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Of all places to be stuck with Colonel Carter, it had to be underground. An island with a temper-cooling breeze and tranquil vistas or a desert expansive enough for them to get some space from each other was just too much to ask for, huh? Vala squeezed her eyes shut to ride out another wave of regret and misery. Of course, if there’d been a suggestions box she’d have gone straight for asking for not getting dumped in the middle of nowhere with no food at all.
“Swina bqllr,” she muttered into her palm, clamping it tight around her mouth and curling up tighter on her side. The hunger had passed after a few days of going without food; now, it was the restlessness that was getting to her. She had agreed with Colonel Carter’s assessment that they should conserve energy and not move to increase their chances of SG-1 finding them, but that had been before she realised how unbelievably boring sitting still for literal days on end would be. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she could talk to her one companion—the only other soul in this whole accursed cave system, for all she knew—but…
Vala chanced a glimpse at the colonel sitting on the opposite end of the blanket, her back to her and her shoulders tense as she worked on…whatever her little project was. Vala surveyed the misshapen rocks strewn behind Carter: various tools the clever Tau’ri had knapped out of spare boulders (and there were definitely spare boulders here), though Vala didn’t exactly recognise any of them. But she supposed it’d be kind of hard to make precise shapes when all you had to work on was stone…and more stone…and maybe a little stone. Anyway, Carter had started on carving a toolkit out of her guardhouse the second they’d rolled out their quilt—the one provision they’d woken up with besides the clothes they’d been captured in—but she’d since graduated to something…finer, Vala could tell, but much more detail than that was beyond her. And she wasn’t about to ask.
It wasn’t her fault that they had ended up in this mess, but it would only be natural for Carter to lash out under duress—and Vala Mal Doran was known for her empathy. She would never wilfully grate on somebody’s nerves.
So, no. Friendly conversation was not happening anytime soon. Her only recourse was stirring up her food deprivation-induced mania for the most random trains of thought to indulge. Well, that and stewing in memories…
With a groan, she closed her eyes again. She should not have reminded herself that remembering stuff was a memorable option. Because now all she could think about was a fortnight ago—the ill-advised and unhappily-ended mission to P8X-412—and worse still, sometime last week when an old contact of the Tok’ra’s had reached out to the Tau’ri and requested a meeting. Oh, gods, what she wouldn’t give now to have stayed back at the SGC. It would have stung, she knew, but only for her: Mitchell had pumped his fist and whooped something about getting the band back together, Daniel had bitten out an explanation to her that Carter would be coming along as the new Tok’ra liaison, and even Teal’c had smiled visibly. They probably would have enjoyed being a team without her, although Daniel might have elected to hang back and forgo the testing of the bracelets’ enduring effecicaciousness. In either case, she imagined the rendezvous would have gone off without a hitch, no dramatic gasps at the sight of her face, no flushes of rage and quivering fingers pointed, no zats fired…
Well. It was SG-1, so that was no guarantee. But at least it wouldn’t have been her fau—
At least it wouldn’t be her stuck in a cave, that was.
Stuck in a cave. With no food except in her dreams. No light except the fire fuelled by bones with lingering greasy fats. And by hárbarethr no entertainment.
Vala didn’t think she could survive much longer. She glanced back at Carter, still hard at work.
Maybe there was something she needed help with. Vala generally stuck to a code of “They’ll take it if they need it” but after a week of mind-numbing, gut-numbing nothing, she was desperate enough to offer.
“Colonel?” she ventured, her throat scratchy with disuse. She hadn’t spoken since about Day 4, when she’d realised that they had worked out enough of a routine she didn’t need to communicate verbally anymore and that her ramblings were becoming so distracted she didn’t want to give her companion reasons to believe her mad enough to get rid of.
“Yes?” murmured Carter. She sounded croaky too, but Vala suspected part of her affliction was thirst. They had found a quiet little stream to camp out beside—hour by hour, Vala alternated between finding the trickling current her anchor to sanity and wanting to rip out her own eardrums because of it—so they’d die of starvation sooner than dehydration, but Carter rarely came out of her hyper-focused hunched state. If Vala had money to wager—if she had anything to wager—she’d put it on Carter actually getting up and going to the stream more often to gather more silt and flint for her stonework than to drink.
Carter cleared her throat. “Yes, Vala?”
Vala shook her head. Damn, her thoughts were more scattered than even she was used to. “Oh, ah… What are you working on over there? Can I do anything?”
“No, I’m okay. But thank you for asking.” Her voice was tight, and Vala winced. Translation: “I think you’ve done enough.”
Biting her lip, she contemplated sinking back into the murky silence and letting Nature decide whether hunger or madness would end her, then mustered the broken-up pieces of her resolve. “Yōumò Kèbów isn’t Tok’ra, but she helped them with former hosts they saved from Goa’ulds.”
Carter paused in her work but didn’t speak, so Vala elucidated, “She was like a halfway house. Once the symbiote was gone and you were all healed up, the Tok’ra’d drop you off with her for a little cheap lodging, a little work buying and selling technology. Just to get back on your feet if you couldn’t go back to your original planet for whatever reason.”
“Halfway house, huh?”
Vala grinned despite herself. “If I have to spend evenings with Daniel’s definition of fun, I’m at least going to choose the documentary topic.”
Carter didn’t laugh, but there was a crinkle around her eyes when she turned to the side to look at her.
Encouraged, Vala went on, “Yōumò was really very kind. Qetesh took me when I was still rather young, so Yōumò taught me how to eat a balanced meal, how to—ah—cope with one’s monthlies, that sort of thing. And she refreshed my memory on things I knew but hadn’t…gotten to practise, in a while. Like laundering my own clothes. Oh, she had the most delectable recipe for pikafetta cake…” Ah, bqllr, am I rambling already? “Anyway. She was really very kind, which was why I…robbed one of our clients for everything they owned and ran away with it.”
The softness around Carter’s expression immediately shuttered. “What?”
“I wouldn’t steal from Yōumò herself,” she explained, with enunciation.
“Why did you steal at all!”
“Oh, c’mon—freedom has to be earned, Colonel. If you want it, you take it yourself.” Fierenze’s eyes, the life draining out of them, flashed in her mind as they occasionally did. “Otherwise, it’s not really freedom, is it?”
Carter furrowed her brow.
Vala sighed morosely.
“But I suppose that’s why she was irked when she saw me.”
“Irked enough to throw you in this pit?” muttered Carter.
“Eh… Yeah, no, that part I would not have expected.” Not to mention the fact that Carter was here with her. What did Yōumò have against her? Or if it was a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, why hadn’t the rest of SG-1 gotten tossed too? But Vala figured she’d pressed her luck enough by telling the colonel this sordid tale—she didn’t need to remind her that the two of them had been abandoned, as alone as they were together.
Carter turned now to face her completely. Vala sucked in a breath and held it, unsure what those notoriously keen eyes saw when turned towards her, especially with the weak glow of their fire playing with the shadows across her face.
Just when Vala might have had to gasp for a very undignified inhale, Carter said, “You can help me make the spears.”
She blinked, half convinced the light had tricked her into thinking she saw Carter’s lips move and making up words to go with them.
“Vala?”
“Spears?”
A smile poked at the edges of Carter’s mouth. “Sorry, yes, you wanted to help, right?” She lifted up the stick in her lap, and Vala squinted at it until she’d worked out it wasn’t a stick but an arm-length bone sawed to have some sort of hook on one end. “This is a spear-throwing lever. Well, it will be, anyway; I’ve still got to shape the other end. But a launching device is no good without projectiles, so it’d be great if you can help with those. You just need long, flexible bones for the shafts and brittle, fine-grained rocks for the dart points… Oh, by ‘long’ I don’t mean— They’re more like large darts than real spears, each only about five or six feet…ah, I’ll show you what that looks like later. Anyway, I can’t think of anything for fletching, but I’m hoping the narrowness of the caves will let some inaccuracy be forgiven.”
Vala nodded studiously. “Okay. I’ll get right on it. I’ll be a total spear-carving machine. But, um…why have you made a spear-throwing lever?”
Carter seemed to deflate with her heavy exhale. “I know I said it’d be wiser to not try to catch the bugs and bats we’ve seen around—”
Vala pulled a face. Bats was a very generous classification for the giant, furry rodents they’d seen flapping around this cave system.
“—since humans can survive weeks, even a month, without food. But I’m starting to think SG-1 won’t find us in time, and we’d better set up our traps and our weapons before we’re too weak and dazed to start.” She looked down at the spear-thrower in her hands and rubbed at a spot with the pad of her thumb. “Besides, I needed something to do.”
Vala thought back on the past week; indeed, Carter had been working on this weapon for days, so she wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been mentally sketching out a plan to Go Hunting even as she’d told Vala they should Not Go Hunting. She wanted to be annoyed but, really, she was a sucker for a good secret Plan B. Besides, she was too buoyed by the prospect of doing something—even if it was caveman menial labour—to be bogged down by the whens and hows.
When Carter hunched forward again, zeroed back in on her work, Vala stretched out on the quilt to get the kinks out of her joints. And then she was off to find bones and brittle, fine-grained rocks lying around.
“How deep do you reckon we are, anyway?”
Tensing up on the other side of the blanket, Carter slowly lifted her gaze from her work. The spear-thrower was coming along nicely. Well, okay, Vala wasn’t exactly an experienced judge, but it definitely looked more finished than it had when she’d first gotten a good look at it.
“I really don’t have an estimate,” said her companion at length.
“Fair enough. It feels pretty deep—no light, no airflow, that lovely sensation of being pressed down on by miles and miles of stone and earth.”
With a complaisant hum, Carter returned to the spear-thrower.
