'Taking Leave' - last line prompt fic
A quick-fic for teaphile, inspired by her last line prompt and the icon she posted it with. Posted because it's quiet around here - too quiet. *tumbleweed*
Taking Leave, title kindly provided by the lovely paian
PG, Gen, ~3000 words
Warning for: zomg! off-screen pre-story character death, and honestly, I don't know what's wrong with me, this is the second happy ending I've written with death involved, and so I humbly implore someone to show me up and write one without.
...
Lam cleared her to go home, but not to drive, and before she had even thought to call him Daniel was standing at the infirmary door with two laptop bags and a duffle over his shoulders, his coat folded over one arm. His eyes tracked a nurse across the infirmary, watched her fuss over the screens monitoring Cam sleep, and then grabbed a free chair, drew it up alongside her bed. “Heard you’ve been released for good behavior.”
“I got into one fight,” Sam said, easing herself up to sitting with a wince. “The other guy started it, though.”
“I bet.” Daniel said, glancing quickly again across the room to Cam’s bed. His eyes were crinkled with a smile when he looked back, and he kindly didn’t patronize her with a guiding hand when it took two tries for her to swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand up. “Well, I’ll be your parole officer for the evening, so - chair or no chair?”
It wasn’t so bad, standing. Sam curled her bare toes against the cold cement floor. “No chair. It’s just the medicine. Can you give me ten minutes to pick up the prescriptions from Lam and -“
“Done. Brought you a change, too.” Daniel swung the duffle up on the bed, unzipped it with a flourish.
“Really?” Sam reached in and found pill bottles and her favorite sweatshirt among the folds of fabric. Beaming, she nodded to the curtain. “Give me five, then.”
“Sure. I’m gonna go poke Mitchell, see if he moves.”
It ended up taking her closer to ten - the bandages around her wrist made shoelaces and the clasp on her bra ridiculously complicated undertakings, and she still felt overbalanced, verging on toppling over at odd moments. Finally she was good to go, reasonably put together - although God only knew what her hair must look like. Daniel hadn’t brought a comb, so Sam figured she either looked passably human after all, or beyond what assistance he could give, raiding her locker for supplies. Either way, there was a long soak in her tub on the agenda; she’d deal with it then.
When she emerged, she found Daniel sitting by Cam’s bed, and Cam still dead to the world. Having seen the size of the needles they had been taking to his IV, she wasn’t surprised - but there was color back in his face, and the nurses were starting to space out their checks, so Sam figured they’d be seeing him awake soon enough.
“All set?”
She nodded. Daniel gave Cam a last one-over and, seemingly satisfied, scooped up the bags and his coat, and followed her out.
--
The car ride was exceptionally quiet. Upbeat Daniel of the infirmary had vanished somewhere between the security check out and the turn off the long, winding road down the mountain. Sam could almost see him turning over whatever had him so far away in his head, but didn’t ask. The last week had been…hard, on all of them, but Daniel especially, and Sam knew him enough to know he’d talk about it when he was ready to and not before.
She wasn’t expecting him to say, carefully, as they sat waiting at a red light, “They’re decommissioning the team.”
Sam had been looking out the window, watching a teen on a skateboard show off for a small group of high school girls. She decided, immediately, that she must have misheard. “What?”
Daniel nodded, eased off the brake as the light turned green. “And retiring the designation. Effective…eventually, I’m not sure exactly when, actually.”
“Why? I mean, we defeated the Ori, we destroyed the supergate -“
“I don’t think it’s a punishment, Sam,” Daniel interrupted, gently. “But the IOA’s made up their minds on it, apparently.”
Sam dropped her head back against the headrest and stared blankly through the windshield for three blocks. “How do you know?” she finally asked.
“Landry pulled me into his office yesterday morning to talk to me about it. Probably you’ll hear it from him once you’re back, but - well, I would have preferred to have heard it from one of you, so…”
“No, absolutely, I just…” She sighed and shook her head. “I can’t believe they’re breaking us up, just like that.”
