[Sam Carter] Runner...

[wolfcat]

Who: Sam Carter.
Where: On the run.
When: Sunday, April 32. Morning. While Daniel and Jack are fishing, after Since I'm Up.
Invited: None.
Status: Complete.

Sam watched the door close behind Boone as he left. His whispered assurance that they'd talk later didn't particularly reassure her. But, then, she wasn't really seeking reassurance, in any case.

She stood beside her chair, in the middle of the lab, unmoving for a long span of heartbeats -- save for the trembling of her body in the wake of too many emotions. Her eyes remained fixed on the closed door until she was forced to blink in order to keep them from drying out entirely. At that point, she raised her hand to look at it, saw it shaking, and lowered herself slowly into the chair.

Her hands covered her face and, just as slowly, she crumpled forward, elbows coming to rest on her knees. She rubbed her face, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes to grind away the tears that moistened her lashes, but not yet her cheeks. The breath she drew in was deep, if shaky, and she held it for a second before releasing it through tight lips. Then her lips pressed together, pressed between her teeth for moment before she moistened them with her tongue and sucked the excess moisture away from the insides of her cheeks.

It was hard to breathe. The unshed tears had been sufficient to cause her nose to clog just enough to impede comfortable air flow. She opened her mouth to make it easier, inhaling another deep, somewhat shaky breath and letting it go. A third breath, not quite so shaky, and then a fourth brought her trembling under control. She felt the adrenaline drain from her system and, as she now pressed her palms into her knees, let her head fall heavily forward. Her eyes closed. She simply sat there, waiting for her body to regain its equilibrium.

She wasn't really sure how long she sat there. It felt like hours, though she knew it wasn't likely more than a couple of minutes at most. As her control reasserted itself and she gained the ability to breathe normally once more, she straightened. Shoving herself to her feet, she turned to look at the computer. The data gathered from the Thomas Payne Maru incident had finished processing, but the numbers didn't really make any sense to her.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to know that was simply because she didn't have the focus to read them properly.

"Damn it." She swore, the words no more than a whispered sigh. But, she realized that her morning of work had effectively walked out the door with Boone. The thought made her snort, and she amended it. Who're you kidding, Carter. It walked out the moment he walked in.

That caused a new flash of irritation to spark within her. She squelched it swiftly. It was as much her own fault as it was Boone's -- Lantash's. So, there was no point assigning blame. But there was also no point wasting her time in the lab.

The fact was, as she looked around once more, she realized that she needed to get out of it. The air still felt charged with too many emotions. Her nerves felt raw and she was restless with the lingering effects of the adrenaline rush.

"I gotta get outta here," she muttered, and she headed straight for the door.

Jogging down the path away from the lab, she stopped only briefly to acknowledge a young lieutenant on patrol when he saluted her as she rounded a corner. "Is everything okay, Colonel?" he asked as she returned his salute.

"That depends," she said dryly, lips twisting into a faint grimace. "Do you have any deep, dark secrets you feel a need to drop on me, this early in the morning?"

"Um." He looked clearly confused. "No, ma'am?"

She gave him a genuine smile, sharp as it was. "Then, yes. Everything's just fine, Lieutenant. Carry on."

"Yes, ma'am." He gave another sharp salute and left her to continue his patrol. Sam shook her head briefly and resumed her jog.

She didn't have any particular destination in mind as she began to run. All she really cared about was the physical exertion of the exercise. Her feet pounded over the packed earth pathways that led towards the tent city that surrounded the central administrative area. The streets were fairly deserted, this early on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the only people that were out and about were others with similar intent -- a morning run or chores that simply couldn't wait until later. They were very, very few in number.

As she left the settlement behind, she found the ground easier to run on. It was softer, springier, and a little damper. True, she had to pay a little more attention to just where she put her feet, so as not to twist an ankle -- wouldn't that make a fine addition to the morning's disaster? -- but, that was good, too. It gave her something to concentrate on aside from her anger, hurt, and confusion.

Before long, she fell into a steady rhythm. One, two, three, four. She counted the sound of her footfalls as if they were the beats in a bar of music. Truthfully, Sam wasn't particularly musically inclined. But the count allowed her to comfortably maintain a steady lope that would neither exhaust her nor give her too much time for navel gazing. And it filled her head with numbers, rather than memories.

In short: It worked for her.

In fact, it was a beautiful morning. That their new calendar called it the thirty-second of April still seemed strange, but even if she thought of it as an early day in May, Sam knew the weather couldn't have been better were she running a hiking trail in the Colorado Rockies. The sun had only just started to warm the land. The breeze was still cool. But the sky was clear and birds sang songs in the distance that weren't dissimilar to the songs of their Earth cousins. The smell of the damp loam and meadow grasses was comforting, in fact, in its familiarity.