Since they had gotten on surer ground, what with Carter understanding what had gone wrong with the mission and Vala being on the same page with the game plan, the colonel had taken to facing her while she worked instead of sitting at the edge of the quilt and looking outwards in the direction of their little stream. Although Vala knew this wasn’t an open invitation to chitchat—it simply made sense to see Vala if she were helping with the spears, after all—she couldn’t quite help it. She’d lasted a couple of days by sternly telling herself she’d already survived a week with her own thoughts, as horrible as that had been, but in the end she couldn’t deny that this was a whole other situation.
Vala Mal Doran didn’t do halfway. If she was going to vacation in the hellscape that was her inner world, she was going to sink into it. If she was going to fiddle with her hands in the real world, she was going to fire up every sense.
She had a feeling Lieutenant Colonel Carter didn’t function the same way, though. And as such, she had been trying really, really hard to not distract her from her very, very important work. But—
“Though I suppose even a shallow part of these caves would feel that way,” mused Vala, kindly ignoring the way Carter twitched oddly at her voice. “You wouldn’t have to go very far to lose any light source, and I don’t have any particular knowledge on caves but I’m sure the aerodynamics are quite complicated in actuality.”
—she could blame the ravenous hunger for lowering her usually admirable self-control, couldn’t she?
Carter sighed rather loudly.
Vala bit her cheek to keep herself from digging a deeper hole.
And then: “You make a good point.”
Vala straightened up. Now those were words a girl could hear more often.
“About the airflow, I mean.” Carter cocked an eyebrow at her. “Plus, I suspect we’d feel like we were under miles and miles of stone and earth no matter where we ended up, given the way we ended up there.”
“Mmm…” Exaggeratedly, Vala pursed her lips and looked off to the side. The way we ended up there being getting zatted then waking up with no clue where they were and no way to orient themselves?
Carter chuckled at her expression. “Yeah,” she said with the warmth of agreement, as though she’d heard Vala’s internal remarks. “And speaking of that aspect, I’ve considered it while wondering how deep we are, too. If we were being transported by other people, we couldn’t be that far from an entrance, right?”
“We can’t presume that though, can we?”
She tilted her head in inviting contemplation, so Vala went on, “What if there are rings somewhere down here? Or a teleportation system similar enough?”
Carter grimaced. “Ah, crap, how did I not think of that?”
Vala reached out with the spear she was working on to tap her companion’s foot. “Don’t worry, I’ve been having a harder time keeping my thoughts straight too.” And she hadn’t even engineered a way to hunt out of rotting remains and common-grade minerals! “How’s the spear-thrower going, by the way? I can’t wait to eat.”
Truly. The hunger was starting to creep back in, quieter than the first few days but stronger, fiercer. She feared her stomach really wouldn’t be waiting much longer before consuming itself for nutrients.
“It’s going,” replied Carter, dropping her gaze to inspect her handiwork. “I’m tentatively hoping it’ll be done before we turn in for the night. And how’re the spears?”
Vala swung up the spear in her hand with an irrepressible grin. “This one makes seven. I can’t say how well any of them will fly, but they look…”
“Good. They look good.”
Her grin widened, her chest puffed out a smidgen, as Carter offered her a faint smile.
“I know I’ve only made one spear-thrower, but maybe you’d like to join me on the hunt tomorrow?”
Vala’s eyes widened. For days she had been agonising over how she could extend her veneer of I’m-not-useless to Carter and avoid being ditched when the work was done, and here the puzzle pieces were falling into place in her lap?
“I just,” she scrambled to add in the vacuum of Vala’s seeming hesitation, “your question got me thinking. Maybe we should do a survey of the cave system, try to get our bearings. But—”
“Of course,” she interjected before Carter could spiral any further. “I agree, and I’d rather we didn’t split up anyway. I’d have asked to join you if you hadn’t brought it up.” Not true, but white lies were her favourite brand of dishonesty.
Smiling again, Carter set aside the spear-thrower to pick up an unshaped chunk of rock with the care of two hands. “I found this soft limestone by the stream which is sort of like chalk.” Carefully did she deposit it into Vala’s open palm; indeed, it was earthy and fine, not as crumbly as chalk but still ductile enough that her skin already felt dusty. “If we can find shale or anything else portable but sufficiently hard for writing on, you can sketch out a map while we walk around hunting.”
Vala didn’t know the first thing about cartography, but she kept her lips zipped on that detail. She’d figure it out.
And indeed she did, making up a system as she went along. Carter never questioned it if she asked to stop for a few minutes so she could get something down. Just as Vala developed a mind to question what Carter was doing though, eyeing the rodents piercingly but never actually taking a shot to pierce them, a dart was slotted into one end of the lever, the colonel made an overhand throwing motion, a squeal echoed down the tunnel—and a thump resounded underfoot.
After that, Vala was perfectly happy to keep her mouth shut.
As they made their laborious and revolting way back, dragging between them three furry corpses, Vala allowed a flush of proud camaraderie to warm her from the inside. Feeling subsequently magnanimous, she chirped, “Your marksmanship was incredible, Colonel Carter.”
A short-breathed laugh burst from Carter, a sound so uncharacteristically unrestrained that Vala knew she felt the rush of accomplishment just as headily as she did. “My father used to take me clay pigeon shooting,” she said. “Stars, I hated it as a kid. I wanted to go to the gun range, but he always said static targets were no use. Which, though a fair point, didn’t make me dislike having to go outdoors to get my practice any less—I much preferred being unbothered by the weather and the season. ’Course, wasn’t up to me since he was the one paying for the membership and he could choose whichever clubhouse he wanted.” Carter slowed down a moment to wipe sweat off her brow. “But I guess it worked out: I can’t say I’m not comfortable firing at living, flying targets, can I? I was always better at trap shooting than skeet.”
“Your father took you…clay…pigeon…shooting?” She really needed a tour of Earth soon. They had clay pigeons?
“Oh, uh, well—”
Vala shook her head. “No, no, that’s all right. There are stranger things a father can do with his daughter. Mine used me as an alibi sometimes.”
Carter choked. “What?”
“He was a thief and a cheat,” she said flatly, then waited a moment to let the customary jabs about fruit falling from trees or what-have-you come, but she only heard receptive patience in the laboured breathing of the woman beside her. It made her chest pinch a little. “He didn’t come home for months, and when he did, it was only to lie low. Sometimes he’d take me for a day out to make a show of having a family he was taking care of or to give him plausible deniability when he was scoping out a job.”
By then they’d reached the chamber where they’d left their quilt and Carter’s tools, so Vala figured there was no point in adding that as a child she’d never cottoned on to his ulterior motives and always walked on air during that daddy-daughter time. Unceremoniously, she dumped the dead animals on the ground by the entrance and shuffled over to the centre of the domed cavern, where Carter had stacked the bones she’d found lying around with enough fat to fuel a campfire.
Vala kicked at the pile; no embers flickered. The colonel had been responsible and meticulous about dousing the flame before they’d left. Which…well, good, but now she had no idea how to get it going again and…
“Here, let me.”
She jumped, but Carter’s hand on her elbow was everything gentle as she nudged Vala over. Moving out of the way, Vala watched Carter crouch down, grab some flint from her stockpile of tools and materials, and pull something out from under her shirt.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Can you go get some stuffing?” said Carter at the same time.
“Oh, sure—”
“Sorry, I—”
They tripped over each other for a moment before Vala stumbled over to the blanket.
“I tore a hole in one of the corners on my side; you can get some out there.” Vala saw it. “And…it’s my dog tags. Everyone in the U.S. military gets them for identification, but I’ve been using it as a fire striker. Though stainless steel isn’t the most effective, beggars can’t be choosers.” Vala returned and handed over the tuft of cotton stuffing she’d ripped out. “Thanks.”
Vala forgot to reply as she watched Carter scrape the flint against her necklace—her dog tags—until a spark flew onto the cotton and set it aglow. Carter cupped it in her hand and blew; when it suddenly blazed up, she grumbled a curse and let it drop onto the pile of bones, which she seemed to have set to rights while Vala had her back turned.
Opening her mouth to apologise, she found herself saying, “Y’know, I’ve seen you do this process many times over the last several days, but it holds the attention much better with food imminent.”
With a chuckle, Carter led her back to where they’d left the aforementioned food. Now came a facet of roughing it with which Vala was familiar: preparing an animal and cooking its meat. Although she could have gone the rest of her life never draining a dead rodent of its blood or plunging her hands into its carcass, she was exceedingly pleased to feel like she was balancing the usefulness scale as she took the lead in this task. But Carter—possibly feeling secure with her fire-lighting and weapon-building—relinquished her authority with ease.
In fact, she smiled contentedly as she followed Vala’s instructions for skinning their game, remarking lightly, “Originally I was worried about starting a fire down here and using up oxygen, but…”
Vala followed Carter’s gaze to the campfire. Carter had explained she positioned it in the centre to minimise the smoke affecting them, for which Vala was grateful—for myriad reasons. If she never inhaled smoke again, never felt her lungs burn from the inside out again, it would be too soon.
“The air is strangely consistent here, isn’t it?” she offered, and Carter nodded.
“Yes, I thought so,” she said as she sawed through the rodent’s diaphragm with one of their sharper stones. She considered the organs in its chest cavity for a moment before carefully setting them aside. “It doesn’t feel thinner anywhere. Even if we’re not that deep underground, a complex cave system wouldn’t have uniform airflow.”
Not completely understanding what that sentence meant, Vala enthusiastically added, “I haven’t felt out of breath even after chasing down a giant flying mole rat.”
Carter shot her a bemused look before giving it up and smiling a little. “Mole rat, huh? Is that what these are?”
“Colonel Carter.” She waited until she had the other woman’s full attention. “I have no idea what these are.”
The colonel laughed, and they spent the rest of their time preparing dinner trying to one-up each other with tales of strange animals encountered on other planets. The conversation dwindled as they eventually became reacquainted with the forgotten feeling of fullness, but while Vala basked in the evening haze, Carter seemed to drift uneasily in the descending quiet.