There was a long pause before Daniel responded, long enough that she had time to brace herself for another blow by the time he added, “They also aren’t going to reassign me.”
“What?” And she had no doubts that she’d heard correctly, that time.
Daniel shrugged, rolled his eyes a little. “Yeah. Apparently the IOA has decided I’m more valuable on-world.”
“But that’s…I mean, Daniel - and don’t take this the wrong way - but you should never have been allowed into the field in the first place, not when you were the only person on Earth for a while that could translate Goa’uld effectively, not from a traditional perspective. Putting you on the team was still the right call.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Still,” Sam protested. “We, the SGC, needed you in the field then, and we need you now. General O’Neill -“
“Isn’t fighting it,” Daniel said. He pulled into her driveway - Sam hadn’t even noticed they were on her street - and killed the engine, but made no move to leave the car. “It wasn’t his idea, any of it, but I’m not…entirely sure he doesn’t at least partially agree. And I’m not sure I don’t partially agree.”
She stared at him. “You can’t mean that.”
Daniel sighed and unbuckled. “Come on. You need to take most of the meds with food, right?”
Sam wasn’t hungry, and she didn’t want to come on. But Daniel was already retrieving their laptops from the backseat, and she slowly undid her seatbelt, climbed from the car with a shaky feeling that had nothing to do with her medication.
--
He had clearly been by her house already, because the mail was sorted and stacked on her counter, and nothing in her fridge had started to evolve in her absence. Daniel settled her on the couch with a magazine and she stared at the pages without seeing them as he poked around in the kitchen, made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Her favorite comfort lunch, what her mother had always made her when she was home sick from school. She couldn’t remember ever having told him that, but he even cut her sandwich into rectangles, instead of diagonally as he cut his own, so she must have, once.
Sam watched him across the table, warily, and wondered if he was really going to do this, if he was really going to make her ask. But he took a bite of his sandwich, sipped his soda, and then said, “This Ori thing…I can’t do it again, Sam. I’m done.”
She wanted to protest, because it was Daniel and she’d never…he never gave up, not on anything, not ever, and for him to now was inconceivable. But she bit down on her immediate reaction and really looked at him for the first time since they’d come staggering through the gate a week before, exhausted and bloody and missing one. He looked - tired. Not even sad, just tired. Like he had looked right before Kelowna, although she hadn’t really understood what she was seeing, at the time. “Because of Vala?” she asked, cautious.
“No. Well… no. She’s a part of it, but no. I…” He trailed off and drifted away for a moment, not seeing her for a long moment. “It’s been a long time, and the gate’s taken a lot, and I don’t…know if I can give anymore. The only things I have left to lose are you and Teal’c. And Mitchell, although don’t ask me when that happened. And I just - can’t.” He cleared his throat, came back to himself and shrugged. “So no. Landry retiring SG-1…I’m okay with that. I know maybe it’s different for you…”
“I’m not okay with it.” Sam said. And then she said, “But the rest…I can understand.” She hesitated, toyed with the edges of her napkin. “I don’t want to go into the field with another team.”
“Teal’c and I hoped you wouldn’t,” Daniel said, carefully. He smiled a little when she raised her eyebrows at him, apologetic. “It’s not that we don’t trust you, or Mitchell, just…you know.”
“I know.” Those few weeks of missions before she’d returned from Nevada, Daniel off - kind of - in another galaxy with the lunatic who hijacked the Prometheus and poor Cam, so not prepared, and Vala dragging them all over the galaxy - they’d been less than pleasant. “I guess Teal’c is going back to politics.”
Daniel shrugged, noncommittal. “Sort of. What will you do?”
“I’ll go back to R&D, I guess, why?” Sam asked, her vague suspicion sharpening when he didn’t immediately answer. “What are you going to do, Daniel? I can’t picture you sitting at a desk for long, not anymore.”
