argue that."
They're lying naked on the bank of the stream, fishing poles beside them, lines in the water, and although it's not the dirt per se, it is the grass-covered ground. He strokes her hair. "To be honest, I barely got laid in college much less in the dirt. Until Sarah anyway."
"Hmm..." Sam hums in agreement, her eyes looking backward in time, and he wonders if it was the same for her, until she met Jack.
As he brushes the pale hair from her eyes he doubts it. It's different for women...
"If we'd met before all this," he asks quietly. "Would you have fallen for me?" He purposefully looks up at the sky and watches the white clouds drift, keeping his eyes off her expression.
After several long moments, she replies, "I don't know. I was never very good at choosing guys who were good for me."
"Then I'd have been right up your alley. I have one very good reference for how bad I really was..."
She lets out a long breath that holds a laugh inside of it. "We'd have been so busy in our own labs that we never would have seen each other."
He smiles absently. "Things are different now."
"Yes," she agrees, quietly. "Things are different now."
++
Late summer is coming fast, and he feels good. The garden is giving a good yield, and the tomatoes are coming in faster than they can eat or can them. It feels a little like old times to eat tomato sauce and peppers on spaghetti. He has pounds of the dried pasta locked in plastic containers with the rice, and it seems to be holding up. For now.
They're keeping careful track of the days though, and summer is running out. He's starting to feel a pang in his chest when he thinks about Sam leaving. He's still not sure he can heal her, not completely. He's not sure it's even possible. It isn't Jack's death that weighs so heavily on her, it's the Earth, or what's left of it. She needs to go south and help with the rebuilding. It would soothe her soul, he thinks. But then his will be left cold and heavy.
One evening after dinner they walk up through the small nearby subdivision of country houses. The days are starting to shorten now, and the heat of the sun wanes with the sunset. They make their way silently through the house with the big deck that overlooks the fields, but Sam takes a sudden detour down the hallway. He blinks after her. They usually don't invade the abandoned homes unless they're foraging.
"Sam?"
"We need something new to read." Her voice drifts back to him from one of the bedrooms. "I'm tired of tragedies."
He follows her voice and finds her standing in front of a small bookshelf in what was once the master bedroom for a family. She glances up at him. "You ever notice how depressing a lot of the classics are?"
He gives a crooked smile. "There's a reason they became classics."
"Screw the human condition, I want something fun." She shuffles through the paperbacks.
Daniel smiles behind her back. She wants something fun. That's... promising.
She pulls a book out and gives him a mischievous glance. Suspicion fills him. "What?" he demands.
She holds up the book. There's an elaborately painted picture on the front of a couple in a passionate clinch. She smiles.
He glares. "Oh, hell no!"
"Oh, come on," she protests. "It's something different!" She flips the book open to the middle and reads with a dramatic flair, "Deep and passionate, he laved her lips, her tongue, the inner recesses of her mouth. Jenise kissed him back, enjoying his expertise in this simple act."
"What, is he kissing her or flossing her teeth?" Daniel asks, dryly.
Sam smirks, but she keeps the book. Daniel sighs and glances around the room. Maybe the guy had been close to his size. He needs more socks. He walks to one of the dressers and pulls open a drawer. Women's underwear. He closes it again, quickly, and glances at Sam. She's leaning over the bookcase and looking down the side of it. "What?" he asks, wondering what she sees.
She reaches down and then stands up and turns, holding up a large glass bottle. "Buy you a drink?" It's brandy. Good brandy.
He gives her a smile. "Sure, let me find socks first." He walks to the other dresser, pulls open the top drawer and stops, staring down. "Oh..."
"What?" Sam walks up behind him and glances over his shoulder into the drawer. "Oh..."
A box of Trojan condoms sits there, nestled in the tangle of socks. He feels a sudden heat rippling through his gut. He slides his fingers under the lid and pulls one small foil packet out, turning it until he can read the expiration date. "They still have two years left." He glances at her.
She's staring at them, bottom lip between her teeth. She looks... nervous.
"I don't have to take them," he says, softly. "It's not a hundred percent. We can just leave them..."
"No," she replies, clearing her throat when her voice catches. "We should take them... even if we don't use them."
He stuffs the condoms and the socks into an old plastic grocery bag while she takes the book and the bottle out onto the deck. She's already got a glass waiting for him when he slips out of the sliding glass doors and sinks into the chair beside her. The brandy is rich and strong, going right to his head. She doesn't say anything, and they watch the sun sinking toward the horizon in silence. The green corn stalks are starting to turn brown now, and they rustle in the breeze. It's seed corn, not fit for eating, so it's simply going to seed again. It'll grow again next year. And the year after. The deer are growing fat and multiplying like rabbits with the feast. He should really learn to hunt... The hardware store has a whole rack of compound bows and boxes of arrows.
Maybe it's the lateness of the season or the alcohol in his blood, or maybe he just figures he has nothing to lose, but he hears his own voice in the gathering darkness. "I want you to stay."
She shifts in her chair, and he hears the soft, wet sound as she sips at her brandy. "You could come with me," she counters. "Help rebuild the world,"
He sighs. "What am I going to do? Dig up old Campbell's soup cans?"
"Daniel..."
Of course he can find something to do; he knows this. He looks down the road toward the house and the orchard he's spent nearly two years building up. "I was never very good at life," he says. "I should have been in Egypt with her..."
"If you had been, you'd be dead now."
"She said, 'What are you going to do, Daniel, spend your whole life in a book?', and she was right. That was pretty much my life's plan."
"And mine included not destroying the Earth, but shit happens."
He turns his head to stare at her, and the absurdity of their positions, the way they'd swung in opposite directions, hits him in a rush. He laughs, and the alcohol makes his head swim. A similar laugh bursts from Sam's lips.
"We're drunk," she states, but she isn't slurring her words.
"Maybe we're just crazy," he offers.
"It's not as bad as I thought it would be," Sam muses.
She's smiling and relaxed, and Daniel is thinking about how she tastes and how she sounds when she reaches that razor-thin edge before climax. He leans over to kiss her suddenly, and she turns her head at the same time. He over-corrects, and his balance is shaky from the brandy anyway. He pulls them both down onto the floor of the deck as his chair shoots out from under him.
He's surprised and a bit worried until she lands beside him, laughing wildly. His own laughter spits out between his lips and he starts again. How do they do this, go from darkness to laughter in the space of moments? He hugs her to him. "I've fallen in love with the Destroyer of Worlds," he says. "How crazy is that?"
Her laughter fades, and he sobers up as she stares at him. "I didn't mean that," he rushes to explain. "Technically, you've only destroyed one world..."
She waves her hand dismissively. "Whatever." She swallows hard. "You love me?"
Oh. It was that part.
"I'm sorry," he apologizes. "You're going to leave. I shouldn't have told you that."
Her mouth moves, but she doesn't say anything.
"We can just forget I said anything," he suggests. It sounds like pleading to him.
"I never expected... this," she finally says, softly. "I could see how close we were in the alternate reality, but I didn't really know..."
"What did you expect?" he asks. "Redemption? A way to keep Jack alive?"
"No," she whispers. "I expected... closure."
"Did you get it?"
She furrows her brow and lays her head back against the floor of the deck. "No. I don't think that's something I can ever have. Instead I found..." She trails away and raises her hands to her face.