Vala didn’t make a habit of going around and asking after people’s mental state, but with the entrails of their hunt encircling them and the mess of hand-eaten food staining both of their palms and clothes, it felt rather silly to ignore the way her companion’s eyes had gone unfocused.
She nudged Carter’s foot with her own. “You all right?”
“Hmm?” The colonel looked up and blinked a few times before smiling. “Sorry, I was just… Well, General O’Neill would call it dwelling.”
“Dwelling on what?”
Carter chewed her lip, her eyes flicking about. “Ideally, our first meal after going without for so long would not have been roasted meat. Our body chemistry adjusted to our malnutrition, so we should have gently adjusted it back with simpler foods first. Like…fruits, nuts, and…you know.”
Cheeks flushed, she met Vala’s gaze unsteadily, as though she were embarrassed by her own worries and in expectation of a ribbing for them. But Vala nodded solemnly, all too ready to believe how dangerous—and how painful—such a careless return to feeding could be. She had borne witness to too many souls who’d survived starvation at Qetesh’s punishing hands, only to succumb to muscle and heart problems when they stuffed themselves with triumph, well-earned as it was. There was something uniquely nasty about dying in liberation.
“Perhaps we can find vegetation somewhere, now that we will be exploring the caves,” said Vala thoughtfully, looking over at where she’d left her rudimentary map. “We didn’t have a choice in what was available for our first meal, but I’m sure it’ll turn out all right, yes?”
Carter’s smile softened once more. “I think you’re right, Vala,” she said, and Vala beamed. Oh yes, those were words a girl could get used to hearing.
By the time Carter had officially brought them back to eating two solid meals a day, they had canvassed enough of their immediate surroundings that Vala was convinced they needed to pack up and start moving camp along with their mapping efforts. Carter was hesitant, citing all her training to stick to one spot if you wanted to be found, but Vala—with the help of the undeniable detail that soon they’d have covered all ground that was reachable on foot with enough time to get back to base camp every night—was renowned for her persuasive skills. Scepticism tight on her face, Carter stuffed her rock/bone collection into her array of pockets, rolled up the spear-thrower and its darts in the quilt, and hefted it into her arms to trail after Vala, who had her shale, chalk, and torch in hand.
At this point, Vala had multiple sheets of shale to carry, plus she needed to be relatively unburdened to be able to work on the map. But her companion having to shoulder the bulk of their provisions while she skipped down corridor after corridor was a warped reflection of her years as Qetesh’s host, which she tried not to think about lest it twist her insides all up. Besides, Carter insisted she was fine, only uneasy that their sole weapon was so far out of reach—but there was no way she could hold the thrower, and the spears, and the cumbersome quilt.
Despite this insistence, the colonel was always the one to call it for the day once they’d found a new source of water, not Vala. Vala would very deliberately pore over her slates, giving purposefully absentminded commentary on any interesting additions to the map, while Carter shook out the aches in her arms and groaned quietly over her taxed muscles. Qetesh had taught her that where dignity was not possible, ignorance to the indignity was the next best thing. Even though Carter likely did not enjoy letting Vala witness her weakness, on their fourth night away from their original stream, she must have decided the pretence took more effort than warranted.
“Are you sweating as much as I am?”
Vala nearly knocked over the stack of shale she was crouched over arranging. “Uh… Well, I believe to answer that, I need to know how much you’re sweating…”
With a wince, Carter curled her arms a few times. “These caves are really humid.”
She straightened up and considered for a moment. “Temperate, though,” she remarked.
“It might be better if it wasn’t.” Carter exhaled out of the corner of her mouth, blowing stray hairs out of her eyes. “We shouldn’t let our sweat cool on our skin or we’ll get hypothermic.”
Watching Carter roll out the quilt, Vala considered that little warning. The blanket was a saving grace during the day since it kept them from sitting on the heat-sapping stone floor, but it wasn’t wide enough to protect them from the ground as well as wrap them up during the night. She was getting used to falling asleep desperately curled up and waking up shivering. It was uncomfortable and miserable, but not life-threatening; she had no doubts falling ill would change that quickly enough.
“So what do we do?” asked Vala, even as she pinched her BDUs in contemplation, already having an idea of what exactly they’d have to do.
Carter nodded in agreement with Vala’s unspoken train of thought, then added, “We’ll do that tomorrow. For now, I think I have an idea for the fire—we need to dry off without heating up enough to start sweating again.”
“Shall I catch us dinner while you do that?”
While she wasn’t sure whether Carter’s acquiescence was because she truly didn’t mind Vala going off on her own or because she was too fatigued to put up a fight, either way it was a testament to her confidence and Vala would take it. Picking up the thrower and spears, she declared she would catch the fattiest, juiciest flying rodent around and earned a supportive chuckle from her companion. It took her several tries to get the hang of the spear-throwing lever, interspersed with a few pep talks to herself to recall how Carter had done it, but eventually she managed her promise and they feasted on squelchy cave creature that night.
The next day, Carter included their shirts with their weaponry as she wrapped up the quilt, which left them in their tank tops and trousers. Vala didn’t mind showing some skin—she rather preferred it, to be honest—but she took Carter’s careful aversion of her eyes as a cue that she minded and accordingly kept her gaze elsewhere. And so you’d have to believe her that it was a complete accident when she later caught sight of the white stripes streaking out from under Carter’s undershirt. If the scars didn’t zigzag quite the way they did, or they weren’t shaped in quite the patterns they were, maybe Vala wouldn’t have been so stunned to see them. As it were, they looked just like—
Samantha yanked on her BDU shirt, and Vala looked up with a jolt. Samantha met her eyes for an instant before focusing on setting up camp, leaving Vala steeped in her embarrassment for getting caught and her shame for staring in the first place. As she crouched down to pick up and shrug on her own shirt, all she said was, “We covered a lot of ground today.”
Humming, Samantha reached over to take a slate and scan it. “Have you noticed how illogical our map is?”
“Illogical?” She rested her chin on Samantha’s shoulder to try to see what she was seeing, ignoring how the colonel stiffened under the unexpected touch.
“I don’t really know how to explain it…” Deft fingers skated over the chalky lines, and a noise of protest vibrated low in Vala’s throat. “Sorry,” giggled Samantha as she very carefully stopped smudging Vala’s hard work. “But it just doesn’t seem to…lead anywhere. The patterns…”
It was Vala’s turn to hum pensively. She knew Samantha could see schemes and figures where nobody else did, but in this case she suspected she did see what Samantha saw: the frustration of taking a turn, reaching a dead end, and having to trace the stone totems and chalk markings they left back to the previous intersection; the endlessness of grey walls, grey floors, grey ceilings, grey passages where the most exciting features were small speleothems (a little redder than grey!) and the occasional trickle of water (a little bluer than grey!). Straightening up, she stretched loudly and reassured with just as much force, “We’re not going in circles—we’re eliminating options that won’t get us out of here. Lucky would be choosing the right path on our first try, but don’t panic! We two don’t need luck, eh, Colonel?”
Samantha frowned over her shoulder. “I’m not…”
But Vala was already wandering off to explore the area just past their chosen campsite for the night.
“Vala! Be careful!”
She rolled her eyes but smiled, warmly exasperated by the realisation that she hadn’t heard that three-word phrase since her mother had died. In any case, she was careful, remaining in the dim but luminous reach of the torch she’d left with Samantha and testing each footfall before shifting her weight forward. She was simply curious where the new stream they’d found led—she could hear rushing water.
It didn’t take long for her to find out.
“Uh—Colonel Carter?”
Samantha’s hurried footsteps echoed behind her as the glow of the torch grew brighter. “What? What happened? Are you o—?” She broke off into a gasp. “Oh, holy Hannah.”
Vala nodded dumbly. With the better lighting, the impressive cliff in front of them was even more clearly a fatal rocky plunge. The stream tumbled over the edge for…Vala leaned forward…at least several storeys before—
Samantha grabbed her shoulder and tugged her back. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “Be careful.”
This time Vala didn’t smile as she rolled her eyes. “I am! I just wanted to see where it goes!”
“It goes to our deaths.” Her voice was half grim, half wry. “I guess that counts as a dead end, too. We’ll have to turn around tomorrow.”
With a heavy sigh, Vala looked around longingly. The ledge where they stood was small, albeit not particularly narrow, but the cavern into which it opened was the largest the two of them had come across by far: she couldn’t even see two of the opposite walls, far beyond the torchlight as they were. Turning their backs on this discovery felt like throwing away a very big chance of finding the way out—any way out.
Wordlessly, Samantha nudged her, and wordlessly, Vala followed her back to camp.
But there was nothing for it. That frustration, that endlessness, came surging upwards. Why had Yōumò done this? Did a little theft really warrant such a fate? Vala almost wished she’d just stayed in her employ, making deliveries and keeping her head down; it wouldn’t have been real freedom—earned freedom, won freedom—but then again, neither was this.
Vala’s good humour returned soon enough after the disappointment with the cliff, yet Samantha’s spirits continued to slip as the map grew in the dimension of size and shrunk in the realm of possibility. Until, that was, they stumbled upon the plants.
These caves were not lacking in fauna, what with various palm- to face-sized insects scuttering around and the ever-squealing rodents flapping after them, but Vala would have forgotten what the colour green even looked like if not for their BDUs. And then she turned a corner and bam: green everywhere.
Moss all across the ground, thin vines on the wall, roots breaking through the ceiling. A little pond in the corner of the chamber was overrun with algae. Tiny fungi clung to the bases and corners of the walls, and lichen ran between them and the pond. Ferns dotted the area, but of course, the most stunning fruit of this discovery was—well, the literal fruit.
Small but fairly numerous, they grew up and down the vines, well hidden in the twists and folds of the plant. But evolution could not have accounted for Samantha’s grappling, grasping curiosity.
