Spoilers: Chimera. Now make the pain go away! Seriously, I wrote this according to Canadian Broadcasting, ie Season Eight hasn’t happened yet, so nothing from that season has any bearing on this story.
Disclaimer: I profit in no way whatsoever by doing this, except that my soul grows a little with every word.
Summary: Sometimes, it’s just nice to have some company.
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Common Ground
A klaxon had begun to sound almost as soon as Sam had finished talking. She had made her apologies, promised to answer his questions later, kissed him on the cheek and left. When she had gone, a small, brown haired woman had materialized out of nowhere and informed him that she had to run some tests. Many of these tests involved needles, and he was almost positive that most of them were completely unnecessary, but he didn’t say a word.
As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure he was still capable of speech. What Sam had told him over the last two hours was completely insane, but her manner in telling him left him no room for doubt. As crazy as it sounded, she had told him the absolute truth, and what had begun as an innocuous hook-up had suddenly taken on a whole new light.
When he’d called Mark to tell him about the case, he hadn’t meant to come away with a date. He knew that Mark had a sister in Colorado Springs he didn’t get to see very often, so he’d offered to send Mark’s best wishes, and possibly one of those indecipherable crayon drawings his kids were always drawing up for their perennially absent aunt and grandfather. Mark, however, had taken it upon himself to play matchmaker, and Pete, having nothing better to do, had played along.
But no amount of physical attraction, and there was lots and lots of that, would overcome what he was feeling now. Sam’s true job scared the crap out of him. Knowing that there was life out there, some of which would gladly kill him or, from what he understood, worse, made him want to crawl into his sock drawer and sleep for days. He knew that every time he looked at Sam now, he would feel a cold terror clawing its way through his body. And he never wanted to feel that way again.
Pete looked across the infirmary, and saw another person there. He recognized her of course, it’s hard to forget the face of a person that tried to kill you, but he also noticed that there was something different about her. Sam had told him that the woman, Sarah, he thought her name was, had been cured. Or whatever. At any rate, she was harmless now, no more fire in her eyes or strange particle weapons in her hands. A man, Daniel Jackson, he remembered, had been with her until the klaxons rang, but now she too was alone, her knees hugged to her chest and a look of loathing in her eyes.
Pete looked around the infirmary for signs of the short, tyrannical woman or any of her needles, but found none. Moving carefully, so as to avoid reopening his wounds, he made his way across the room and sat down on the bed nest to Sarah’s.
“Hey,” he said, lacking anything else.
“Hello,” she replied quietly, her accent swallowing the end of the word.
There were several moments of silence between them. Sarah pulled the blanket that covered her knees more tightly around her and unconsciously rubbed the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said finally. “I, uh, wasn’t myself.”
“Yeah, someone explained that to me. Don’t worry about it. As a matter of fact, I plan to forget about it as soon as I possibly can. That and all of this,” he replied, gesturing to the infirmary at large.
“I sympathize completely,” Sarah said with a small smile. “I have to have a debriefing with a whole room full of Air Force officers and government officials wherein I will be forced to relive every agonizing moment of the last three years.”
“Want to stage an escape?” This earned him an actual laugh.
“I could, you know,” she admitted. “Osiris, that thing I carried, knew the schematics of this base, various techniques for evasion and how to operate several dozen different types of highly destructive weapons.”
“Well, I’m game if you are.”
“I can’t,” she said with a shudder. “I am never, ever going into that part of my mind again. I don’t want the memories I have, and I am going to forget them.”
“I can understand,” he said with a sigh. “My name is Pete, by the way. Pete Shanahan.”
“And what will you do, Pete Shanahan, once you are free of the SGC?”
“I am going home,” he said simply. “Home to Denver where I am canceling my subscription to National Geographic, breaking my DVDs of The Mummy movies, and cutting the words ‘air’ and ‘force’ out of my Scrabble dictionary.”
“That sounds about right,” Sarah agreed. “I’ll have to find a new job. My tenure at Chicago is long over. A library perhaps, in some small town where my biggest problem is overdue fines and tracking down the teenagers who keep mis-shelving books.”
“Do you have any family or anything?”
“Not that I haven’t killed. Or tried to,” she said ruefully. “My family in England was furious with me for coming to America. They never supported nor approved of a life in academia. The team at Chicago was my family, and I destroyed them.”
“Well, if you ever need someone to talk to, look me up.”
“Thank you.” She took his hand. “I believe I will.”
In the office of Dr. Janet Fraiser, Daniel watched as tears filled Sam Carter’s eyes. Janet had caught them in the hallway as they made their way back to the infirmary and ushered them before the live feed screen that allowed her to monitor her patients from out of the room. Daniel, for his part, was unsurprised by Sarah’s reaction and was already planning his request to Hammond on her behalf. Sam, however, was obviously confronted by her very worst fear. As she watched Sarah take Pete’s outstretched hand, she took several gasping breaths and then fled the room.
Daniel looked across at Janet, managing to convey a whole world of questions and concerns in a single gaze.
“I’ll take care of her, Daniel,” Janet said sadly. “As much as anyone can.”
“I just…How can he be a policeman, someone who has dedicated his life to helping people, and hide his head in the sand, knowing what he knows?”
“This is pretty big, Daniel. Too big for some, I guess.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.”
In the main room of the infirmary at the SGC, Pete Shannahan and Sarah Gardiner planned fresh beginnings and new lives as far away from their current surroundings as was humanly possible.
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fin
AN: The line about the Sock Drawer is my favourite from “Mystery Science Theatre 3000”.
A lot of this comes from a discussion we had about the type of Daniel’s heroism, how absolute it is. Pete is still the type who always saves the Damsel in Distress, he just does it very locally. I still hate him though.