“Ah. No. Actually, I’m taking a leave.”
“For how long?”
“Indefinitely,” Daniel said. He stirred his soup idly, drawing patterns in the liquid with his spoon. “I’m resigning. Temporarily.”
“You can’t ‘temporarily’ resign.”
“Why not? Jack’s does it all the time.”
She resisted rolling her eyes. “Daniel.”
He put the spoon down, pushed his bowl away. “The program is going to go public. Soon, probably in two years or so. Apparently they’ve already started to prep for it.”
“Retiring SG-1 on a high note,” Sam realized.
“Among other things, I’m sure, but yeah. And that’ll change a lot of things, and I’m…pretty sure I don’t want to be around for it.” He smiled at her, more than a little sardonic. “We’re either going to be vilified or put onto pedestals, you know. The late, great SG-1.”
Sam shrugged an agreement. “I’m still not sure how resigning helps.”
“Temporarily resigning,” Daniel corrected. “Elizabeth Weir and I have a standing agreement that when the program does go public, she’s going to suddenly develop a pressing need for my expertise in Atlantis.”
“To do what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Daniel, gesturing dismissively. “She’ll come up with something.”
Sam couldn’t help but laugh a little, humorless from vertigo, the uncomfortable feeling that she’d had the wind knocked out of her somewhere back in the car and had never quite caught it again. “You know, I woke up this morning wondering when’d we’d be cleared for the field again,” she said, and then winced at how pathetic it sounded, out loud.
Daniel’s face went soft, and serious, an expression that had once been so commonplace she never noticed it, and somewhere along the line became reserved exclusively for her, and for Teal’c; a private part of himself that he’d learned to shield from the rest of the universe, but never from them. She thought he was going to say something, some terribly insightful phrase that would put everything into perspective, the way he always seemed to be uniquely capable of doing - but instead, Daniel stood abruptly, leaving the cups and plates to move around the table to her chair. “C’mere.”
She let him steer her back to the couch, didn’t protest as he maneuvered her onto the cushions and sat at the far end with her feet in his lap. “Look,” he said, and there was finally, finally a brief moment where regret seemed to cross his face. “You know I would have gone through the gate with you guys for as long as they let me, right?”
“I know,” Sam said, and found that she really did, because Teal’c had always been on loan, and the general had one foot in Minnesota a long time before the was the general, but Daniel - it took her a long time to come to terms with the idea that Daniel had put up a very good show of being gone without apparently actually leaving, that he had given up immortality and then thrown on an SGC uniform because they had handed it to him. “Atlantis, huh?”
“Carter Gatebridge,” he reminded her.
“Carter-McKay.”
“Whatever. Just a several-billion-dollar puddle jump away.”
She tried to smile, almost made it. “Better than R&D, I guess.” Which was weird to say, because she’d really wanted to be there, once. But it was always easy in theory; Sam had never been good at factoring the magnetic pull of the gate into her plans. Or the pull of the people.
“Yeaaah…” Daniel said, slowly. “You know, you don’t have to go back to R&D.”
“There’d be no reason to run a lab in the mountain. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the facilities are great, but -“
“No,” Daniel said. “I mean, you don’t have to do any of that at all. No Nevada, no SGC.”
“What, Atlantis?” Sam couldn’t picture herself working day-to-day with McKay. Well, she could, but the idea was terrifying.
Daniel shook his head, then hesitated, amended, “Well, actually - if you wanted to - I mean, you know I’d…and I’m sure Elizabeth could think of a way to desperately need you, but that wasn’t what I meant. And anyway, that wouldn’t be for a long time. At least eighteen months.”
“What are you doing ‘til then?” She asked - because, she suddenly realized, ‘temporary resignation’ was a how, not a what.
“Teal’c’s never been to Europe,” Daniel said, looking at her over the rims of his glasses as if that would clarify everything. “We’re not counting Glastonbury.”