Once she had taste-tested one of the reddish little berries and survived one hour without ill effects, she was all eagerness in adding them to their menu. Not that Vala could fault her: roasted rodent was starting to get a little repetitive.
While Vala savoured her first meal in forever that didn’t make her taste buds weep in anguish, Samantha tore through it and then set to fiddling with the fronds of the ferns, mumbling to herself as she twisted them this way and that. And eventually Vala couldn’t deny it: the curiosity was killing her.
Licking her fingers clean of the sweet stickiness of the fruit, she chirped, “Whatcha doin’?”
Samantha lifted her head with wide eyes. Vala wasn’t sure if they were crazed or pleading. “I know you like to keep moving, but do you think we could stay camped here for a while? I believe these plants are just fibrous and strong enough to make good cordage out of.”
Vala had already had the same thought at the sight of Samantha’s beaming smile upon seeing this chamber. But hey, cordage, whatever that was? Who could say no to that?
Turned out cordage was very neat indeed. With it, Samantha was able to tie up the quilt and strap it to her back instead of having to haul it in her arms, which meant she could now hold the throwing lever and the spears at the ready. Even once this set of string was prepared, Samantha kept at her cordage weaving while Vala explored the surrounding passages for their map. A few days and Vala finally found out why.
“I know you’ve been thinking about that cavern with the waterfall,” said Samantha without preamble as they settled in for bed.
Vala tsked—had she really let that shown?—but rolled onto her side to face her companion openly. “Is that so?”
“And I might have figured out a way to explore it.”
“Is that—what?” Realisation struck fast and hard. “No way those little ropes you’ve made for the quilt are strong enough to rappel two grown women down a cliff!”
Samantha squeezed her eyes closed. “It’s not certain, it’s not safe, it won’t be comfortable at all.” Her eyes snapped open, the blue of them crystal clear and sharply glinting. “But I came up with a thicker version of those ropes and I tested how it held my weight earlier. I think it could work, and I’m willing to try. But it’s entirely up to you—I wouldn’t blame you at all if you didn’t want to risk your neck on something so avoidably dangerous and—”
“Can we go tomorrow?”
“—reckless…what?”
Vala rolled onto her stomach so she could crawl closer to Samantha. “Is everything ready? Can we do it tomorrow?”
Samantha stifled a laugh with her hand. “Yes. If you’re sure…yes, we can.”
Vala had been sure from the moment Samantha said she was willing to try.
And she only had minor second thoughts as they set up their ropes the next morning. Samantha explained what a Dülfersitz was and how a belay worked, and Vala constrained her questions to proper and serious ones.
Once she started to get the hang of what she had to do, the exhilaration settled in and she might have enjoyed the activity more if the ropes didn’t cut into her skin, burning her with the pressure of her own body mass. About halfway down the cliff, they had gotten close enough to the torch they had thrown down to see the underground lake that awaited them. Samantha looked up from where she was hanging just a couple of metres under Vala, and even without speaking she understood she and the colonel were sharing the awe of the view.
And then the ridge Samantha was holding broke off.
“Vala!” she shouted as she fell, her arms swinging to find purchase but her body falling too fast, her voice echoing tremendously in this giant, accursed cavern—
The world dropped into silence, and Vala’s chest heaved, her eyes blurred.
Trembling, she looked down.
Of their own accord, Vala’s hands had gripped the belay rope, and the colonel, dangling now but not free falling, scrabbled for a new ledge in the cliff face.
“Sam—” she choked out, but her voice gave out. She’d almost— She couldn’t— Not another—
The colonel didn’t hear her hoarse cry, only speaking up again when she’d recovered. “Okay, I’m okay now. Vala, I’m— Vala. Thank you. I’m okay.”
Vala could only nod, and they continued down the cliff.
Her limbs were shaking up a storm by the time they got to the bottom, and her heart thudded just as uncontrollably when she caught sight of the pile of loose and broken rocks that had preceded them.
But then Sam turned to her and grinned. “Holy. Crap.”
And the life in that bright expression, those shining eyes, overwhelmed all else. Vala grinned back. “What the hell did we just do, Colonel?”
Laughing a little crazily, Sam dropped the ropes to the ground and threw her arms around Vala. She was shaking just as badly, Vala realised, but that didn’t matter. Not right now.
In their days canvassing the caves, they had developed a comfortable, efficient routine for setting up camp. Yet tonight, they stumbled through the process, stopping every once in a while to grin at each other, their cresting pride unrestrainable, their waning adrenaline heady. Vala’s face was warm and flushed long before Sam had lit the campfire.
Flopping down on the quilt, Vala cried, “By the gods, I’d forgotten what that was like!”
“What what was like?” chuckled Sam, her focus on turning the spitroast.
“Feeling…good about physical exertion,” she sighed. She stared up at the cavern ceiling, suddenly as distant to her here as the night sky had been to her when she was indentured to Fierenze or in her rare glimpses from behind Qetesh’s eyes. Pebbles crunched to signal Sam twisting in her spot to look at her. “Feeling proud and fulfilled by it, feeling connected to my body instead of…” She lifted her arm, simply relishing the weight of it for a moment before waving it dismissively. “But I’ve missed it. My mother used to say being in touch with the world meant being in touch with yourself. I never used to believe her.”
“Your mother sounds like a wise woman,” said Sam softly. Vala turned her head ever so slightly, just enough so the colonel wasn’t in her periphery anymore.
A beat fell, and she mused, “Maybe not wise—she had a baby with Jacek Mal, after all—but clever enough to come up with that nugget and kind enough to pass it along to me, that’s for sure.”
“What…” The fire popped a little, and Sam shuffled back away. “What happened to her?”
“Ah, well. She died before my adolescence.” Her eyes slid closed to allow the flashes of Gislone Doran’s face to have more colour, more brilliance. “Just an accident. You know—something that happens every day to anybody.”
“Maybe so,” murmured her companion, “but on that day it didn’t happen to anybody. That detail is just as true.”
Detail. She wondered how her life would have differed if not for that detail. If she had not been saddled with her parents’ debts after her mother’s demise and her father’s subsequent vanishing act, if she had not been forced into Fierenze’s service to pay them off, would she have been running a job on Prithvi when Qetesh was there and been taken as host? Likely not. And what a strange notion that was.
Vala drifted off to sleep imagining herself going to the completion academy as her mother had intended for her, studying mechanical systems and working in weaponry design or maintenance, one day introducing Gislone to her first grandchild, and never, ever having to hurt anyone, just to be free.
“Have you read all of SG-1’s mission reports?”
Vala arched an eyebrow at Sam as the colonel plopped down onto her side of the blanket. “No-o-o,” she replied when no context was forthcoming. “Was I supposed to have done? You realise there’s nearly a decade’s worth of those?”
“I do realise.” Shaking her head, Sam sorted through her tools and inspected the edges of them. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to have, I was just… I’ve been thinking about possible technology that might have gotten us…here.”
“Right, ’course. You’ve been wondering whether something teleported us down here like I said before?” While she hadn’t read all of SG-1’s mission reports, she had read several and possessed her own firsthand experience with various planets, in the Gate network and otherwise. She’d make a great sounding-board for what technological feats were available out there and what weren’t, if she did say so herself.
But Sam only made a noncommittal noise, her attention now on sharpening one of her stone tools. Vala shrugged and returned to her own little project: some rodent-pelt clothing.
The two of them had remained stationed by the underground lake, recognising that the numerous tunnels leading out of the cavern meant they didn’t always have to be on the move to keep finding new territory. At least for now. Consequently, however, they had become efficient enough to grant themselves a little downtime in the evenings. Every day, after a quick and delightful breakfast of leftovers, they explored as much of their surroundings as they could, Vala on mapping duty and Sam on hunting, then returned to base camp for an early dinner to make up for missing lunch. At that point Sam had taken to disappearing for a couple of hours, wandering off with a few of her tools and wandering back with a crease between her brows.
At first, Vala had to exert herself to not be offended that the colonel apparently wanted so much time and space away from her, but Sam had also taken to starting up small talk—even if it was sometimes about mission reports of all things, the poor little workaholic—and sharing anecdotes around the campfire, so Vala was willing to not take it personally. Besides, to occupy herself while Sam was away, she’d taken to tinkering with the remains of their meals. Vala had been raised to use every part of an animal hunted, after all.
Rodent fur wasn’t the thickest or the softest, but she was hopeful it’d help keep them warm during the nights at least.
Yawns overtook her soon enough, and with them a light sort of silliness. Vala leaned towards the campfire with her hands splayed in a specific way. She had to cough loudly a couple of times, but eventually her companion looked up from the other side of the flames and laughed.
Grinning proudly, Vala explained, “It’s a bird from my home planet, a garuta. You can tell because of the apparent knobs in its wings.” She wagged her fingers, and the shadow on the rock wall across from them flapped its wings accordingly. “In real life, you can identify it even more easily by its call, which sounds eerily like it’s crying for help.”
Sam raised her eyebrows meaningfully, but Vala snorted and shook her head. Emulating its silhouette with her hands was as far as she would go, thank you very much.
With a grand sigh, she flopped onto the quilt and squirmed around until she felt cosy. She closed her eyes to the sounds of Sam putting away her things and settling down as well, but then the colonel spoke.
“I’m not all that knowledgeable about birds, but I do know my constellations.”
One eye opened to peek at Sam. She lay at the edge of the quilt, her cheek resting on one hand, the keen fingertips on the other tracing a shape in the cavern floor.
“These specks here?” she murmured. “They look just like Ankaa, Nenque, Wurren, and Beta, Gamma, Kappa, Zeta, Nu, and SX Phoenicis.”
Vala frowned. Did Sam hit her head while she was swanning around this evening? she worried as she scooted over to the other woman’s side to see what delusions she was envisioning in the stone face around them.