One, two, three, four...

How many worlds had she and her team been to over the course of the last decade? Worlds much like this one. Rarely had they ever found a gate that opened onto a world that couldn't be inhabited by humans. And of the ones that didn't open into friendly environments, most of them were space gates, which served their own purpose -- particularly in light of the 'jumpers found on Atlantis.

If she ran the numbers, it worked out to one world, once or twice -- typically twice -- a week, fifty out of fifty-two weeks a year for... what? Nine years? Use ten to make it easy. So, a thousand worlds, more or less.

Wow. Even she was impressed by that.

The field quickly gave way to forest and the path she followed became more of a game trail than an actual foot path. It wove clearly in between the trees, though without any real predictability as to left or right or around which trunk. But, it was fairly flat and there weren't too many roots that stuck out or got in the way. So, she didn't particularly lose the rhythm of her stride.

How many more worlds had Boone been to? Or Lantash? Or even Jolinar? Tok'ra could live for thousands of years, provided they found new hosts as each current host aged past the symbiote's ability to repair and regenerate. Too often, that didn't happen. But, often enough, it did. Jolinar had several hosts before Rosha had died and she'd been forced to jump into the Nasyian man and then into Carter herself to survive the Ashrak's pursuit. But, of all of Jolinar's hosts, it was Rosha that Sam remembered most clearly.

Truthfully, Sam's recollections from the symbiote weren't extensive, even now, six... eight years later. She still only commonly got occasional flashes, a few random bits here and there, the occasional dream and even rarer nightmare. Anything could trigger them -- scents, sights, sounds. Strong emotions. But the clearest they'd ever been was when Martouf had asked her to dredge up the memories of Rosha and Jolinar's escape from Netu, Sokar's private re-creation of Hell. The Tok'ra had had to use a special memory enhancing device to help her do it. On her own, most of the memories she saw were of her own life and times.

But, together, Rosha and Jolinar had loved Martouf and Lantash fiercely. That love had inspired them to do whatever they'd had to, to escape Sokar's clutches -- though they'd paid a terrible price. More than that, their love had been so deep, so lasting that Sam had felt it as her own when she'd first met Martouf. It had confused the hell out of her. Especially since it had, in fact, driven her to seek him out in the first place.

Not that she'd ever told anyone that.

Of course, chances were pretty good her closest friends and colleagues back then had eventually guessed it at some point. But no one spoke of it. So, it didn't matter.

She'd been groping in the dark, then, grasping at straws. In an instant, she'd come to know a stranger better and more intimately than she'd known anyone else. If circumstances had been different, she might actually have stayed with Martouf, with Lantash. But, that would probably have required blending with another symbiote and, even to this day, that wasn't something she was willing to do. It wasn't something she could live with.

To be fair, she'd never truly blended with Jolinar. The symbiote had taken her by force, and held her prisoner in her own mind, all in the name of survival. So, her one experience with a symbiote wasn't exactly stellar. Still, she'd learned to trust the bits and pieces Jolinar had left in her mind. If nothing else, the fact that Jolinar sacrificed herself to save her spoke volumes about both Jolinar's character and the values of the Tok'ra. Sam had come to understand then that, sometimes, the arrogance of the Tok'ra wasn't a superiority complex. Occasionally, it was fear. In the end, Jolinar had desperately wanted to return to her people with the knowledge she had gained -- and to her mate for the love they'd shared -- but she'd given it all up to save the human she'd otherwise high-jacked.

Sam had to respect that.

She came to the edge of a stream, her feet splashing in the mud. She knew from the survey maps of the colony site that it was one of the many small tributaries that eventually fed into the river. Stopping beside it, she leaned her forehead against the rough bark of a tree that closely resembled a big old willow. She'd run far enough and long enough that sweat drenched her brow and gathered on the inside of her black t-shirt. She hadn't out run her thoughts, however.

She remembered how angry she'd been when she'd discovered the Tok'ra had let Martouf die in favor of saving Lantash instead. She knew their loyalties were to the symbiotes first, the hosts second. She remembered how upset several of them had been that she'd survived, while Jolinar had not.

Except, Martouf had been willing to reach out when no one else had.

They'd become good friends, Martouf and she. Lantash, too, but differently. She knew that, really, as much as Lantash had loved her -- and she knew he loved her as much as Martouf had, as much as Jolinar and Rosha had loved them -- she never really had gotten past the whole 'snake in the head' thing. She'd never entirely shaken that Tau'ri prejudice that had always been a source of discord between their two races.