Sam blinked at him, shifted back into the pillows, folded her arms and waited.
“He wants to go. Actually, he has a list of places. Or - things that require places. Disney World. Um…London, a lot of things in London, and France - I still think c’est la vie confuses him - and Spain. And Italy, and Germany, and Greece, and the Czech Republic, and, really, a long list. And that’s just Europe. He has most of the planet itemized.” Daniel drummed his fingers against her ankle, looked at her sideways, and she realized, Oh. The little sneaks. “Take a year off.”
“Daniel, I’m a colonel in the United States Air Force,” she said, pushing herself up a little higher on the couch so she could stare at him skeptically from a better angle. “I can’t just take a year off.”
“Fine,” he shrugged. “Teal’c and I are going sightseeing, and we’re very valuable assets to the program, you know. Something could happen. There could be a mugging.” Daniel met her eyes, flawlessly innocent. “Letting us go off by ourselves, you know, it’s reckless.”
“You’re serious,” she said, almost laughing at the absurdity of it. She could picture them in her minds eye, Teal’c and Daniel on Main Street USA, Teal’c wearing Mickey Ears to hide his tattoo. Except… “What about the Jaffa?”
“They need time to regroup and rebuild before they start trying to organize their government again. Not to mention a completely new political philosophy, but that’s separate. And Teal’c’s always just a gate away.”
“But Teal’c -“
“Is leaving next week to help lay some of the groundwork,” Daniel said. “He’ll be back in a month or two.”
She flopped back into the cushions, stared at the ceiling. “Cam? General O’Neill?”
“We could talk Mitchell… Cameron around. And Jack will be furious at us for going off without him.” Daniel grinned at her. “Teal’c and I figure six weeks or so before he gets fed up and shows up wherever we happen to be.”
Sam did have to laugh that time, a real laugh, even as she scrubbed at her face and shook her head. “And you’ve thought all of this out in the last day.”
Daniel was settling in as well, propping his feet up on the coffee table and slouching down into the sofa. “I know it’s kind of sudden and a little crazy -“
“Uh, yeah,”
“-But hear me out, Sam. We’ve given up so much of our lives to protect Earth, and we barely live in it. We’ve spent the last decade exploring other planets and Teal’c’s never seen this one.”
“That’s the nature of the job,” Sam said.
Daniel shook his head. “No, it was the nature of the job, and I’m not complaining. But SG-1 isn’t our job anymore. We can do whatever we want.”
“Whatever we want.” Sam blinked up at her ceiling fan, then propped herself up on her good elbow. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Beaches,” Daniel agreed. “Drinks with umbrellas.”
“NASCAR.”
“The Roswell UFO Museum.”
Sam snickered. “You really think it could work?”
“I think the Air Force owes us,” Daniel said, sobering a little. “The IOA owes us. And keep in mind - Landry does still report to Jack.”
Sam was quiet and still for a long time, turning the idea over in her head and watching dust motes filter through the slanting orange light streaming through her windows. Daniel’s hand was a steady pressure on her ankle, comforting, and when she closed her eyes she could imagine Teal’c sitting serenely in the armchair, could almost hear the clink of glasses from the kitchen, a low murmur that might have been Cam, might have been the general. Finally, she decided. “I could use a vacation.”
Daniel’s face lit up, a rare, full on nose-crinkling beam. “Good. We didn’t want to have to kidnap you.” Sam nudged him, poked her toes into his ribs, and he caught her foot, gave her that look that she had long ago learned to parse as laughter. “I mean it. This is it, Sam, it’s - everything we’ve been working for this whole time. Earth is okay, we’re not responsible for the world anymore. Now we can just…enjoy it. I think we've earned the right.”
Sam found herself smiling back, felt something warm settle in her stomach, a flood of ideas uncurl in her mind and reach out to nudge secret wishes she’d long filed away as impossible. Earning Earth… she'd never considered it that way, but now that she thought of it, well... there was a lot to look forward to.