But Sam once more pointed out the discoloured spots she had noticed, explaining, “This is the shape of the constellation Phoenix back on Earth. The phoenix is a mythical bird that would die by burning itself, but then rise from the ashes and live again. See here—and here? Those are the wings of the constellation. It’s small and near the horizon—so, easy to overlook—but I’ve always had a soft spot for the southern hemisphere’s celestial sphere. As a kid, I was equal parts frustrated and fascinated that there were lights I just couldn’t see… I can’t believe that for all the unfamiliar constellations I’ve gotten to view across the galaxy, I still haven’t travelled to see the Phoenix.”
As Sam then apologised with a hollow chuckle for her obvious desperation to see the open sky again, Vala found she could not blame her. The force of doom oppressed them from above, the burden of an entire unknown planet weighing down on their breakable mortal bodies. Here, as inevitable as the tides of a planet or moon, panic surged in and out day by day. Vala had learnt long ago, a consciousness impotent and trapped in her own skin, how to flow with that kind of anxiety, how to breathe the claustrophobia rather than drown in it.
But Sam was not like her.
She leaned forward to bump her forehead against the colonel’s shoulder. “The garuta is a real bird, but we had folk tales about it too,” said Vala, wondering whether she too could find a stone constellation as her eyes roved the floor. “Apparently, some trapper or what-have-you caught it once, and he tied up its wings and its beak and its talons. Then he put it in a silk pouch, and the garuta struggled for days to break out of its bonds, and days more to wriggle out of the pouch. But it found itself inside of a little box, so it had to claw through that too. But that box had been inside a sack of trinkets, and that sack was inside a wooden chest, and that chest was in a crate on a locked wagon, which did not stop until it had gone directly into an equally locked cellar. So on and so forth.”
“That seems excessive,” snorted Sam.
“It’s a folk tale,” pointed out Vala, though she had made the same complaints to her mother as a child. “The point is that the bird has to defeat so many barriers and prisons that when it at last breaks completely free, it does not realise.”
The idle amusement on Sam’s face crumpled into a frown.
“That is why its call sounds like a cry for help,” she said. “It flies in the sky…free, and forever looking for the latest set of metal bars it must fight through.”
When the colonel’s frown deepened in pensiveness, Vala couldn’t help but muse that her mother would have probably preferred this sort of reaction to her stories. She had always meant Vala to take some lesson from them, but Vala had never been the sort to take lessons, even as a young girl who had every intention of abiding by the law and making Gislone Doran proud. Really, her mother would have probably preferred a lot of Sam’s characteristics to those of the daughter she got. For hárbarethr’s sake, just look at what the woman had built in these past few weeks! Seeing it all, Vala bitterly thought it was a good thing a life of crime had found her before a life of mediocrity had: being an engineer would not have worked out anyway. Vala had always considered herself a natural with weapons—she had been confident enough to plan to make a career out of them, after all—and anyone in her neighbourhood growing up would have told you she had the eye and the hands for figuring out the mechanics of any spaceship that docked on their planet, but…
But she was not like Sam.
This thought might have soured her night, if Sam did not at that exact moment scoot closer, moving towards the middle of the quilt instead of leaning on her side near the edge. “You know what this reminds me of?” she whispered almost giddily. “Sleepovers with school friends. Now all we need is a shopping spree.”
“A shopping spree?” Not a concept Vala was familiar with, but certainly one that delighted her.
Through her smile, Sam yawned and snuggled into the quilt. “Don’t worry. I’ll show you…one day…get back to Earth…”
Sam’s slurred speech made Vala even sleepier, and she drifted under the blanket of unconsciousness guided by thoughts of how much better it was to see Sam look peaceful than not.
Daniel Jackson looked about as far from peaceful as one could get without literally declaring war. And Vala wouldn’t put him past that, either.
His inhumanly loud sigh upon her entry had been downright riotous, which told her she’d interrupted something important to him. Goody! she thought as she spun slowly to survey his lab.
“Come now, Daniel, we don’t want to be late to this briefing, do we? I finally get to meet—”
Ah. Well. That would be the something important she’d interrupted, would it?
The tall blonde perched on one of Daniel’s desks chuckled at her caught-out expression, and Vala bristled.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Daniel?” she said with her most wheedling tone.
Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. “Vala, Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter.” Letting go of his nose, he gestured towards the other woman. “Sam, Vala Mal Doran.”
Vala snapped off a smart salute, drawling, “At your service, Colonel Carter.”
Much to her surprise, the colonel grinned at that; she had been (put) under the impression that these Air Force people didn’t like her ‘mocking’ their salute. “Um. Well, right back atcha, I guess. I’m sure you won’t be needing my help all that much, though. From what the guys have told me, you’ve been holding your own pretty well.”
Daniel exhaled inhumanly loudly again, and Vala raised her brow at Samantha Carter.
And Samantha Carter’s grin widened (begrudgingly, Vala let her posture relax). “But still,” she said. “At your service.”
Vala hadn’t paid much attention during the briefing after all, much more focused on rearranging some of her expectations for the SGC’s very own legend.
She woke up just as General Landry opened his mouth to give them the green light. Green really was an overrated colour.
“What’s with the long face?”
Vala tilted her head to look at her companion, who, already looking brightly awake, was preparing breakfast. Which, being leftovers, did not take a lot of brainpower, and Sam was watching her rather than her hands and chuckled when Vala touched her cheek to feel for what was wrong with it.
“No, I mean, you started scowling practically the moment you were awake.”
Now Vala scrubbed at her face in earnest. “Ugh. I was merely thinking about the mission. I truly wish General Landry had seen some problem with it and not let us go.”
“If he had said that, I think I would have argued, plus probably Cam because he wanted me there and Daniel because he’s Daniel. As much as I didn’t want to be back on SG-1, I…really wanted some update on the Tok’ra. Any update,” she sighed before offering Vala a strained smile. “So it wouldn’t be fair for anyone—including yourself—to blame you for how FUBAR things have gone. Anyway,” she went on cheerily before Vala could come up with a response, “there’s no use thinking about what-ifs. We just have to get out of here.”
With a resigned nod, Vala sat up and accepted her portion of the leftovers. “In that case, shall we decamp today? I’ve pretty much got inroads of all the passages from here mapped out.”
“Today?” Suddenly, Sam’s cheer was nowhere to be seen. “Well…how about tomorrow? So we have time to, um, adjust our plans.”
“Er…okay.” She narrowed her eyes at the colonel, but she didn’t speak for the rest of their breakfast.
Bouncing on the balls of her feet, Vala scanned the array of tunnels to decide which one to venture more deeply into today. They were all so similar, and at this point so equally represented on her map, that it was really a toss-up.
So why not have some fun with it?
Vala swung out one arm and started to spin on the spot—
Strong yet nimble fingers gripped her elbow.
She shot Sam an unhappy look.
Though the colonel avoided her eyes, she said with something like firmness, “Um, sorry. Just…don’t wanna waste time. This way should be good, right?”
Vala shrugged off the hand but gamely headed down the very path. Why was Sam acting weird? Vala would think she’d done something, except Sam had just been all kind and reassuring about the one thing Vala would not have faulted her for holding against her. And now the colonel was saying Vala was wasting time? She’d always indulged Vala’s harmless bouts of foolishness—her doodling on the maps, her skipping ahead down the corridors when restlessness seized her, her random games and tricks—so what was going on here?
The creeping shadows in the passage offered no answers. The further they walked, the more uncharted territory they discovered, the greater Vala’s sense that something was…off, in this area of the caves. The air was thinner here. The insects moved wrong, twitching around more than scurrying along. The walls had cracks, the water smelled strong and gleamed greasily, the ceiling seemed entirely untouchable even though it only arched a few metres above their heads. The speleothems here looked…not frail, exactly, but…
She turned towards her companion, not sure what word exactly to use. But Sam was mumbling to herself, her gaze sweeping the area too rapidly for Vala to meet her eye—and yet, Vala would swear she glimpsed calculations going on behind those eyes. What—?
And then Sam did make eye contact. Her mouth dropped open in a wordless yell, the colour drained out of her face, every muscle in her body tensed as she ran right towards—
The floor slammed into Vala’s back. Specks of light—true brightness, not the kind coaxed out of timid flames in an unwilling abyss, but the kind she hadn’t seen in what felt like months—shot across her vision, and the world was still for three whole seconds.
Her breath came back to her at the same instant the soreness in her shoulder blades and the throbbing in her leg registered.
She groaned.
She gasped, “What in all the galaxy was that for?”
“Don’t move.” The colonel pushed off of her arms where she’d landed on top of her, shuffling downwards on her knees until— “Oh, no.”
“What? What?” Lifting her head, she spotted her slates shattered on the ground from the drop, the torch having rolled nearly to the wall, and— “Oohhhh, no, no, no!”
At least the tip of a stalactite currently impaled in her left shin explained why Sam had tackled her.
“It’s okay!” soothed Sam in a very unsoothing voice. “You’re okay. This is fine.”
“I have a hunk of rock!”
Sam cast a sheepish glance at her. “Yes.”
“In my leg!”
“Well…yes.”
Vala slapped her hands over her eyes with another groan. Maybe frail was the word she’d been looking for.
“It’s okay,” insisted Sam as, from the sounds of it, she tore her tank top for bandage strips. “It looks like a through-and-through straight into the side and out the other end. Probably missed your arteries; another inch and it’d’ve missed you entirely.”
Vala refrained from speaking. She knew it could have been worse—she had seen the rest of the stalactite, after all, which had snapped in half upon striking the ground; relatively speaking, only a small part was stuck in her shin while the rest had fallen on its side, so she wasn’t pinned down or flattened—but like Sam had said, it could also have been better. Not having anything stuck in her shin, for one. Couldn’t the colonel have shoved her another inch?