He rolls over and stretches out next to her, sliding a hand up to pull at hers. "What?" he asks.
"A second chance," she says, voice muffled.
He smiles a bit, finally dragging her hands away from her face. There's water in her eyes. "Come on," he says. "Let's go home."
++
Her lean fingers roll the condom onto him carefully and slowly, and he sucks in his breath as little shivers of delight rip through him. Her hands move to his back and she runs her nails lightly over his skin, making him inhale sharply. He sinks down to kiss her, and her legs spread for him. Her knees clutch at his hips.
He slides in, little bits at a time with each stroke, and it's warm and wet and tight and the feeling makes him groan helplessly. "Sam..."
She moves with him and around him, and he sinks deep as she moans his name in return. He moves slowly, wanting it to last, and he pulls back, bracing himself on his arms so he can look at her in the candlelight. She looks right back at him, and it's a powerful thing. He's not a ghost, and she's smiling gently.
He rocks against her until she gasps in his ear and pulls him tightly into her arms. She shudders beneath him, and he keeps moving, pushing her through it, even as he feels that first stab of pleasure down low in his own body. She relaxes beneath him and welcomes him as he thrusts hard and buries himself deep, breathless groans rising up in his throat.
He pants against her neck in the aftermath. She strokes his back.
He carefully pulls out and disposes of the condom before collapsing next to her.
"That was nice," she says.
"Nice?" He's not sure if he should be insulted or not. She grins and curls up half on top of him. In the fading heat of summer it feels warm and comforting. He decides not to be insulted. Nice is... nice.
"You can read the dirty book to me," he suggests. "I think I might like it after all." He lifts one eyebrow with a smirk.
She stares at him, not moving. "What are you going to do, Daniel, spend your whole life in a book?"
He hesitates, holding her gaze. "No," he finally says. "I'm not. Not this time."
++
The Mississippi river is wide and fast.
Mist rises from the surface in the early morning autumn cold. Daniel stares over at the opposite bank where a small city of tents is quiet and still among a clearing in the trees. The bank is lined with boats of all sizes. It's safer to travel in groups, but he and Sam still keep to themselves, not quite ready to show their faces. He'd had to trade three full bottles of brandy, two boxes of new, unsealed canning lids, fourteen condoms and a bag of their rice for a small, heavy boat capable of handling the big river. It's too late in the year to start walking. If they want to reach New Orleans by the time the snow flies, they'll have to move faster.
A hand touches the sleeve of his coat, and he glances over at Sam. "You ready?" she asks, a small smile tugging at her lips.
He takes a brief look back at the overgrown highway up on the high banks. When he looks back at the boat, Sam is settling the last pack of their food into the bow and lashing it down. She sits in the forward seat and looks up at him expectantly.
He nods in silent reply to her questioning gaze, and he strides down, pushing the boat out into the water and quickly hauling himself inside before his feet get too wet. Sam steadies the craft until he's sitting, and they both pick up oars. She glances back, and he smiles.
The river takes them south.
~end~
Footnotes- Excerpt from Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.
Excerpt from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Excerpt from Mine to Take by Dara Joy.
Our Lost Skies Reborn
By jennghis kahn
For: linnet_101 (the lucky girl who got two fics!)
Prompt: One of the canon AU's. (Luckily I picked a different AU then moonshayde did. I almost didn't. :P )
Pairing: Sam/Daniel
Rating; NC-17 (some het smut)
Category: AU, angst, apocafic
Spoilers: Point of View
Summary: Our SG-1 saves the Point of View AU from Goa’uld invasion, but what happens after our team goes back through the Quantum Mirror? The AU Earth is a vast wasteland, destroyed by the invasion. Sam finds a familiar name on a list of survivors, and she goes to find him…
A/N- Thanks so much to shutthef_up for giving it a once over and commiserating with me while we both tried to finish our late fics. Eesh.
This was definitely written with linnet_101 in mind. I really hope she likes it. :)
Our Lost Skies Reborn
++
It’s mid-Spring when the woman shows up on his doorstep. The days are windy and warm and the nights still hold that chill of escaping winter.
He’s been watching her from the orchard as he prunes the trees and gathers up the sticks into bundles. She first appears as a speck two miles to the south, cresting the hill at the edge of town and moving slowly.
He watches her progress from the bare branches of the awakening apple trees. Gradually she makes her way along the gentle, slow dip of the old road as it cuts, straight and long, through the cornfields gone to weeds. She walks along the side, even though there have been no cars for more than a year now.
She’s been walking for a long time. He sees the weariness in her posture, the automatic and adjusted gait of someone who’s grown accustomed to the little aches and pains.
Walking down ruined highways, jagged with broken concrete, will do that to you.
He doesn’t have a chance to mistake her for someone else; someone he knows is never coming home. (And this was never her home anyway.) This woman has brilliant, long blond hair that tosses around her head in the wind. She has clear pale skin that he can see even from his perch among the trees. Sarah is freckled and has hair of flames.
Sarah is in Africa-or had been when the world ended. And even if she did survive, even if she does find a way back home, this isn’t where she will come.
When the woman is trudging up the small rise of road that leads to his house, he climbs down out of the tree and retrieves his glasses from the house before going to sit on his front step. She hesitates when she sees him, stopping in her tracks and watching him warily. She’s wearing the olive-green cargo pants of the military and a thin, plaid flannel shirt that’s several sizes too big on her. Her boots look military too, and he wonders if she really is military or if she just outfitted herself in an abandoned surplus store.
She shrugs out of the huge pack on her back and leaves it lying at the edge of his cracked driveway. She picks her way through his garden, careful to keep between the sticks he’s driven into the ground to mark the rows. He doesn’t know this woman; he has never seen her before in his life, and yet there’s anticipation inside of him, an eagerness to look into her eyes.
When she’s a few yards away she stops and stares at him, and her eyes are wide in recognition, in amazement. They’re very blue.
“Daniel,” she gasps, her voice breaking a little.
He doesn’t know her, but he feels a tug inside as her voice grabs at him. He’s been alone for a long time.
“Hello,” he says, softly, and he waits, unsure of how to start a human conversation with someone other than himself nowadays.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says, and she gives him a helpless, nervous little smile. “I saw your name on the wall…”
He has a common name. He painted it, and his general location, on the Wall of Survivors-a concrete barrier on Interstate 55 in Chicago that withstood the destruction-with all the others, even though he has no family and Sarah is half a world away with no hope of returning. Putting his name into script seemed a last act of defiance to him. I survived. I live. I go on. Twice now he’s had visitors, and both times he’s had to turn them away disappointed.
He’s no one’s long lost son or brother or husband, never has been.
But this woman looks at him as though the sun is rising in his eyes. She knows his face.
“Who are you?” he asks. He’s dimly aware that she could be a fruitcake looking to latch on. There were many who lost their minds when the bombs stopped falling.
“My name is Samantha Carter,” she replies, and he watches as she struggles for her next words. “And we’ve met before.”
++
The story she tells him is fantastic.
There was a time when he had lived and breathed ancient Egypt, and his mind had been a beautiful thing to behold. He’d been unencumbered by the politics of his chosen profession and he’d thought new, edgy theories were the best, new hope of explaining the mysteries of the pyramids.