True, her own father had become a Tok'ra, had blended with a snake to great success. It had even been her idea that he do so -- though she was old enough and wise enough now to know that a lot of that wasn't so much a desire to help the Tok'ra as it was a desire to save her father's life. She'd grown to like Selmak as much as she loved her father.

But, of the two, it was Jacob that had always meant the most to her. The symbiote had been ancillary -- not unlike suddenly acquiring a step-parent. She'd mourned Selmak's passing, yes, but not nearly so much as she mourned her father's passing. Truthfully, she continued to mourn the old man, though she had indeed made her peace with it between then and now. Selmak had given her four extra years with him, and a chance to know him in ways she never could have, had none of it ever happened. For that, she'd be eternally grateful.

She crouched down by the stream now and peered over the bank. Flotsam drifted underneath the overhanging blades of grass. She didn't particularly see her reflection in the water; the current was too swift over the eddies of twigs and stones that had collected along the edges. That was just as well. Plunging her hands into the cold water, she splashed some on her face and wiped it dry with the tail of her t-shirt.

When her mother died, Sam had believed her father had cared more for his work than for her or Mark. Over time, she'd learned that wasn't true, but they'd still never been extremely close. When he'd laid dying of cancer, she'd been reluctant to go see him -- not because she didn't love him, didn't want to see him, but because she'd believed he'd never have wanted her to see him losing a battle. General Hammond had commented just how much like her father she was. Standing beneath the budding sweep of the willow branches, she supposed he was right. She hated being put in a losing situation.

And this whole thing with Lantash felt like a losing situation.

Looking at the water once more, she cupped her hands into it and took a mouthful to drink. It had a strong mineral taste, but wasn't distasteful. Wiping her hands on her trousers, she rose to her feet again.

Martouf's death had been difficult to deal with, truthfully. Sam'd had to shoot him herself. Yes, she'd used a zat, but that didn't stop him from dying. And while she comforted herself with the reality that she'd had no other choice, it had never really sat well with her. She'd always blamed herself for his death, even when she'd later discovered Lantash was still alive. That had angered her, in fact. She couldn't believe the Tok'ra, who could have healed Martouf and saved them both, had chosen to let the host die in favor of saving the symbiote, instead -- in favor of dissecting the host to find out just what the za'tarc technology had done to him. But, in the end, the reality was Martouf's life and death had been out of her hands. She'd done what she'd had to in order to save lives, and to give Martouf some peace of his own. Her grief then had been as much Jolinar's as her own, but she couldn't deny just how much of it had in fact been her own grief. Even now, she missed him.

Eventually, though, she'd mourned Martouf and made her peace with it. What else could she do? Later, when Lantash found his way into the body of young Lieutenant Elliot and confessed his continuing love for her, the sacrifice he'd made to save both her and the rest of her team had been on much the same level as Jolinar's own sacrifice to save her. It spoke volumes about his character, and about the truth of depths of his emotions. Thus, she'd mourned him almost as much as Jolinar would have, almost as much as she had Martouf.

But, again... it was a long time ago. She'd made her peace with it. Hadn't she? In this moment, standing by the stream, the morning's argument still fresh in her mind, she wasn't entirely sure. And yet...

Captain Boone was no Martouf. She didn't know him. Because of Jolinar, because of Rosha, she knew Martouf -- knew him in very intimate ways she didn't know Boone. And she was extremely uncomfortable at the thought of that level of intimacy with Lantash's new host.

Her brows dipped, knotting together as she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Way to go, Sam," she growled, pushing her thumb up over her forehead and rubbing at the center of her brow with the heel of her hand. She rubbed her hand over her eyes then, and reached around to rub the back of her neck after that. "Why is it, the moment everything seems to be clicking along with out a problem, something like this always comes along to bite you on the ass?"

It was a little frustrating. Her love life, such as it was, had never been the most exciting thing to watch. Trusting on that level was difficult for her. She didn't do it often. And when she did, it was never for long and, come to think of it, it never ended well. Her father's grief at her mother's untimely death had early shaped the impression that sort of love led to loss and grief and pain. On some level, Martouf's death had reinforced that.

Hell, most of her relationships had reinforced that. Jonas Hanson was a control freak with a god complex. He'd died delusional, certain he could force her to capitulate to him. It would never have happened. Even if he hadn't died, she'd never have given in to him. But she'd still mourned his passing, lost soul that he was. Then came Martouf... and today wouldn't have happened without Martouf; without his death. Next was the Tollan, Narim. He'd died defending his planet from a Goa'uld whose true goal was to destroy Earth. The Ancient, Orlin, who'd ascended after haunting her house for a while, came after that.