“This is going to hurt like hell, but I don’t think you’ll bleed out, so…”
“Well that’s good,” sulked Vala. “Hey, wait, what is going to hurt like—?”
She cursed any Goa’uld, Tok’ra, and Air Force officer she could name as the rock slid out of her flesh, dragging all the universe’s sharp edges against her nerves it seemed. She panted as an unearthly cold rushed into her body, replacing her lost blood with shards of phantom ice.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” whispered Sam. But since she immediately clamped down on the wound, pressing mercilessly on her every pain receptor, Vala decidedly did not forgive her. “Not ideal, I know, I’m so sorry. I wish I could have left that in until a real doctor could look at it. I wish I had a first aid kit, I wish I had seen it falling sooner—”
“And I wished General Landry never sent us on this mission, remember?” snarked Vala through gritted teeth. “We just have to get out of here.”
Sam nodded a few times. “Yeah… Yes.” She nodded again, firmly now. “Well, to do that, we have to get back to camp. I’ll bandage this as best I can”—she was already doing so, only talking to fill the silence—“then you can lean on me for the walk back. You can carry the spear-thrower; I’ll have to hold the torch, and I guess come back for the spears later, unless they end up fitting in our pockets somehow.”
“Sounds lovely. Very thrilling. I can’t wait.”
There was a pause in Sam’s bandage-wrapping. “Sorry about your shale, Vala. Whatever parts of the map you had on these ones are broken beyond recognition, I think.”
“’S’fine,” she grunted around a particularly rough adjustment of her leg. Annoying, but fine. “What about the stalactite?”
“What?”
“Not the main part. That alicarl tried to squash me. I mean the endpoint—the stabby part. Where is it?”
“I…don’t know, anymore. I threw it off to the side.”
“Can you find it?” asked Vala, just on the right side of whining. “I want to see it. Was it entirely covered in blood?”
When Sam changed her bandages after dinner—humming, pleased, once she saw the wound was no longer bleeding before washing them in the lake to avoid having to rip any more clothing—Vala caught sight of the scars again. Sam had not put her BDU shirt back on, as she usually did once they returned to camp, so Vala saw the white lines of raised skin while the colonel leaned over her leg, and she couldn’t stop seeing them while the colonel crouched by the lake to scrub the blood out.
Sam was smiling when she came back to the quilt with the (more or less) clean bandages, and her rewrapping was everything gentle, and Vala found herself hesitant to endanger that. So before she had time to think it over, she said, “Y’know, I’m glad you only had to tear my pant leg to tend to this wound. If I had been stabbed in the abdomen or something—”
The colonel grimaced. “I don’t think I could have done much for you in that case.”
“—you would have had to lift my shirt and then you’d have gotten an eyeful.”
One sharp eyebrow arched. “You…don’t seem the type to mind that. Which is fine, of course,” she scrambled to add, “but why…?”
“I don’t have any of my childhood scars left, thanks to Qetesh. But I reckon I’d quite prefer them to the ones she gave me.” Vala spread out her arms, acquiescing to what Sam had said: she wasn’t the type to mind showing off. When you reveal plenty in one area, nobody expects you to be concealing anything elsewhere. What did she have to hide her scarless shoulders or legs for? What use was there in denying the lies of hers that people already saw through or the rumours of others that people already believed? “Nothing direct, of course; this was her body after all. Save for the entry scar. But she was always fond of flagellation as a punishment, and that’s not exactly a detail her people—our people—would forget.”
Sam had paused her ministrations to stare wide-eyed at her, but now she swallowed and focused back on the final touches of the bandage. “I… It was years ago. Stars, the SGC was still in its infancy. We…didn’t know about the sarcophagus’s effects yet.”
Vala shuddered as she recalled the gilded interiors of Qetesh’s sarcophagus, the trembling sensation of it stitching together her injured skin and pulling apart her natural aging. She hated those things.
“Daniel became… Well, he was lost to it, for a time. And so we were stuck in…in a bad situation. In these mines. And we had to work.”
The sobs and screams of Vala’s former subjects echoed in her ears, the exhortative promises that they would do better, work better, be better. She would not wish that on anyone.
Her hand drifted to her stomach, and Sam’s smile was like a tender bruise.
“I don’t have many scars there,” said the colonel softly, “but my leg is an eyeful. Back when the Kull warriors were a major threat, one attacked our Alpha Site and my thigh was seriously wounded. The skin never healed right because I couldn’t let it; for days I had to run and crawl and fight with that gaping hole.”
Pulling a face, Vala made a gagging noise of sympathy.
“Tell me about it,” laughed Sam. “Probably the only worse scar I got in the field was…”
Her fingers ghosted across her forehead, her smile fading.
Vala furrowed her brow; there was no scar there. Or if there was, it was too faint or thin for her to see in this lighting, despite Sam sitting right at her hip. How could it be her worst? She opened her mouth to ask, and what came out was, “Yōumò never hurt me. She never would have, I think.”
Sam’s gaze unclouded as it focused on her.
So she went on, “And if—if I had stayed with her, I wouldn’t have gone back to P8X-412 and… Well, they might not have accepted the Ori, maybe. I mean, the Prior they met is just so uncharming they had no reason to…!”
Cutting through her grumbles, Sam asked, “What happened on P8X-412?”
Vala looked around for a moment instead of answering, then sighed, and explained.
“You named the trial system after yourself?” questioned Sam at that point in the retelling. Not perfunctorily, like Mitchell, but not coldly, like Daniel. “Why?”
“Come now, Colonel Carter, I think you know me well enough by now that you realise I don’t last very long in a place that doesn’t give me the proper honours.”
Sam rolled her eyes, the gesture softened at the edges by her smile. “Right, of course, but why the trial system?”
Vala blinked. What?
The colonel furrowed her brow now. “I mean…of anything. You could have named a holy festival after yourself, but you chose…the trial system?”
“I…” She thought back on that small mining outpost for several moments before weakly saying, “They weren’t a very festive lot.”
Sam didn’t say anything, but she didn’t stop looking at her either, her gaze like so many parasitic snakes crawling over her skin.
Abruptly, Vala announced, “I’m going to sleep now.” She didn’t give Sam a chance to respond, settling down on the quilt and turning her back to her companion as quickly as she could. And she forced herself to fall asleep as quickly as she could, too, though that didn’t stop her mind from beleaguering her with the question of what she was putting herself on trial for.
Her sleep was so fitful that she didn’t realise she had been startled awake until somebody kicked her in the belly.
Winded as she was, she still managed to curse the somebody in four different languages.
Vala rolled over a second before she remembered her leg was injured, and she cursed some more as pain shot up her body. By the time she had shaken off the sleep and the daze, Sam’s nightmare had progressed to full-on crying.
“No,” the colonel pleaded, straining her neck as her head swivelled left and right.
Gingerly, Vala pulled herself closer and touched Sam’s shoulder, and the colonel immediately shrank away.
“Stop it, please!”
“Colonel Carter—”
“Wasn’t my decision…”
“Colonel Carter!”
“I’m sorry.” By the gods, she’s trembling. “I’m sorry…what we did to you…”
Vala didn’t know what to do, the scream Sam had let out—“Stop it, please!”—at her last touch not something she wanted to ever remember, let alone repeat. Yet in spite of Vala’s wretched wavering distance, Sam flinched from someone’s hand, and wept.
“Betrayed you… You know…didn’t want…”
Sam kicked out again—though thankfully Vala was not in the way this time—and brought her hands up. At first, Vala thought she was trying to shield her face, but then she scrubbed at her forehead and Vala’s stomach dropped.
“Fifth, please!”
“Samantha!”
Unable to sit uselessly anymore, Vala dragged Sam up into her arms and pulled her tight. Maybe she was doing a million things wrong but what else was new? Vala ignored every warning that blared this wasn’t the way to deal with a night terror, and every alarm that shrieked an embrace was just another enclosure to break free of later. She held fast.
And Sam fell apart.
Her hands clutched at Vala’s sides as she sobbed, sobbed into her neck. “Sorry, I’m sorry.” The words were muffled in Vala’s shoulder but she heard them agonisingly clearly, and she tried not to wonder whether Sam was apologising to Fifth still or now to her. Instead, Vala rubbed her back and squeezed her close and tried to be comforting.
Vala was no good at comforting.
But Gislone Doran had been. So Vala dredged up some childhood lullaby with long-forgotten lyrics and hummed the tune, letting it sway her gently alongside the warrior in her arms. Her mother had smelt lightly of lye, which was only a step or two above how she must reek now—despite the lake-bathing schedule Sam had implemented and Vala happily adhered to—but that scent had been half the reassurance when little Vala woke from a bad dream. So before Sam could start to question what exactly she was trying to accomplish, the lullaby petered out and Vala eased away her hands.
“Colonel Carter?” she whispered.
Sam shifted around to lift her sleeve and wipe at her eyes. Vala loosened her embrace to let her move, but she didn’t leave the circle of her arms, even turning back to press her face into Vala’s shoulder. After a few slow, deep breaths, she croaked, “Are you real?”
Vala scoffed. “Unfortunately, yes.” But the question lingered in the air in spite of her irreverence. Are you real? You named the trial system after yourself? Otherwise, it’s not really freedom, is it? She shoved them all aside for a much easier one. “Though you realise you would hear me say yes even if I wasn’t, don’t you?”
Sam gave a wet laugh but didn’t reply.
With a couple of final pats on the small of her back (gods she hoped those didn’t come across patronising), Vala asked, “Do you think you can fall asleep again?”
After a beat, Sam sniffled and pulled away. “Probably not. But you can go back to sleep; I’ll just hang out by the lake.”
Vala nodded and let her go. But when she lay down, those questions came rearing back, and eventually she limped over to the lakeside and plopped down beside the colonel.
“Fifth,” she ventured, “was one of those…fleshy Replicators, right?”