He’d written papers and made speeches, and he might have mentioned aliens a time or two before Sarah had knocked him soundly across the head and asked him if he was crazy.
Archeology-all science-was susceptible to certain indolence. Once a theory became widely known, changing it became a monumental task. One he wasn’t prepared to take on by himself. One Sarah wouldn’t let him take on without proof.
The papers had been lost in the sea of ongoing academia while he finished out his post-grad work and spent weekends in bed with Sarah. (Well, mostly, but that was a whole other story.)
Now Samantha Carter sits at his kitchen table with a cup of his precious coffee in her hands, and she tells him that those papers had been instrumental in something the world had never known about. Something fantastic and unreal.
Something that had destroyed them all.
“A… stargate?” he asks, wanting to laugh but restrained by the sadness in her eyes and the niggling suspicion in his own mind.
She nods and pulls a thick, ripped and soiled file folder from her pack and lays it out reverently on the table. “It’s one of the only things I could save,” she explains, quietly.
He places nervous fingers over the papers and the photographs, feeling a little shock as he touches them and turns them toward his eyes and views the wonder of the stargate. He recognizes the hieroglyphs in some of them, not in others, but the fascination builds. He traces the glyphs on the gate as Samantha tells him about gate addresses and constellations and stellar drift. She has a thousand stories inside of her; he can sense it. Stories of galaxies and planets and aliens both good and evil.
And then she tells him about the quantum mirror.
“In those other realities you were a part of the program, and we all worked together. You, I, Jack and Teal’c.”
Jack, she has told already told him, is her dead husband. “Teal’c?” he asks, tilting his head.
She tells him about Teal’c. About the Goa’uld and the Jaffa and how the Earth became a target. In other realities Teal’c turns against his gods and joins Earth in their battle, but not in this one. In other realities the four of them are a team called SG-1, but not in this one. In other realities they live on and the Earth grows strong and they beat the Goa’uld and live out their lives together.
But not in this one.
He wants to call her crazy. He really shouldn’t believe any of this, except he knows the research. Making that leap to new possibilities isn’t all that difficult once it’s lined up for him. Besides, he saw the Jaffa himself as their ships landed upon a ruined city and they rounded up healthy humans by the thousands and they all disappeared into rings of light.
He’d wandered around the wreckage of Chicago, hiding from the Jaffa until they’d suddenly retreated one day and their ships had risen quickly into the sky. They hadn’t returned, and in the confusion of a destroyed world, he’d started a new life.
He glances up and sees the late afternoon sunlight in the windows. Even though the days are getting longer he’ll have to think about making dinner soon. It’s difficult to prepare a meal by candlelight. He gets up to start wood burning in the stove.
“I didn’t get a chance to fish this morning,” he says, giving his new friend a smile. “I hope you like asparagus and rice.” The asparagus is at its peak right now.
She gives him a smile. “It’s hard to be picky nowadays.”
“True.”
She grips her coffee cup and watches as he puts the rice on to boil. “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me,” she says softly.
He turns and leans against the old laminated counter-the house is old, built in the 60’s. “It’s not so much you that I believe as that file,” he admits, nodding toward the thick folder. “That quantum mirror thing though…” he flashes her a slightly disbelieving smile.
She smiles back and lowers her lashes, rubbing her thumb along the rim of her cup. “I had a hard time with it too. At first.”
“Why didn’t you just stay with the Stargate, or find another reality to escape to where all of this hadn’t happened?”
She glances away. “There are problems with moving into alternate realities that aren’t your own, and the Asgard took the gate when they put Earth under their protection. They said we weren’t ready for it.” Her eyes drift to his kitchen window and the overgrown fields beyond. “It’s hard to argue with that when most of civilization has been destroyed and seventy percent of the population killed or abducted.”
Daniel sags back against the counter. “Seventy percent?” he whispers.
She nods. “It’s a rough estimate, but the Asgard confirmed it.”
“So other nations…”
“It’s the same,” she tells him quietly.
He’d guessed long ago that Sarah was most likely dead, and if not dead then stranded, but to have it confirmed sends a thin, cold line of dread through him. He realizes at that moment how long he’s put off mourning…
“Daniel?” Samantha is looking at him with concern.
“Um…” He clears his throat and feels the despair building behind his eyes. “Watch the rice. I just have to…” he doesn’t finish and walks out of the kitchen and the house.
There’s a wrought iron bench on the side of the house, facing the gentle valley and the long road. He sits, and the breeze blows into his face from the west. The sun is setting and it will get dark soon. True dark. There are no city lights to break the shadows anymore.
It’s so different from his life in Chicago, and with Sarah. So different from hearing the constant traffic outside her apartment window. There was always that endless din, no matter the time of night. He’d wake early and listen to the traffic building as the street lamps died and the sun rose. He’d watch Sarah sleep and think about his work and hers and about her eyes and her skin and the way her mouth tasted…
He closes his eyes to the wasted world and tries to imagine it for a moment.
“Daniel?”
He opens his eyes again and fixates on the long, fluttering leaves of the young corn that has steadfastly insisted on growing in the huge field of weeds next to the house. The corn went to seed last fall and has grown up again despite it all.
She sits down beside him, careful not to touch him. “I’m sorry,” she says, and there’s real pain in her voice. “There was someone...?” It’s a gentle inquiry, but she leaves the words out there for him to direct as he wishes.
“Sarah,” he tells her. “There was… Sarah.”
“Where was she?”
“Egypt.”
Samantha is quiet for a moment, and he glances at her. She’s worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. He thinks that’s probably a bad sign.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Egypt was hit early and hard. There was a… history there with the Goa’uld. They destroyed the region.”
Daniel swallows down his tears. He hears her sigh beside him and it’s a long, heavy, tortured sound. “Do you want me to leave?” she asks.
He’s surprised at that, and he knits his brows together as he leans down over his knees to rest his elbows on his thighs and hide his eyes from her. “I…”
“I’m the one who got the gate working,” she confesses, softly. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t…” She trails away.
He’s still a bit confused, although he can see why she’d think the way she is. “No,” he says, and he finally glances at her to find her staring out at the same field of corn, jaw tight as she fights the wetness in her own eyes. “Stay,” he says, and is a little amazed at how much he means it.
++
They eat the rice and the asparagus after dark. It’s cold and a little over-cooked, but he has plenty of salt and it isn’t bad. He has bags of the rice in plastic storage containers in the basement, but it’s really reaching the end of its shelf life now.
He tells her about the new settlements he’s heard about: the Menominee Indians to the north who are raising wild rice and hunting the wild game that is quickly recovering their lost numbers in the absence of humans; and a fishing settlement to the east, on Lake Michigan. The Naval base was destroyed, but the numerous coastal villages are starting to gain momentum again, pulling salmon from the lake in great numbers.
She tells him about her journey through the deserted plains, and the pirates they met on the Mississippi River. It’s a waterway that’s become suddenly important again. Not for logging and gambling but for survival and quick transportation.
”Why did you come here alone?” he asks suddenly. She’d been traveling with the survivors of Cheyenne Mountain.