Taking Leave, title kindly provided by the lovely paian
PG, Gen, ~3000 words
Warning for: zomg! off-screen pre-story character death, and honestly, I don't know what's wrong with me, this is the second happy ending I've written with death involved, and so I humbly implore someone to show me up and write one without.
...
Lam cleared her to go home, but not to drive, and before she had even thought to call him Daniel was standing at the infirmary door with two laptop bags and a duffle over his shoulders, his coat folded over one arm. His eyes tracked a nurse across the infirmary, watched her fuss over the screens monitoring Cam sleep, and then grabbed a free chair, drew it up alongside her bed. “Heard you’ve been released for good behavior.”
“I got into one fight,” Sam said, easing herself up to sitting with a wince. “The other guy started it, though.”
“I bet.” Daniel said, glancing quickly again across the room to Cam’s bed. His eyes were crinkled with a smile when he looked back, and he kindly didn’t patronize her with a guiding hand when it took two tries for her to swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand up. “Well, I’ll be your parole officer for the evening, so - chair or no chair?”
It wasn’t so bad, standing. Sam curled her bare toes against the cold cement floor. “No chair. It’s just the medicine. Can you give me ten minutes to pick up the prescriptions from Lam and -“
“Done. Brought you a change, too.” Daniel swung the duffle up on the bed, unzipped it with a flourish.
“Really?” Sam reached in and found pill bottles and her favorite sweatshirt among the folds of fabric. Beaming, she nodded to the curtain. “Give me five, then.”
“Sure. I’m gonna go poke Mitchell, see if he moves.”
It ended up taking her closer to ten - the bandages around her wrist made shoelaces and the clasp on her bra ridiculously complicated undertakings, and she still felt overbalanced, verging on toppling over at odd moments. Finally she was good to go, reasonably put together - although God only knew what her hair must look like. Daniel hadn’t brought a comb, so Sam figured she either looked passably human after all, or beyond what assistance he could give, raiding her locker for supplies. Either way, there was a long soak in her tub on the agenda; she’d deal with it then.
When she emerged, she found Daniel sitting by Cam’s bed, and Cam still dead to the world. Having seen the size of the needles they had been taking to his IV, she wasn’t surprised - but there was color back in his face, and the nurses were starting to space out their checks, so Sam figured they’d be seeing him awake soon enough.
“All set?”
She nodded. Daniel gave Cam a last one-over and, seemingly satisfied, scooped up the bags and his coat, and followed her out.
--
The car ride was exceptionally quiet. Upbeat Daniel of the infirmary had vanished somewhere between the security check out and the turn off the long, winding road down the mountain. Sam could almost see him turning over whatever had him so far away in his head, but didn’t ask. The last week had been…hard, on all of them, but Daniel especially, and Sam knew him enough to know he’d talk about it when he was ready to and not before.
She wasn’t expecting him to say, carefully, as they sat waiting at a red light, “They’re decommissioning the team.”
Sam had been looking out the window, watching a teen on a skateboard show off for a small group of high school girls. She decided, immediately, that she must have misheard. “What?”
Daniel nodded, eased off the brake as the light turned green. “And retiring the designation. Effective…eventually, I’m not sure exactly when, actually.”
“Why? I mean, we defeated the Ori, we destroyed the supergate -“
“I don’t think it’s a punishment, Sam,” Daniel interrupted, gently. “But the IOA’s made up their minds on it, apparently.”
Sam dropped her head back against the headrest and stared blankly through the windshield for three blocks. “How do you know?” she finally asked.
“Landry pulled me into his office yesterday morning to talk to me about it. Probably you’ll hear it from him once you’re back, but - well, I would have preferred to have heard it from one of you, so…”
“No, absolutely, I just…” She sighed and shook her head. “I can’t believe they’re breaking us up, just like that.”