Sam huffed a laugh. “I thought you haven’t read our mission reports.”
“Not all of them,” she said.
“You know what he did, then.”
“Not all of it.” She would wager so, anyway. The colonel’s way of writing had become familiar enough by the time Vala started reading about the Replicators that she could pick up on all the uncharacteristic, though subtle, dips in detail from that one mission.
“He…” Sam combed through the gravel at the shoreline, sifting the pebbles and jagged edges until she picked up a smooth, flat stone and balled it up in her fist with a sigh. “He would put his fingers in my head and show me things. If they were real, they were someone else’s. If they were mine, they were fake.”
Vala kept her eyes on Sam’s hands, toying with the stone now, flipping it from palm to palm, smoothing it and feeling it and weighing it, in lieu of Sam’s face, which was drawn and shadowed this far from the low campfire. “But we both know the stuff that’s real and ours is the worst, sometimes,” she said after a moment.
“Ironic, huh?”
She snorted, then murmured a quiet cheer as Sam skipped the stone a few times across the lake.
Chafing at her upper arms, the colonel said, “I’m sorry about waking you. And if I hit you—General O’Neill says I kick sometimes.”
Vala hummed noncommitally. “You had nightmares often when you were on SG-1?”
“No,” she said softly. “That was more Daniel’s thing—he had nightmares, General O’Neill got insomnia, Teal’c would shed tears without realising it during his kelno’reem… But when I do have one, it tends to be a whopper.”
“I’m most like Daniel, then.” She wondered how he would feel about that. He’d probably pull a sour face, she mused as she watched the colonel dig up another skipping stone.
Sam chuckled. “I’ll be sure not to tell him you dared say something so offensive.” Exhaling slowly, she flicked the stone onto the lake, and it skimmed the surface of the water nearly five times. “If we ever get out, anyway.”
“Hey now…,” started Vala, but her companion waved her hands.
“Sorry, sorry. I’m pretty bad company after a nightmare,” she muttered. “I guess this place has just been…getting to me.”
“The lake is nice though,” hummed Vala, and Sam turned to grin at her.
“It is, isn’t it? Grounds me. Lets me remember General O’Neill’s cabin in Minnesota. That lake is very nice, even if there’s…very few fish.”
Vala quirked an eyebrow but only commented, “I’ve never been. Actually, from what Daniel tells me, I’ll probably never get an invite.” He’d been very pointed about how General O’Neill’s cabin was for close friends, in fact. She had half a mind to make a huff about that, but then the flickering flames caught the soft turn of Sam’s smile, and Vala recognised the expression.
Gross. Maybe she didn’t want to be invited after all.
But as a tranquil quiet blanketed them, not so much broken by the nearby gurgling waterfall and crackling fire but interwoven with those sounds, Vala recalled some of the eccentricities she had picked up about the Tau’ri. Or at least the peculiar contingent she had gotten most familiar with—the United States Air Force, the odd little buggers—who apparently didn’t let superior officers and subordinates get too close. Poor Sam, she thought, though she’d turn herself into the Lucian Alliance before she ever uttered those words in the colonel’s hearing. And you know what? Poor me, while I’m at it.
What a pair they made. Between symbiotes and legacies, the galactic underbelly and this Fifth jerk, Sam’s military regulations and Vala’s indentured servitude, it was a wonder the two of them had their own lives at all. Really, if Vala thought too hard about it, she wasn’t entirely sure what part among all the thieving and scheming and running and living large and lying low was ‘hers’. (Which was why she didn’t generally think too hard about it.)
“How does she do it?” she wondered airily, and only when Sam looked at her quizzically did she realise she hadn’t spoken quite airily enough. “Oh—don’t mind me. Just thinking.”
Sam tilted her head. “About?”
Vala sighed loudly. “Well. Alright. I know we haven’t known each other very long, and most of that has been…highly one-on-one—”
Snickering, Sam cast overly deliberate looks around their lovely furnished cavern.
“—but from all of the stories I’ve heard from SG-1 and the technicians and your old eggheads and even the blasted kitchen staff, you’re not…you never…”
Despite the colour now suffusing her cheeks, Sam gave Vala a patient smile, and she sighed even more loudly.
“See now, you might have heard I can be a little over-the-top.”
“Er…might have, yes.”
Daniel, she thought with an eye roll. “Well, I’m not.” Misrepresenting one’s strengths and one’s smarts was a mere matter of survival—people these days simply had such skewed metrics, she swore. “Still, I can acknowledge people think that, as much as I…” She coughed and shook her head. “But they don’t about you, even though you never hide. Men’s insecurities don’t quiet your brilliance, in either direction. You are feminine”—she poked Sam in the cheek—“you are kickass”—she poked her in the shoulder—“and it is effortless. How do you do it?”
“I don’t know if ‘effortless’ is the right word for it.” Her voice was wry, but Vala refused to let her joke her way out of this.
“You don’t doubt it, do you?” she demanded, only meeting Sam’s gaze for a second before leaning forward to pick at her bandages instead. “Even if you feel like you don’t know who you are sometimes—I guess that is quite unavoidable when you’ve had a worm in your head—I think you do know it. Somehow, someway. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to be so bare-faced about it all.” She lifted her head to give Sam the full force of her raised eyebrows. “However you do that.”
Sam’s cheeks dimpled around the upturn of her lips; even after all this time alone with and close to the colonel, her easy, even charmed, acceptance of Vala’s pushiness could still catch her off guard. “Thank you, Vala,” she wove into the quiet. Vala didn’t know how to be as gentle as the ambiance around them, so she opted for a shrug rather than words.
When Vala started fidgeting with her bandages again, Sam asked, “Do you want me to redress those?”
“How about in the morning? I don’t see any blood, and I am getting kinda tired. Are you ready to sleep now?”
Sam bit her lip. “I…I can try.”
As they shuffled back over to the quilt, Vala eyed her companion and felt…unsettled at how discomposed she looked.
“Colonel Carter, I have a question.”
Sam arched an eyebrow at her. “Um…go ahead?”
“What exactly did Colonel Mitchell mean that you coming back was ‘the band getting back together’?”
“He said that?” she giggled. “Ah, what a dork. Next time he says something like that, ask him about backup singers, okay? That’ll put him on the spot.”
Vala scoffed, bemused, but agreed.
It was the least she could do.
Her laughter dissipating, Sam grew pensive yet again, but Vala had run out of diversions.
Lying down, she had only measured out a half dozen breaths before Sam rolled over to face her. Even in the low light, Vala could see the anxiety in those eyes.
Wordlessly, she lifted one arm in invitation, and wordlessly, Sam tucked her head under Vala’s chin.
She let her arm drop around the colonel’s shoulders, breathed in the scent of her hair (not quite lye…but the limestone dusts of these caves were remarkably close), and took as much comfort from her as she did from Vala. At least, one could hope.
For once, Vala woke up before her considerably militaristic companion did. Looking down at Sam’s peaceful features, she even considered preparing breakfast for them, then she figured she best not mess with whatever routine the colonel had going, right? But she let herself build up the fire again with the greasy bones of last night’s dinner before huddling at the edge of the quilt to stare out at the lake. She would move closer to the shoreline, maybe even try skipping some rocks of her own, if not for her leg being stiff and her wound pulsing uneasily.
How the tables have turned, she joked to herself, recalling how Sam had sat like this while Vala dozed in their first week in the caves. It was strange to think about those days though, for doing so only made her realise how much had changed.
And how much hadn’t.
If we ever get out, anyway. Did Sam need to have put that accursed thought in her head? Vala shook it loose and sighed. They would get out. Somehow, someway. That was how Lieutenant Colonel Carter rolled, wasn’t it?
The unmistakable noises of someone rousing from sleep emerged behind her, but Vala didn’t turn around. A few minutes later, Sam sat beside her and handed over a plate—a sizable flat stone—with leftovers.
“Good morning,” said Vala. She smiled a little down at her food, amused by the sudden thought that it’d be kind of funny if they found out they’d been sleeping during the day and moving around at night. How were they supposed to know if it was actually morning right now? There just was no way, not until…or unless…
If we ever get out, anyway.
“Good mor—”
“Do you really think we’ll be stuck here forever?” she asked, turning sharply and almost glorying in how the ever-equable colonel jumped in surprise.
At length, Sam answered, “No. I… I think, in fact, that we might have found the way out yesterday.”
Vala could only stare.
“I know this is very sudden, but I had this idea… And last night, when you said all that about me not…well, you know, I…”
First her leg got impaled, and now she had whiplash! Actually, speaking of her leg… “Yesterday?” she exclaimed. “You mean you want us to go back to the tunnel that is apparently falling apart on our heads?”
Sam winced. “I believe the falling-apart aspect is actually in our favour. Vala, I—” She exhaled shakily, then took a deep breath. “Vala, I think we’re in a simulation.”
What.
Sam stared at her.
She stared back.
What!
“What?” she said.
And then the dam burst, Sam’s nervous silence shattered behind a torrent of words: an explanation of the wires and emitters she had gouged out of some walls down here, a rundown of the sprawling code she managed to uncover but not edit on a panel buried in what she called the hologrid, a plan for what to do about the weak spot she had located… And despite the utter madness of the whole thing, it started to make sense. Vala had wondered why Yōumò had gone to such apparent lengths—but this was not simple revenge. She worked in the sector of new and upcoming technology, after all, and this kind of virtual reality would need serious testing. She hadn’t been after Vala at all—she had been after anyone with naquadah in their blood, and the Tau’ri’s Tok’ra liaison would be just too accessible. That was why SG-1 wasn’t here, and that was why—
Vala gasped. “So that’s why you’ve been acting weird!”
Sam paused her spiel for a moment. “I’ve been acting weird?”
“Yes! The ‘tomorrow so we can adjust our plans’ and the ‘let’s not waste time’ and the…going off on your own…every evening…”
Sam’s gaze dropped as Vala’s heart leapt into her throat.