She meets his gaze over the flickering candle on his table. “I wasn’t planning on coming here, but… we got to Chicago and heard about the Wall. I saw your name there… and I just…” She shakes her head slowly. “Charlie and George are family, but… in all those other realities there was something special about SG-1, and I… had to see if it was you.”
“They just let you wander off alone?”
She shrugs. “No. We started south toward all the big settlements, but a few days out I just had to come back. They wouldn’t have understood, and the group of civilians we had along needed them, so I just wrote Charlie a note and snuck away one night.” She raises her brows thoughtfully. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he figures out where I’ve gone and shows up, but I wrote that I’d meet them in New Orleans at the end of summer.”
There are big signs on the Wall of Survivors telling people to head to New Orleans and help create the new America. Daniel had considered it early on and then quickly discarded the idea. He wishes them well, but it had smelled of chaos to him. Besides, at the time he hadn’t been quite willing to accept that Sarah was never coming back.
He reads a few of the mission reports by candlelight in bed. Samantha is stretched out silently in her sleeping bag on his floor, arm curled delicately beneath her head as she stares at the flame and answers questions softly as he asks.
“This is amazing,” he says, his voice breathless with the wonder of it all.
She’s less enthused. She gives a faint smile and her gaze doesn’t move from the flame. “Maybe if you’d been there things wouldn’t have gone so horribly wrong.”
He frowns. “I don’t think I’d have stopped anything, Samantha.” Her name feels foreign on his tongue. He wants to shorten it.
“You might have. In all of the realities we found that hadn’t yet been destroyed, you were a part of the program. You’re important somehow.”
He meets her gaze through the dull, yellow corona of the flame and he’s silent. He can’t imagine having that sort of power. He can’t imagine what he might have done to stop all of this.
“Maybe our first mistake was keeping you out of the program,” she says. “It was all military. Civilians were kept to a minimum and weren’t allowed off-world except for purely scientific research purposes.”
“Even so,” he says. “This is amazing. I wouldn’t have stopped you from opening the gate, Sam.”
She doesn’t even flinch at his shortening of her name. “Still…” she insists, softly.
He doesn’t say anymore, and when he looks up from the next report, the candle has burned low, and she’s turned away from him, her shoulders rising and falling rhythmically in her sleep.
++
He wakes early, too enthralled with all he’s learned over the past day to sleep. His guest is still sleeping, and he listens to the deep cadence of her breathing as he dresses in the early morning light. He doesn’t sleep in the small bedroom of the house. He uses that for storage. The wood-burning stove keeps the kitchen and the small living room cozily warm during the cold winter months once he’s closed off the rest of the house, so he’s dragged the mattress into the living room and build a small frame for it, low to the floor. Summer will bring humidity and heat, and the living room has windows on all sides except where the kitchen branches off. The cross breeze is wonderful.
He eases silently from the house and grabs his fishing gear, heading down to the small stream that winds its way across the backfields of the old farms that surround his house. The house he adopted wasn’t a farm itself, but part of a small, country sub-division. He’d found it in late summer last year, only a few short months after the apocalypse. He’d wanted to find some place far enough from Chicago to keep him away from the desperate humans banding together and preying upon others in order to survive, but close enough that he could still venture there within a few days if he needed to.
The orchard had just been starting to ripen with fruit, and he’d explored the farms and found canned goods, gear, books on every agricultural process known to man. The small town that had supported the farms had a library and a hardware store. He hadn’t needed anything else. He’d found no people here. They’d all either moved south or been abducted.
Tentatively, he’d set down roots, and he’d waited for Sarah to walk up his sidewalk and through his front door.
Instead, here is Samantha Carter, covering herself in the reaper’s cloak and offering apologies but seeking him out through some sort of misplaced sense of destiny.
And he wants to hear more.
He looks up at the cloud-strewn sky as his line sinks into the clear water of the stream, a worm on the hook to tempt the perch. The sky is as silent as the Earth. The clouds drift slowly, and it’s been a long time since a white jet-trail sliced across the blue.
He’d been so unprepared for how time had simply ceased once civilization ended.
++
She stays with him as he reads the rest of the mission reports over the next few days. He’s excited that his research helped open a gate to other worlds. He wants to know all about them, and he imagines walking on alien soil, exploring alien ruins. She tells him anything he wants to know, but there’s always a reserved sadness to her words. She can’t see it in quite the same way he views it. Not anymore.
Eventually, he runs out of questions, and she runs out of apologies, and he wonders if she'll leave. She seems lost, as if she can't quite decide herself what she should do. She has people waiting for her in the south, but she languishes in Daniel's orchard while he prunes the branches, and she takes turns cooking with him in the evenings; she goes with him to forage in the nearby neighborhoods.
She's quiet and unlaughing and she'd leave at his word, but he doesn't want her to go. Somewhere in the middle of all the mission reports and the stories and all of their pain, she became familiar to him. So quickly.
"Come here," he says, one day while he's weeding the garden. She's hauling buckets of water from the cattle trough he'd set out to catch rain.
She lifts her brows and studies him, hesitating with her bucket. He waves her over. "Come here," he says again, a smile tugging at his lips. "If you're going stay awhile and eat my food you can start helping me weed this damn garden."
She flashes him a mordant glare, but he can see she's not serious. Still, he likes the spirit. She sets the bucket down and walks carefully through the rows of sprouting plants toward him. "I know nothing about plants," she warns him as he gestures for her to get down on her knees beside him. "I’ve killed every poinsettia ever given to me at Christmas."
"Well, now you can put your botanical homicidal tendencies to good use and kill weeds," he remarks.
The mordant glare comes back but there's the tug of a smile as well. She watches as he shows her the deep purple of the beet leaves and then the tiny vines of the beans. "They're mostly in a straight line," he instructs. Pull everything else and toss it over there. They rob nutrients from the soil."
He waits as she tries, correcting her as she goes. She's yanking the weeds from the ground and then brushing her hands off, and he watches, amused, for a moment before suddenly reaching out and grabbing her hands in his. He pushes them deeply into the soft soil and forces them closed around big handfuls of dirt. "Get them dirty," he exclaims. "It won't hurt you."
She glances up at him, and her blue eyes flash a bit. "I'm not afraid of dirt," she says quietly. "Or blood." He holds her gaze for a moment, his grip turning soft on her hands, well aware of how the side of her thigh is pressing against his. She doesn't jerk her hands from his grasp. She sits quietly while her eyes run over his face. She relaxes and changes the subject. "Did you have a green thumb before all this happened?"
He slides back onto his heels, releasing her hands. "It's hard to be an archeologist without picking up some sort of agricultural technique. It's the basis of survival for most of modern and primitive man," he says. Then he shrugs. "Of course, there's nothing like the end of the world to teach you how to grow your own food. There were a lot of books about gardening in the house when I found it, and a few more in some of the farms around here. I read a lot."
She gives him a faint smile at that, and glances back down again as she pulls a few weeds and then breaks up the turned soil, pushing it back over the tops of the baby beets like he'd shown her. "We had a beautiful yard... before." She hesitates then, and her hands stop. "Jack took care of the yard. I never had the time." Her face grows somber again. "He enjoyed it."
Suddenly they're back in the darkness again, the joking gone. Daniel lets a long breath out, feeling Sarah's ghost pass over him as well. "I'm sorry," he says. Sam nods, and then she goes back to the weeding. He watches her for a while and then leaves her to it, moving over to start his own row.