There was a long pause before Daniel responded, long enough that she had time to brace herself for another blow by the time he added, “They also aren’t going to reassign me.”
“What?” And she had no doubts that she’d heard correctly, that time.
Daniel shrugged, rolled his eyes a little. “Yeah. Apparently the IOA has decided I’m more valuable on-world.”
“But that’s…I mean, Daniel - and don’t take this the wrong way - but you should never have been allowed into the field in the first place, not when you were the only person on Earth for a while that could translate Goa’uld effectively, not from a traditional perspective. Putting you on the team was still the right call.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Still,” Sam protested. “We, the SGC, needed you in the field then, and we need you now. General O’Neill -“
“Isn’t fighting it,” Daniel said. He pulled into her driveway - Sam hadn’t even noticed they were on her street - and killed the engine, but made no move to leave the car. “It wasn’t his idea, any of it, but I’m not…entirely sure he doesn’t at least partially agree. And I’m not sure I don’t partially agree.”
She stared at him. “You can’t mean that.”
Daniel sighed and unbuckled. “Come on. You need to take most of the meds with food, right?”
Sam wasn’t hungry, and she didn’t want to come on. But Daniel was already retrieving their laptops from the backseat, and she slowly undid her seatbelt, climbed from the car with a shaky feeling that had nothing to do with her medication.
--
He had clearly been by her house already, because the mail was sorted and stacked on her counter, and nothing in her fridge had started to evolve in her absence. Daniel settled her on the couch with a magazine and she stared at the pages without seeing them as he poked around in the kitchen, made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Her favorite comfort lunch, what her mother had always made her when she was home sick from school. She couldn’t remember ever having told him that, but he even cut her sandwich into rectangles, instead of diagonally as he cut his own, so she must have, once.
Sam watched him across the table, warily, and wondered if he was really going to do this, if he was really going to make her ask. But he took a bite of his sandwich, sipped his soda, and then said, “This Ori thing…I can’t do it again, Sam. I’m done.”
She wanted to protest, because it was Daniel and she’d never…he never gave up, not on anything, not ever, and for him to now was inconceivable. But she bit down on her immediate reaction and really looked at him for the first time since they’d come staggering through the gate a week before, exhausted and bloody and missing one. He looked - tired. Not even sad, just tired. Like he had looked right before Kelowna, although she hadn’t really understood what she was seeing, at the time. “Because of Vala?” she asked, cautious.
“No. Well… no. She’s a part of it, but no. I…” He trailed off and drifted away for a moment, not seeing her for a long moment. “It’s been a long time, and the gate’s taken a lot, and I don’t…know if I can give anymore. The only things I have left to lose are you and Teal’c. And Mitchell, although don’t ask me when that happened. And I just - can’t.” He cleared his throat, came back to himself and shrugged. “So no. Landry retiring SG-1…I’m okay with that. I know maybe it’s different for you…”
“I’m not okay with it.” Sam said. And then she said, “But the rest…I can understand.” She hesitated, toyed with the edges of her napkin. “I don’t want to go into the field with another team.”
“Teal’c and I hoped you wouldn’t,” Daniel said, carefully. He smiled a little when she raised her eyebrows at him, apologetic. “It’s not that we don’t trust you, or Mitchell, just…you know.”
“I know.” Those few weeks of missions before she’d returned from Nevada, Daniel off - kind of - in another galaxy with the lunatic who hijacked the Prometheus and poor Cam, so not prepared, and Vala dragging them all over the galaxy - they’d been less than pleasant. “I guess Teal’c is going back to politics.”
Daniel shrugged, noncommittal. “Sort of. What will you do?”
“I’ll go back to R&D, I guess, why?” Sam asked, her vague suspicion sharpening when he didn’t immediately answer. “What are you going to do, Daniel? I can’t picture you sitting at a desk for long, not anymore.”
“Ah. No. Actually, I’m taking a leave.”