“Colonel Carter,” she whispered, “how long have you known about this?”
“I— I don’t really know.”
“That is not a great answer, I won’t lie!”
Sam grimaced. “I’ve suspected for a while. Remember how unexpected the airflow has been here? And I did tell you the map felt illogical, didn’t I?”
Vala could only splutter incoherently at that, but she did so long enough that Sam seemed to pick up on the sentiment behind it: complete and utter dissatisfaction.
“When we rappelled down the cliffside though,” she said slowly. “That’s when I got a solid theory.”
“That long?” Unholy Jaffa, she’d told Sam about her mother that night!
“The day after,” stammered Sam, eyes wide with horror like she’d heard the turn of Vala’s thoughts. “I— When I almost fell, remember? I dislodged a…a part of the hologram technology, or whatever it is. But I didn’t realise what it was until morning. I thought it was just an odd rock or something until I got to look at it up close in the torchlight while you were working on the map, and—and after that, I just…”
Sam’s voice crumpled under Vala’s glare. “You just didn’t trust me with it?” she suggested.
“No!”
“Then you didn’t think I could handle it, or—or had anything to offer?” She suddenly remembered a conversation from a few days ago and felt a little sick. “Is that why you asked if I had read your mission reports? What was so wrong about my answer you decided not to tell me?”
“SG-1 encountered something like this before, on P7J-989, but I didn’t—” The colonel squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. When they opened, they were beseeching. “I’m sorry, Vala. You didn’t do or say anything wrong.”
“No, I didn’t!” she said hotly, glad to hear somebody say it just this once. “And yet you kept me out of the loop—again, might I add! You don’t get to make these decisions by yourself. You’re not a part of the SGC, technically. Even if you were,” she added on a scoff, “you wouldn’t be the leader of SG-1, you realise?”
Sam frowned. “That’s entirely unrelated—”
“Colonel Mitchell wants you here but he sure as hell wasn’t listening to you during those few minutes this mission hadn’t gone to pot.”
Face reddening, Sam looked away, but Vala knew they were both thinking of the same incident: Mitchell dismissing Sam saying she had a bad feeling about some of the energy readings at the rendezvous with Yōumò, making some inside joke referencing their Academy years that had made Sam snap her mouth shut just like she was now. You know, the more she thought about it, maybe it really wasn’t fair for any of them to blame Vala for this whole mess.
“Maybe I should be making the decisions now.”
Sam’s eyes shot to hers, and admittably that was probably going a little too far in the realm of logic and reasoning. But she thought of how Sam had engineered the weapons, and led the hunting, and started the fires, and gotten Vala mapping, and figured out how to scale the cliff, and even told her when the best time to bathe was; and a nauseating sense of uselessness crawled up Vala’s throat.
“Yeah,” she soldiered on. “Exactly. You know. Maybe I shouldn’t be listening to you anymore either. You led me down an unstable tunnel that got a hunk of rock in my leg, we do well to remember!”
Which was true!
(It was rather heady being able to make a point without having to fudge the facts. She should try it more often.)
“Vala,” started Sam, and Vala was already determined not to be mollified by that…that condescending tone. “You’re right that you need to be more involved in our decisions. But I’ve taken you into account for all of my plans and…and I know you’re not used to doing…that, so I strongly believe we shouldn’t split off our—”
Vala’s laugh sounded brittle and vaguely deranged even to her. “Oh, you strongly believe that? Where have you been going every evening, Colonel?” And not quite liking the implications of what Sam had said right before that, she added loudly, “While I’ve been making blankets for us both, by the way?”
“I was only investigating some of the panelling and circuitry,” said Sam, frustration creeping into her voice and overtaking the pleading. “I never made any choices without your input. Yes, I knapped the spear-thrower without telling you, but at that point I was mostly keeping my hands busy! And yes, I wanted us to go down that specific tunnel yesterday because I had a hypothesis, but it was just a hypothesis and I had no idea you would—” Sam’s gaze darted to Vala’s wound and back up. “I never wanted you to get hurt. I’m so sorry you got hurt.”
Sympathy wriggled in Vala’s chest, but she put it down with expert swiftness. If Sam felt bad about her injury, then Vala wasn’t going to make her stop—she should feel bad, first of all (this damn hole in her leg hurt like nobody’s business), and second of all, Vala could very well use that.
“I am sorry as well,” she sniffed haughtily, turning away. “And I’d storm right off at this moment if it wouldn’t be more like hobbling, too.”
All the fight seemed to deflate out of Sam on a sigh. “I—” But she broke off and silently gathered a few of her tools and a torch. She took one of the spears but not the lever, casting Vala a meaningful glance which she stoutly ignored.
Sam started towards the tunnel entrances before turning and softly saying, “Just…don’t go anywhere, okay?”
Vala pressed her lips together, not wanting to be tied to any promise or weakened by any reassurance. But now she thought of how Sam had patiently taught Vala how to build the darts, and let her hunt on her own, and never begrudged her the lead in cooking, and given her the chalk and shale to make a map system all by herself, and risked death by falling off a cliff just because Vala was disappointed about the massive cavern, and even told her about phoenixes after laughing at her stupid shadow puppets; and Vala…
“Wait,” she sighed. “Let me go with you.”
Sam’s eyes widened, but she didn’t argue as Vala grabbed the rest of the weaponry, lit another torch, and caught up to her. She left her shale behind. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be needing it any longer.
Tense silence enveloped them for a few minutes, until Sam whispered, “I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you sooner, but every time I…I was terrified, frankly.”
Vala frowned at that. “Terrified? Of what?”
“Of finding out you were…part of the hologram.” Impossibly, her voice was even softer now.
Vala’s chest tightened to hear it. Are you real? But with a slow, deliberate breath out, she dispelled the pain of it and leaned on Sam. Just to take pressure off of her injured leg.
“I hope you’re not worried about that anymore, Colonel,” she said lightly. “I hope you realise we’re stuck together, now.”
Sam ducked her head to hide a smile before gathering some pebbles off a nearby ridge in the wall. She tossed them into the air, and Vala realised what she was doing just before the fine dust identified the direction of a breeze.
When they found the crevice it led to, a draft howling out of it, Vala straightened up to let Sam search it to her satisfaction.
After a few minutes, she nodded at Vala and faced the crack in the wall. “Ready?” she murmured.
Without thinking, she shot out her hand to grab Sam’s, but the colonel didn’t even flinch. Tightening her grip, Sam led the way through the crack, and Vala happily followed.
CODA.
As much confidence as Sam had in the Prometheus’s medical staff’s medical ability, she had to say their bedside manner could use a little work. But maybe she had gotten spoiled by how patiently Janet always managed worried teammates hovering over an incapacitated comrade; she’d do well to remember most military physicians didn’t have the time or the disposition to be so understanding.
Still, muttering to herself about how she and the guys had been unceremoniously kicked out of the infirmary after delivering Daniel kept her from reflecting too much on Vala. At least, it had, until she let herself think about Janet. Because now all Sam could feel was a deep, deep grief. Bereavement of any proof that she could connect with, be accepted by, other women and help, save, them when it mattered—could handle ordinary friendship.
Could she do friendship right at all? She recalled how awkward it had been to see Vala in the briefing without getting to catch up with her first, and how little opportunity they had gotten to talk or even make eye contact amidst the urgent mission, and how poorly her attempt to bring up their time in the caves by referencing their “backup singer” conversation had gone. Stars, she hadn’t meant to make Vala feel like she wanted to get rid of her. And now—
Something dark and sad welled up inside of her, and Sam had to blink rapidly for a moment to keep her composure.
Dammit this isn’t productive.
Swiping at her eyes, Sam forced her mind to quit wandering morosely and likewise directed her feet to where she could actually be useful. Yet going over the telemetry from the moments before the singularity had her shooting straight out of the depths of her despair. Could it really be…?
Her hope only got more and more dizzying as she stumbled back into and through the halls, so it was a good thing the guys found her when they did.
“Whoa, whoa, Sam,” said Cam, hands gripping her shoulders. “Where’s the fire? You know we can’t be having one of those on a spaceship.”
“Are you well, Colonel Carter?” asked Teal’c. “May we assist you with this conflagration?”
“What— No, I—” She shook her head. “I was just looking for you guys, actually. Are you going to see Daniel?”
Cam nodded. “Yeah, figured we’d followed Doc’s orders to give ’em time long enough.”
“Though,” intoned Teal’c, “the infirmary is that way.”
She flushed as he tilted his head in the direction she had come from. “Um…oops.” She considered lying about getting lost, but they probably wouldn’t buy that, considering she had built this ship and all. “Lead the way?”
With a slight bow, Teal’c took point while Cam fell in step with her. Still, her thoughts were stampeding so loudly with her discovery that she barely managed one-word responses to Cam’s attempts at conversation. But when he urged her to think about rejoining SG-1, her attention was properly caught.
Vala had struck home with her assessment that Cam didn’t always listen to her in spite of her experiential seniority, but what really niggled at Sam was Vala’s observation that she saved people—her tirelessness, her ideas, her open heart and bare face saved people.
She didn’t reply to Cam right away, though. She had bigger news to share.
“A matter stream left the cargo ship just before it exploded. There’s at least a slight chance that it was pulled into the singularity.”
Daniel furrowed his brow. “So you’re saying she could be alive…somewhere in the Ori home galaxy.”
“It’s possible,” she hedged, but even as Daniel made a quip and Cam and Teal’c smiled in relief, she silently revised, More than possible. Even highly probable. It wouldn’t do to profess such irrational conclusions, but privately, Sam let herself believe that she would see Vala again. And when that phoenix rose from the ashes to once more take to the sky in all its swooping fiery motion, Sam would gladly seize the second shot at friendship with her.
Until then, she had work to do.