They work in silence.
++
The questions run out, but the need for company doesn’t. She just… stays. And soon she’s up before him, out tending the garden with confident hands and a distracted mind. He thinks she likes the solitude, and so he eventually gives it over to her and lets her work it alone. He fishes or cuts wood or works in the orchard, and he pauses occasionally to watch as she pulls weeds silently, the weight on her shoulders seeming to hold her down, close to the ground. She won’t use gloves, and when she comes in during the late afternoon, there’s dirt under her fingernails and a relieved tiredness in her eyes.
She doesn’t talk much once the Stargate falls away, and he figures that maybe they’re both mourning in their own way. And that’s okay, because she stays.
But still, one evening as she comes in for dinner, her arms covered in dirt up to her elbows, that weariness in her eyes and her stance, he stops her in the doorway, one hand circling her wrist warmly, gently. She meets his gaze, leaning into him just slightly.
"You need to find a way to live with this," he tells her, quietly.
She doesn't say anything for a while, just stares over his shoulder and out the kitchen window at the setting sun. He rubs his thumb over the sharp protrusion of bone in her wrist, and she shifts her glance to his. "How do you live with destroying the world?" she asks.
He picks a piece of dandelion fuzz out of her hair. "You help those who are left?" he offers.
She takes a long, slow breath. He lets her go so she can wash up. Her fingers tangle briefly with his before she walks away, and he stares after her. Fixing this woman will take a miracle. She may never heal right. But he doesn't seem to care. He wants to keep digging deeper, like she's the buried tomb of an unknown pharaoh.
The more he finds the more he wants.
++
“What are you reading?” she asks that night as she stretches out on her sleeping bag beside his bed. He glances at her through the dancing candlelight.
“Last of the Mohicans,” he answers. “I’ve always wanted to read it, never had the time… before.”
She smiles faintly. “Story of my life.”
He smiles back. “I’ve got stacks in the basement. There’s a library in town, and some I just find while I’m foraging in other houses. I have some rare books I rescued from the archeology library in Chicago, but those are in plastic cases.” She glances at him and he shrugs. “Some of them are one-of-a-kind. I couldn’t let them burn or just lie there, buried.”
“Mmm,” she murmurs in agreement. “I had a whole bookshelf at home of books I intended on reading once I had the time.”
He watches her for a while as she stares at the shadows on the wall, remembering. He shifts under his sheets. “Why don’t I read it to you?”
Her gaze slides to meet his. “You’re already partway through it.”
He shrugs. “It’ll conserve candles if I read it to you, and I’ll just start over.”
She hesitates, but there’s a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth. He flips the book back to the beginning and starts: “Chapter one. Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared: The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold: Say, is my kingdom lost?” He hesitates over that, a small ironic grunt rising in his throat.
"Apt," she says, wryly.
He glances up at her. “Shakespeare,” he explains. She nods silently and looks at him expectantly. He continues: “It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet…”
She listens raptly, and he reads until her eyes close and he can hear the slow, rhythmic breaths of her slumber.
++
“I think maybe… I didn’t want to go with the rest down to New Orleans,” she says one late afternoon as they sit on a neighbor’s deck after a day of foraging. The fields of corn have come in thick, regardless of the weeds, and the plants are tall, the rows loud with the sounds of crickets in the deepening shade.
“Why not?” he prompts, passing her the jug of water they’d carried with them.
“People are rebuilding their lives there, rebuilding civilization. What would I tell them about what I did? How would I tell them the truth?”
Daniel stares out at the field thoughtfully. “Maybe you don’t tell them anything.”
“They deserve to know.”
He glances at her. “They deserve to start again, not carry your guilt for you.”
It’s a little stronger than he intended, and she winces, but she takes it well. She nods and stays silent. He feels the sudden urge to touch her. They’ve been very proper about distance over these past weeks, despite being the only two people for miles around. Despite being male and female and, he thinks, somewhat attracted to each other. The wall she surrounds herself with seems so vast…
“Sarah wasn’t ever coming back here,” he tells her quietly.
“What?” she looks perplexed.
“She left me a few months before all this happened. She had an opportunity to go to Egypt and work on an important dig, and I couldn’t make her stay. I was always so distracted by my work…” He trails away, feeling the old familiar ache that Sarah’s departure had brought. “She said it was better for her to just move on. She couldn’t wait around for me to catch up anymore. She went to Egypt and I stayed in Chicago, and truth be told… I was a little relieved that I didn’t have to worry about anniversaries or birthdays or anything else that interfered with my research.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, and then she huffs out a soft laugh. “I know how that goes. The relieved part. Theoretical Astrophysics is as entrenching and time-consuming as archeology. You never know everything.”
“I wrote her once, but she never wrote back. And then this happened, and she’s probably dead, but even if she isn’t; even if she finds a way back across the ocean, she won’t be coming back to Chicago. She’ll go to her family in England.”
It’s silent except for the birds and the crickets and the faint rustle of the corn. Her hand slides onto his forearm, and her fingers curl around his wrist. She squeezes gently. He exhales a bit too roughly, not even realizing he’d been holding his breath. It’s the first real human contact he’s had in ages. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to.
It hurts. It gets better each day. There’s no one left who doesn’t know the feeling anymore.
++
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” Daniel hesitates, looking up from the book when a soft snore interrupts him. Beside him, her mattress and sleeping bag pulled up next to his so she can listen as he reads, Sam has fallen asleep.
They’d finished Last of the Mohicans weeks ago, along with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now he reads the brief but powerful Heart of Darkness. They seem to suit her mood.
She gives another soft snore, and he smiles. The heat and humidity are thick outside and in, and there’s a mist of sweat on her forehead. She sleeps on top of her sleeping bag, a light blanket over her bare legs. He marks their place in the book and then blows the candle out, shifting down to lie on his side and watch her for a while. She cut her hair the week before, tired of blowing the long strands out of her mouth and eyes as she bent over the garden rows. The short locks fall into her eyes anyway, and he reaches out and carefully pushes them aside, not wanting to wake her.
If he’d met someone like her before…How his life would have been different.
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
++
It’s late when he wakes again, and the room is dark, the moonlight gone. The reason for the darkness makes itself known a moment later as the quick flash of lightning flickers across the open window. The trees rustle with a sudden wind, and he feels the coolness of the air as it blows in and across his heated skin. It’s the prelude, not the main event, and the cool breeze feels good, so he doesn’t move to shut the window just yet.
He props himself up on one elbow and glances at Sam still lying beside him. She’s kicked out of the blanket; long, pale legs stretched out on top of it. He can just see the sheen of her skin where her thighs curve, where her belly dips, where her shirt drags down and reveals the shadow between her breasts. It sends a potent stab of longing through his chest and into his groin.
In another flicker of lightning he sees her eyes, open and fixed on him. He reaches down blindly and feels for her hand. “Storm,” he whispers, trying to explain, and ignore the sudden want in his body. To illustrate his point there’s a distant rumble of thunder.
She says nothing but her fingers rest lightly, tangled with his as the first fat drops of rain hit the roof and the ground outside. He breathes in the gradually growing scent of damp earth and pavement.