“For how long?”
“Indefinitely,” Daniel said. He stirred his soup idly, drawing patterns in the liquid with his spoon. “I’m resigning. Temporarily.”
“You can’t ‘temporarily’ resign.”
“Why not? Jack’s does it all the time.”
She resisted rolling her eyes. “Daniel.”
He put the spoon down, pushed his bowl away. “The program is going to go public. Soon, probably in two years or so. Apparently they’ve already started to prep for it.”
“Retiring SG-1 on a high note,” Sam realized.
“Among other things, I’m sure, but yeah. And that’ll change a lot of things, and I’m…pretty sure I don’t want to be around for it.” He smiled at her, more than a little sardonic. “We’re either going to be vilified or put onto pedestals, you know. The late, great SG-1.”
Sam shrugged an agreement. “I’m still not sure how resigning helps.”
“Temporarily resigning,” Daniel corrected. “Elizabeth Weir and I have a standing agreement that when the program does go public, she’s going to suddenly develop a pressing need for my expertise in Atlantis.”
“To do what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Daniel, gesturing dismissively. “She’ll come up with something.”
Sam couldn’t help but laugh a little, humorless from vertigo, the uncomfortable feeling that she’d had the wind knocked out of her somewhere back in the car and had never quite caught it again. “You know, I woke up this morning wondering when’d we’d be cleared for the field again,” she said, and then winced at how pathetic it sounded, out loud.
Daniel’s face went soft, and serious, an expression that had once been so commonplace she never noticed it, and somewhere along the line became reserved exclusively for her, and for Teal’c; a private part of himself that he’d learned to shield from the rest of the universe, but never from them. She thought he was going to say something, some terribly insightful phrase that would put everything into perspective, the way he always seemed to be uniquely capable of doing - but instead, Daniel stood abruptly, leaving the cups and plates to move around the table to her chair. “C’mere.”
She let him steer her back to the couch, didn’t protest as he maneuvered her onto the cushions and sat at the far end with her feet in his lap. “Look,” he said, and there was finally, finally a brief moment where regret seemed to cross his face. “You know I would have gone through the gate with you guys for as long as they let me, right?”
“I know,” Sam said, and found that she really did, because Teal’c had always been on loan, and the general had one foot in Minnesota a long time before the was the general, but Daniel - it took her a long time to come to terms with the idea that Daniel had put up a very good show of being gone without apparently actually leaving, that he had given up immortality and then thrown on an SGC uniform because they had handed it to him. “Atlantis, huh?”
“Carter Gatebridge,” he reminded her.
“Carter-McKay.”
“Whatever. Just a several-billion-dollar puddle jump away.”
She tried to smile, almost made it. “Better than R&D, I guess.” Which was weird to say, because she’d really wanted to be there, once. But it was always easy in theory; Sam had never been good at factoring the magnetic pull of the gate into her plans. Or the pull of the people.
“Yeaaah…” Daniel said, slowly. “You know, you don’t have to go back to R&D.”
“There’d be no reason to run a lab in the mountain. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the facilities are great, but -“
“No,” Daniel said. “I mean, you don’t have to do any of that at all. No Nevada, no SGC.”
“What, Atlantis?” Sam couldn’t picture herself working day-to-day with McKay. Well, she could, but the idea was terrifying.
Daniel shook his head, then hesitated, amended, “Well, actually - if you wanted to - I mean, you know I’d…and I’m sure Elizabeth could think of a way to desperately need you, but that wasn’t what I meant. And anyway, that wouldn’t be for a long time. At least eighteen months.”
“What are you doing ‘til then?” She asked - because, she suddenly realized, ‘temporary resignation’ was a how, not a what.
“Teal’c’s never been to Europe,” Daniel said, looking at her over the rims of his glasses as if that would clarify everything. “We’re not counting Glastonbury.”
Sam blinked at him, shifted back into the pillows, folded her arms and waited.