And, then, of course, there was Pete. That had fallen apart, too. Right in the middle of picking out flowers for the wedding. She'd been the one to call it off, not him. Why? Well... because...

Because of Jack.

The day Martouf had died, the day she'd shot him, was the same day she and Jack had been forced to admit how much they cared for each other. That damned alien lie detector had forced the matter, detecting how each of them concealed their feelings and identifying it as a lie. She'd promised Jack that day that the admission that had cleared each of their names never had to leave the interrogation room. And, officially, it never had.

But, unofficially?

Hell, even her own father, just before he died, had told her not to let rules stand in her way, to find some way to be happy. She'd told him then that she was happy. That she had everything she wanted. She hadn't lied. Not really. The day her father died was the same day she'd walked away from Pete and, as she'd discovered much later, the same day Kerry had walked away from Jack. She remembered that day much more sharply than she cared to admit.

She'd been sitting in the observation room, looking down at her father in his isolation room where he spoke with a pair of Tok'ra friends. Jack had come in. He'd sat down in silence with her for a time, carrying out the same vigil. Then... "You okay?"

She'd been crying some before he came in, but her face was dry by that point. "Actually, I'm fine," she'd replied. "Good, even. Strange as that sounds." And she had been. It had been odd, really, that feeling of peace even then. "I thought I lost him four years ago. Since then, we've been closer than we ever were in my whole life. In a way, Selmak gave me the father I never thought I'd know." Score one for the Tok'ra.

Even then, though, Jack had known what was going on underneath. Jack always seemed to know what was going on underneath. He was solid, that way. A rock. Even now, she loved that about him.

"C'mere." He'd put his arm around her. She'd taken his hand and laid her head on his shoulder.

"Thank you, sir."

"For what?"

"For being there for me."

He'd looked at her, then. She'd met his eyes, seen the sincerity in them. "Always." It was a promise.

And she knew it.

The year before all that, she'd told herself -- in a rather remarkable way, given it had been in the midst of a hallucination brought on by a severe head injury while she was marooned on the Prometheus in a troublesome gas cloud -- that there was no point waiting for Jack. As long as she set her sights on the unobtainable, she couldn't be hurt by someone else, but that was foolish. She deserved more. And, even before Jack had made his promise in the observation room, she'd known he'd always be there for her. No matter what.

So, she'd taken the chance on Pete. But it hadn't worked. It hadn't worked because he wasn't the right one. None of them had been. None but Jack. Unobtainable or not...

Theirs was a comfortable relationship. It didn't need to be consummated. It didn't need to be declared. They were friends. They were colleagues. The respect they had for one another was incredible. Their closeness was as much the closeness of people that regularly put their lives in one another's hands as it was anything more than that. If it never became anything more than that... she was good with that. He was good with it, too. It wasn't something they needed to discuss. They both just knew.

Hell, she didn't even know if they would pursue something more, even if they could. She didn't know if she wanted to. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn't. She liked their friendship just as it was. And, somehow, there was a part of her that doubted it would change all that much, could they get around the regs.

None of which answered the problem of Boone and Lantash.

Indeed, it only compounded it -- providing the man would even acknowledge her later. Briefly, she did wonder what this would mean if and when they had to work together. She was, according to Jack, effectively second-in-command of the Gamma military contingent. That complicated matters, too. If Boone felt as strongly as Lantash did -- and, based on her experiences with Jolinar, she had no reason to believe he didn't -- she may have made much more than just a personal misstep.

She began to run again, stepping over a short log and heading along the stream for a short distance before another game trail started her angling up and away from it once more. The sun had begun to penetrate the foliage enough to give a warm, dappled look to the new green leaves. Birds still sang loudly, some of their calls simply alerting others to her passage, for all that she was sure the pounding of her standard issue boots was all the alert anyone needed that she was coming.

To some degree, the whole debate was moot. If she were brutally honest with herself, she could admit that her anger was as much from real hurt that Lantash hadn't trusted her as it was anything else -- whether or not his secrecy was to spare his feelings, her feelings, or both. That part didn't matter. In the end, he'd not trusted her, and then he'd just dropped this bomb on her. Worse, she knew that he'd likely only accidentally dropped it, and could have done so for any number of reasons: fatigue... guilt... hormones.