“The rain sounds different now, doesn’t it?” she whispers back. Her fingers are sliding slowly with his; the pads of her fingers running lightly down his palm and then back again. It sends a shiver through him.
The rain does sound different now. The way it did when he spent three weeks living with an isolated South American tribe in the Amazon Forest during one summer in grad school. Out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to protect you but a roof of mud and tree branches, surrounded by forest, the rain becomes more… immediate. It’s closer, more worrisome.
“Yes,” he agrees, keeping his voice low, unwilling to break this intimacy they’ve created. Another gust of cool air drives in through the window and her fingers tighten around his. In the ensuing burst of lightning he sees her on her back, head arched back slightly, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. Beneath the thin fabric of her tank top her nipples have risen up sharply with the breeze. He catches their faint shadow in the flickering light and it makes his mouth run dry.
The sound of the rain starts in earnest, and he glances up to see if it’s coming in. It’s not, and the cool gusts of wind come quicker now, easing the warmth of the day that had built up in the room. He gives a sigh as the sweat dries on his nape. Sam’s fingernails drag lightly across his palm again, and he turns his hand over, opening it up for her, waiting with silent anticipation. If she wants more… He’s willing to give her anything.
Her fingers hesitate but then resume their gentle scratching. It’s a maddening tickle, and he has to fight not to close his hand tightly into a fist. He feels it through every inch of his body. He hears her shift, and in the muted light of the storm he sees her profile as she turns toward him onto her side. Her fingers move slowly up his forearm. He keeps still, breathing quietly. Her touch rises, ghosting over his bicep to his shoulder, and he hears the sticky, wet sound as she swallows with difficulty, and then the soft puff as she exhales.
He wants to say something to put her at ease, to let her know he wants to go further, but he isn’t sure she wants to go further. Maybe she’s just exploring. Maybe she just wants some comfort…
Her fingers run over his jaw and catch against the short bristle of his late-day beard. He opens his mouth to say something, but he knows it will come out too loud, too abrasive. Instead he covers her hand with his, rubs his palm over her knuckles soothingly, and then he slides his hand down to her wrist and warmly down her arm.
She breathes deeply, and then her hand hooks around the back of his neck and she tugs. He goes. Ohhh, how he goes. He twists his body and lets her lead his mouth to hers. He kisses her lightly then presses harder, licking at her lips. She opens her mouth and her fingers slide into his hair, and he’s kissing her deeply, with great mouthfuls, tasting her, sucking at her, wanting her as close as he can get her.
She makes a muffled, desperate sound but she pulls him closer, until he's half on top of her, and her fingers curl into his bare back. He doesn’t think much after that, except about good she feels, how warm. His whole body is aching with the anticipation of sex. He's rubbing against her thigh and she's rubbing back and she’s not stopping his hand as he slides it under her shirt and over her bare breast. Instead she gives a soft moan and her hands slide down to the base of his spine, her fingertips slipping under the waistband of his shorts, and he shifts uncomfortably around an achingly hard erection. Her nails scratch lightly through the hair there and slide around to his hips, and he’s pulling back to shove his shorts down and off, shivering a little as the cold stormy air rushes around him.
Sam is pulling her shirt and shorts off as he settles back down next to her, and he hesitates, waiting until she’s bare and her hands are sliding over his chest before he embraces her, bringing her flush against his body. And God, he’s missed this…
She kisses his neck and sucks at the spot just under his chin, and he runs his hand down and over that gentle curve of her waist and over her hip. He can hear his own heavy breathing over the sound of the rain.
He has his hand between her legs, fingers pressing slowly, rubbing at her clit, his mouth at her breast, when her fingers slide into his hair and pull his head up to her mouth. “Do you… have something?” she asks, breathlessly. “Condoms that aren’t expired?”
He blinks rapidly trying to process the words. Condoms have a pretty good shelf life, but he doesn’t have any. “No,” he whispers hoarsely. “I didn’t think… it’s not something I thought about…” he stammers.
She kisses him lightly on the lips. “It’s okay. We just can’t…” She trails off, but he knows what she means. It’s a little disappointing, but her hand slides down over his belly and her fingertips brush the tip of his cock, and he’s over it.
The rain is hitting the roof and window in sweeping sheets now, and he feels the occasional wet spray of drops, but he doesn’t care. He's sucking at the skin of her throat and she's making soft sounds that are hitting him deep and low. He curls over her, head between her spread legs, tongue and lips pulling delicately at her clit while she drags absent fingers up and down his back, raising the gooseflesh there. She arches under him a bit, and he focuses, sliding two fingers inside of her. She's soft and warm and snug, and he groans with the ache of wanting to be inside of her.
He presses deep and she comes apart on him, her breath fast and shaky, her hips lifting up against his mouth and his hand. He keeps up the motions, cock aching in response, until she settles back down, body giving up the tension it had gathered.
He listens to her hard breaths slowing in the darkness, and he's hyper-aware of her scent and her sound and the wonderful fullness in his dick.
She takes a few minutes of silence to regain her bearings, and then she's turning toward him, her hand sliding over his belly, her lips meeting his. He lies passively on the mattress, kissing her back, letting her take charge. He’s still hard and heated and far closer to finishing than she realizes, but she touches him lightly at first. He lets out a long breath, and in the flashes of lightning can see her hands on him. She strokes him briefly and then scratches through his pubic hair, pulls at his tip, squeezes his balls gently. He arches his head back into the pillow and just gives in. The pleasure of it hits him in waves, and he’s groaning aloud, not able to stop it, pushing his hips up toward her asking for more. She doesn’t move faster, she just strokes with that same maddening pace that drives relentlessly forward until he’s so hard and close that he doesn’t care what he sounds like. She knows what she’s doing, and her fingers twist around the tip of his cock, and he comes with a broken groan that feels like it’s yanked from his throat. He grips handfuls of the blanket as the climax pulses through his body, and her hands keep moving… slowing eventually and then moving away to rub at the muscles in his thighs soothingly.
He sags downward in relief finally, listening to his heart pounding in his ears. Oh God, it had felt so good...
He settles beside her then, hand sliding slow circles over her hip. She turns her head and rests her forehead against his temple. It’s an intimate gesture, and he closes his eyes for a moment, savoring it.
“The rain’s coming in,” she says shortly, sounding surprised.
“I don’t care,” he replies, voice thick.
He hears an exhalation of breath from her that was probably a laugh, and then she’s shifting away from him and he hears the slide of the window. He opens his eyes and watches her shadow as she moves, reaching for one of his discarded socks to mop the mess off his belly. She doesn’t close the windows all the way, just enough to shut out most of the driving rain but still let in the cool air. She settles down beside him again, close but not pressed against him. He senses her nervousness.
"I, uh..." she stammers quietly. "I just needed..."
"It's okay," he says. "I needed it too."
"I don't want to make things more complicated for you."
He doesn't see how that's possible. "We're adults," he says, and she murmurs an agreement.
They're silent for a while, and he listens to the low din of the rain and the wind as the storm pounds against the roof. "I know you have somewhere to be," he finally says. "But you could stay awhile. If you want." He waits with an ache in his chest.
"I... I'm not sure if..."
"Please," he says, softly.