“He wants to go. Actually, he has a list of places. Or - things that require places. Disney World. Um…London, a lot of things in London, and France - I still think c’est la vie confuses him - and Spain. And Italy, and Germany, and Greece, and the Czech Republic, and, really, a long list. And that’s just Europe. He has most of the planet itemized.” Daniel drummed his fingers against her ankle, looked at her sideways, and she realized, Oh. The little sneaks. “Take a year off.”
“Daniel, I’m a colonel in the United States Air Force,” she said, pushing herself up a little higher on the couch so she could stare at him skeptically from a better angle. “I can’t just take a year off.”
“Fine,” he shrugged. “Teal’c and I are going sightseeing, and we’re very valuable assets to the program, you know. Something could happen. There could be a mugging.” Daniel met her eyes, flawlessly innocent. “Letting us go off by ourselves, you know, it’s reckless.”
“You’re serious,” she said, almost laughing at the absurdity of it. She could picture them in her minds eye, Teal’c and Daniel on Main Street USA, Teal’c wearing Mickey Ears to hide his tattoo. Except… “What about the Jaffa?”
“They need time to regroup and rebuild before they start trying to organize their government again. Not to mention a completely new political philosophy, but that’s separate. And Teal’c’s always just a gate away.”
“But Teal’c -“
“Is leaving next week to help lay some of the groundwork,” Daniel said. “He’ll be back in a month or two.”
She flopped back into the cushions, stared at the ceiling. “Cam? General O’Neill?”
“We could talk Mitchell… Cameron around. And Jack will be furious at us for going off without him.” Daniel grinned at her. “Teal’c and I figure six weeks or so before he gets fed up and shows up wherever we happen to be.”
Sam did have to laugh that time, a real laugh, even as she scrubbed at her face and shook her head. “And you’ve thought all of this out in the last day.”
Daniel was settling in as well, propping his feet up on the coffee table and slouching down into the sofa. “I know it’s kind of sudden and a little crazy -“
“Uh, yeah,”
“-But hear me out, Sam. We’ve given up so much of our lives to protect Earth, and we barely live in it. We’ve spent the last decade exploring other planets and Teal’c’s never seen this one.”
“That’s the nature of the job,” Sam said.
Daniel shook his head. “No, it was the nature of the job, and I’m not complaining. But SG-1 isn’t our job anymore. We can do whatever we want.”
“Whatever we want.” Sam blinked up at her ceiling fan, then propped herself up on her good elbow. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Beaches,” Daniel agreed. “Drinks with umbrellas.”
“NASCAR.”
“The Roswell UFO Museum.”
Sam snickered. “You really think it could work?”
“I think the Air Force owes us,” Daniel said, sobering a little. “The IOA owes us. And keep in mind - Landry does still report to Jack.”
Sam was quiet and still for a long time, turning the idea over in her head and watching dust motes filter through the slanting orange light streaming through her windows. Daniel’s hand was a steady pressure on her ankle, comforting, and when she closed her eyes she could imagine Teal’c sitting serenely in the armchair, could almost hear the clink of glasses from the kitchen, a low murmur that might have been Cam, might have been the general. Finally, she decided. “I could use a vacation.”
Daniel’s face lit up, a rare, full on nose-crinkling beam. “Good. We didn’t want to have to kidnap you.” Sam nudged him, poked her toes into his ribs, and he caught her foot, gave her that look that she had long ago learned to parse as laughter. “I mean it. This is it, Sam, it’s - everything we’ve been working for this whole time. Earth is okay, we’re not responsible for the world anymore. Now we can just…enjoy it. I think we've earned the right.”
Sam found herself smiling back, felt something warm settle in her stomach, a flood of ideas uncurl in her mind and reach out to nudge secret wishes she’d long filed away as impossible. Earning Earth… she'd never considered it that way, but now that she thought of it, well... there was a lot to look forward to.