Oh, yes. Hormones were involved here. Sam had no doubt of that. The intimate way Boone had stroked her hair out of her face had started it. The anger that had shook him when he gotten up in her face, even her own awareness of his proximity, had made it equally clear. Add to it the fact that she did, in fact, remember just what the relationship between Martouf/Lantash and Rosha/Jolinar had been... She'd struggled with that quite a bit in the beginning. They'd loved each other completely. When Martouf said they were mates, there was no doubt in her mind just how true that was -- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. And she'd fallen heir to all those emotions and experiences.

Which only made his death -- and even Lantash's death -- harder to bear. Her run slowed to a jog, and then a walk as she grappled with the reality of that. She missed Martouf. And, yes, she missed Lantash. The part of her that was still Jolinar, after all these years, missed them in much the same way she imagined her father had missed her mother. That same part of her was ecstatic at the idea Lantash wasn't dead after all, that maybe they had a second chance. But, the more pragmatic side of her was wary. Boone wasn't Martouf. And she wasn't Rosha. She also didn't actually have a living, breathing Jolinar inside of her to mitigate her own reactions. (She was glad about that.)

Passing through into a clearing, she looked up through the gap in the forest canopy and saw the sun haloed within a passing cloud. In frustration, she flung her hands up, turning in a small circle as she surveyed the heavens. "What the hell do you want me to do?" she demanded of the empty sky. "What the hell am I supposed to do? This? This is not fair!"

Sam didn't really believe in God any more, so it was hard to say why she was shouting at the sky. Although it said Catholic on her dog tags, once she'd left her father's house she'd never been very regular in her church attendance. Once she stepped through the 'gate and came to understand just how many the so-called gods in the universe were merely aliens with serious superiority complexes, she'd fallen away almost entirely. Even the Ancients, whom they'd discovered to have been responsible for seeding life on Earth, not to mention a host of other planets across two galaxies, were mortal and fallible. Sure, they'd ascended, which was probably about as close to godhood as anyone could hope to come, but that didn't truly make them gods.

Sam was a scientist. That suggested she was more comfortable with cold, measurable facts than philosophical flights of fancy. But her strongest scientific specialty was theoretical astrophysics. Quantum mechanics, some said, was akin to a religion. It discussed the existence of phenomena outside of humanity's current ability to measure and quantify. As a result, it challenged accepted scientific method. Although most of Sam's day-to-day work dealt with real-world facts and figures, her chief accomplishments had been in fields considered by many to be esoteric at best. She'd proven her theories by practical application, but still hadn't managed to measurably prove the existence of the infinitesimally small particles quantum physics described. The existence of wormholes, and the fact they could be manipulated, was strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that branes and strings really did exist, but, even with the public revelation of the stargate and everything it represented, there were still those that gainsaid everything her life's work was about. And in spite of that, she still believed in it. So, perhaps in that sense God wasn't so far out of reach.

In any case, there was that old saying: No one's an atheist in a foxhole. So, while Sam certainly wasn't shouting at God, per se, she was certainly shouting at the universe in general. It was little more than an expression of her frustration, her confusion, but it made her feel a little better -- in spite of the fact her only answer was the flight of a flock of birds she startled out of nearby trees.

"Thanks," she snirked, flipping a hand sarcastically. "That helps."

Truthfully, she knew that life wasn't fair. She didn't really expect it to be fair. And, privately, she suspected it was a good thing it wasn't fair, because it was likely that the balancing would seem even less fair. But, that didn't stop her from grumbling about it.

She had no desire to deal with this... this... this shit! Oh, yeah. This went way beyond crap and straight into the realm of bullshit. She had, on occasion, witnessed Daniel jump up and down with frustration, trying to get his point across to Jack when he was being particularly obstinate. Sam felt like jumping up and down like that now. She didn't actually do it, of course. That wasn't really her nature. But she sure understood how the archeologist felt.

"Alright," she said aloud again, walking in a tight circle. "Alright. I give. I'm done. Fine. Whatever." She shook her head. "It doesn't really matter anyway." Frat rules required her to stay as separate from Boone and Lantash as they did Jack. Chain of command, and all that. In that light, the whole conflict was a useless waste of time and energy. "Let it go, Carter."

She looked up at the sky one more time. Her confusion hadn't really lessened any. And she still needed to find a way to make a proper apology to Boone and especially Lantash. But the rest of it? The rest of it, she could suppress -- certainly well enough to do her job. And that was all that really mattered.

Thus, shoving her hands deep into her pockets, she began the long walk back to the settlement. It was time to find breakfast, at the very least. After that? Well, there was the salvage yard. Who knew what treasures she'd find there... all of them capable of distracting her for a time. And that was all that mattered.

There'd be time enough to deal with the rest of this crap later.