She lets out a long, shaky breath that sounds as if she's been holding it for a long time. Her hand slides onto his chest, and, when he doesn't resist, she turns into him, pressing herself to his side and burying her face in his shoulder. He shifts until he can get an arm under and around her, and then he holds her close. She falls asleep like that, her arm draped over his chest, one leg tangled with his, her breath tickling his neck. He absently strokes her bare back and listens to the rain.
It does sound different now, but everything does. For the first time that doesn't seem like a horrible thing.
++
They ease into a more sexual relationship after that. It isn't quite as intimate as he'd hoped. There's still distance there, and he can kiss her neck in the middle of the garden, lay her out and go down on her and bring her to a shuddering climax; but if he gives her a random, gentle kiss, if he pulls her into an embrace and rocks with her a bit, she tenses up and becomes a board in his arms.
It's only at night, after he's read to her, and they both laze in that tremulous state between wakefulness and sleep, that her arm slides over his chest and her body curls around his. He accepts what she's willing to give. It isn't a normal world anymore, and she's wounded down somewhere deep. She was the walking dead when she found him, and he can't help thinking that she's staying because he's her way back to the living. But what happens when she leaves? If she's going to get south enough to avoid the winter snow, she'll have to leave in late summer, and that's barely a month and a half away.
Sarah left him feeling hollow inside, torn between wishing he'd been more attentive, and relieved that she'd taken herself away so he had no reason to walk away from his work. He'd always been a loner, from the time his parents had died to the numerous foster families who had taken him in, to his own life after he'd turned 18. Loneliness was a comfort...
Except, now that he has no choice, it feels more like a burden. He wonders if he can make her stay. If he can abscond with the Destroyer of Earth and keep her for himself.
He feels like a ghost. It's only Sam's fingers dragging over his skin that assure him he's solid.
+++
Her mouth is heat and softness and achingly tight. The long grass is tickling his neck and there's a stone digging into his back, but he doesn't care. Her fingers are wrapped around the base of his cock, her mouth hot around his tip. Her tongue has been teasing him for what seems like hours, and his panting breaths are being stolen away by the wind.
He can still taste her in his mouth, and the memory of how she'd cried his name out, how her fingers had grabbed handfuls of his hair, her nails scratching against his scalp, washes through his mind. He'd had to press his erection against the ground while he lay between her legs, aching to rise up and slide inside her but still frustrated by the lack of birth control.
He imagines it instead, as she licks and sucks at him, her fingers sliding down, stroking the skin beneath his balls. He imagines how it would feel, the warmth and the snug pressure all along his shaft, the slick sliding motion of the sex. Her legs would circle his waist, her fingers curling into his back, and she'd pant into his ear, breasts sliding against his chest.
He groans and feels the tightness between his legs. He whispers, "God, Sam... I'm going to..." It hits him before he can get the words out, and it arches his neck and forces his teeth together, hard. Her hand slides up and down, and he's lost inside of it.
She rests between his legs as she waits for him to get his bearings back. Her cheek is smooth against his thigh, and when he glances down, chest expanding with the great gulps of air he's taking, she's smiling absently, fingers smoothing down the short, soft hairs on his leg. He slides his fingers into her hair affectionately, and she doesn't pull away.
"Tell me a joke," he says, hearing the sex in his own voice.
"What?" she lifts her head and glances up at him. She looks so surprised that he laughs.
"Tell me a physics joke," he urges her. "Come on. I know all you hard science dorks have a ton of jokes."
She shoots him a dry glare, but then she’s pensive. "How does Santa deliver presents all over the world on Christmas Eve?"
"Ummm. I have no idea."
"With Rudolph the Red-Shift Reindeer." Sam snorts and grins.
Daniel frowns. "I don't get it."
She laughs, and he decides he doesn't care. She has an adorable smile. "I'm sorry I asked," he says, shooting her a wry grin.
"Tell me one now," she says.
He furrows his brow. "I don't know any."
She gives him a pointed look. "Oh, come on. There has to be a thousand jokes about archeologists having big artifacts or something."
He laughs. It feels good. He thinks. "Well... there was that T-shirt I saw during grad school. 'Archeologists do it in the dirt'."
Sam snorts again and lifts her eyebrows. "Well, I can't argue that."
They're lying naked on the bank of the stream, fishing poles beside them, lines in the water, and although it's not the dirt per se, it is the grass-covered ground. He strokes her hair. "To be honest, I barely got laid in college much less in the dirt. Until Sarah anyway."
"Hmm..." Sam hums in agreement, her eyes looking backward in time, and he wonders if it was the same for her, until she met Jack.
As he brushes the pale hair from her eyes he doubts it. It's different for women...
"If we'd met before all this," he asks quietly. "Would you have fallen for me?" He purposefully looks up at the sky and watches the white clouds drift, keeping his eyes off her expression.
After several long moments, she replies, "I don't know. I was never very good at choosing guys who were good for me."
"Then I'd have been right up your alley. I have one very good reference for how bad I really was..."
She lets out a long breath that holds a laugh inside of it. "We'd have been so busy in our own labs that we never would have seen each other."
He smiles absently. "Things are different now."
"Yes," she agrees, quietly. "Things are different now."
++
Late summer is coming fast, and he feels good. The garden is giving a good yield, and the tomatoes are coming in faster than they can eat or can them. It feels a little like old times to eat tomato sauce and peppers on spaghetti. He has pounds of the dried pasta locked in plastic containers with the rice, and it seems to be holding up. For now.
They're keeping careful track of the days though, and summer is running out. He's starting to feel a pang in his chest when he thinks about Sam leaving. He's still not sure he can heal her, not completely. He's not sure it's even possible. It isn't Jack's death that weighs so heavily on her, it's the Earth, or what's left of it. She needs to go south and help with the rebuilding. It would soothe her soul, he thinks. But then his will be left cold and heavy.
One evening after dinner they walk up through the small nearby subdivision of country houses. The days are starting to shorten now, and the heat of the sun wanes with the sunset. They make their way silently through the house with the big deck that overlooks the fields, but Sam takes a sudden detour down the hallway. He blinks after her. They usually don't invade the abandoned homes unless they're foraging.
"Sam?"
"We need something new to read." Her voice drifts back to him from one of the bedrooms. "I'm tired of tragedies."
He follows her voice and finds her standing in front of a small bookshelf in what was once the master bedroom for a family. She glances up at him. "You ever notice how depressing a lot of the classics are?"
He gives a crooked smile. "There's a reason they became classics."
"Screw the human condition, I want something fun." She shuffles through the paperbacks.
Daniel smiles behind her back. She wants something fun. That's... promising.
She pulls a book out and gives him a mischievous glance. Suspicion fills him. "What?" he demands.
She holds up the book. There's an elaborately painted picture on the front of a couple in a passionate clinch. She smiles.
He glares. "Oh, hell no!"
"Oh, come on," she protests. "It's something different!" She flips the book open to the middle and reads with a dramatic flair, "Deep and passionate, he laved her lips, her tongue, the inner recesses of her mouth. Jenise kissed him back, enjoying his expertise in this simple act."
"What, is he kissing her or flossing her teeth?" Daniel asks, dryly.
Sam smirks, but she keeps the book. Daniel sighs and glances around the room. Maybe the guy had been close to his size. He needs more socks. He walks to one of the dressers and pulls open a drawer. Women's underwear. He closes it again, quickly, and glances at Sam. She's leaning over the bookcase and looking down the side of it. "What?" he asks, wondering what she sees.
She reaches down and then stands up and turns, holding up a large glass bottle. "Buy you a drink?" It's brandy. Good brandy.
He gives her a smile. "Sure, let me find socks first." He walks to the other dresser, pulls open the top drawer and stops, staring down. "Oh..."
"What?" Sam walks up behind him and glances over his shoulder into the drawer. "Oh..."
A box of Trojan condoms sits there, nestled in the tangle of socks. He feels a sudden heat rippling through his gut. He slides his fingers under the lid and pulls one small foil packet out, turning it until he can read the expiration date. "They still have two years left." He glances at her.
She's staring at them, bottom lip between her teeth. She looks... nervous.
"I don't have to take them," he says, softly. "It's not a hundred percent. We can just leave them..."
"No," she replies, clearing her throat when her voice catches. "We should take them... even if we don't use them."
He stuffs the condoms and the socks into an old plastic grocery bag while she takes the book and the bottle out onto the deck. She's already got a glass waiting for him when he slips out of the sliding glass doors and sinks into the chair beside her. The brandy is rich and strong, going right to his head. She doesn't say anything, and they watch the sun sinking toward the horizon in silence. The green corn stalks are starting to turn brown now, and they rustle in the breeze. It's seed corn, not fit for eating, so it's simply going to seed again. It'll grow again next year. And the year after. The deer are growing fat and multiplying like rabbits with the feast. He should really learn to hunt... The hardware store has a whole rack of compound bows and boxes of arrows.
Maybe it's the lateness of the season or the alcohol in his blood, or maybe he just figures he has nothing to lose, but he hears his own voice in the gathering darkness. "I want you to stay."
She shifts in her chair, and he hears the soft, wet sound as she sips at her brandy. "You could come with me," she counters. "Help rebuild the world,"
He sighs. "What am I going to do? Dig up old Campbell's soup cans?"
"Daniel..."
Of course he can find something to do; he knows this. He looks down the road toward the house and the orchard he's spent nearly two years building up. "I was never very good at life," he says. "I should have been in Egypt with her..."
"If you had been, you'd be dead now."
"She said, 'What are you going to do, Daniel, spend your whole life in a book?', and she was right. That was pretty much my life's plan."
"And mine included not destroying the Earth, but shit happens."
He turns his head to stare at her, and the absurdity of their positions, the way they'd swung in opposite directions, hits him in a rush. He laughs, and the alcohol makes his head swim. A similar laugh bursts from Sam's lips.
"We're drunk," she states, but she isn't slurring her words.
"Maybe we're just crazy," he offers.
"It's not as bad as I thought it would be," Sam muses.
She's smiling and relaxed, and Daniel is thinking about how she tastes and how she sounds when she reaches that razor-thin edge before climax. He leans over to kiss her suddenly, and she turns her head at the same time. He over-corrects, and his balance is shaky from the brandy anyway. He pulls them both down onto the floor of the deck as his chair shoots out from under him.
He's surprised and a bit worried until she lands beside him, laughing wildly. His own laughter spits out between his lips and he starts again. How do they do this, go from darkness to laughter in the space of moments? He hugs her to him. "I've fallen in love with the Destroyer of Worlds," he says. "How crazy is that?"
Her laughter fades, and he sobers up as she stares at him. "I didn't mean that," he rushes to explain. "Technically, you've only destroyed one world..."
She waves her hand dismissively. "Whatever." She swallows hard. "You love me?"
Oh. It was that part.
"I'm sorry," he apologizes. "You're going to leave. I shouldn't have told you that."
Her mouth moves, but she doesn't say anything.
"We can just forget I said anything," he suggests. It sounds like pleading to him.
"I never expected... this," she finally says, softly. "I could see how close we were in the alternate reality, but I didn't really know..."
"What did you expect?" he asks. "Redemption? A way to keep Jack alive?"
"No," she whispers. "I expected... closure."
"Did you get it?"
She furrows her brow and lays her head back against the floor of the deck. "No. I don't think that's something I can ever have. Instead I found..." She trails away and raises her hands to her face.
He rolls over and stretches out next to her, sliding a hand up to pull at hers. "What?" he asks.
"A second chance," she says, voice muffled.
He smiles a bit, finally dragging her hands away from her face. There's water in her eyes. "Come on," he says. "Let's go home."
++
Her lean fingers roll the condom onto him carefully and slowly, and he sucks in his breath as little shivers of delight rip through him. Her hands move to his back and she runs her nails lightly over his skin, making him inhale sharply. He sinks down to kiss her, and her legs spread for him. Her knees clutch at his hips.
He slides in, little bits at a time with each stroke, and it's warm and wet and tight and the feeling makes him groan helplessly. "Sam..."
She moves with him and around him, and he sinks deep as she moans his name in return. He moves slowly, wanting it to last, and he pulls back, bracing himself on his arms so he can look at her in the candlelight. She looks right back at him, and it's a powerful thing. He's not a ghost, and she's smiling gently.
He rocks against her until she gasps in his ear and pulls him tightly into her arms. She shudders beneath him, and he keeps moving, pushing her through it, even as he feels that first stab of pleasure down low in his own body. She relaxes beneath him and welcomes him as he thrusts hard and buries himself deep, breathless groans rising up in his throat.
He pants against her neck in the aftermath. She strokes his back.
He carefully pulls out and disposes of the condom before collapsing next to her.
"That was nice," she says.
"Nice?" He's not sure if he should be insulted or not. She grins and curls up half on top of him. In the fading heat of summer it feels warm and comforting. He decides not to be insulted. Nice is... nice.
"You can read the dirty book to me," he suggests. "I think I might like it after all." He lifts one eyebrow with a smirk.
She stares at him, not moving. "What are you going to do, Daniel, spend your whole life in a book?"
He hesitates, holding her gaze. "No," he finally says. "I'm not. Not this time."
++
The Mississippi river is wide and fast.
Mist rises from the surface in the early morning autumn cold. Daniel stares over at the opposite bank where a small city of tents is quiet and still among a clearing in the trees. The bank is lined with boats of all sizes. It's safer to travel in groups, but he and Sam still keep to themselves, not quite ready to show their faces. He'd had to trade three full bottles of brandy, two boxes of new, unsealed canning lids, fourteen condoms and a bag of their rice for a small, heavy boat capable of handling the big river. It's too late in the year to start walking. If they want to reach New Orleans by the time the snow flies, they'll have to move faster.
A hand touches the sleeve of his coat, and he glances over at Sam. "You ready?" she asks, a small smile tugging at her lips.
He takes a brief look back at the overgrown highway up on the high banks. When he looks back at the boat, Sam is settling the last pack of their food into the bow and lashing it down. She sits in the forward seat and looks up at him expectantly.
He nods in silent reply to her questioning gaze, and he strides down, pushing the boat out into the water and quickly hauling himself inside before his feet get too wet. Sam steadies the craft until he's sitting, and they both pick up oars. She glances back, and he smiles.
The river takes them south.
~end~
Footnotes- Excerpt from Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.
Excerpt from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Excerpt from Mine to Take by Dara Joy.