Part the Fourth
In which we discover why Sam is so reluctant to leave the mountain, and she comes to term with it.
AN: There are four ways you can detect naquadah:
1. You are a symbiote, and it is in your blood.
2. You are a Jaffa or a host and can feel your symbiote’s reaction.
3. You are a host whose Goa’uld has died within, leaving the necessary protein markers.
4. You are holding an electronic naquadah detector.
Spoilers: Minor for In the Line of Duty, The Curse and Fail Safe.
To Red, because I never ever would have come up with this on my own.
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The longest she had ever made it was six days. Six of, quite possibly, the longest diurnal cycles she had ever endured. When she got back to the base, it was all she could do not to run into the ‘Gate room and kiss it.
It was in that precise moment that Sam Carter realized she had a problem.
When she was on missions, it wasn’t so bad. It didn’t have to be her ‘Gate, it just had to be a ‘Gate. It was not until the mission to Egypt that she realized that it was not the ‘Gate itself, it was what the ‘Gate represented. If she was close to a mine, or a group of Jaffa, or, heaven help her, captured by a Goa’uld, then she was okay. But when she was on-world, off-base, she got really really antsy.
It was not, as Jack suspected, that she was a work-a-holic. Well, not completely anyway. She loved her work, she always had. But it was not because of this that she hated leaving the mountain. Jack wanted to take her fishing. In Minnesota. Hundreds of kilometres away. That, Jack would argue, was the point. In Jack’s mind, “fun” was irrevocably linked to “away”, and the further away you went, the more fun you had.
Sam, naturally, had found the hole in that logic immediately. If fun equalled away, she had queried, then shouldn’t their missions count? They certainly were further than Minnesota. In Jack’s world however, missions never left the mountain by more than a few dozen steps (if they were lucky). It had caused her no end of pain to admit that his rationale was not completely unfounded.
Daniel was convinced that it was emotional, that her upbringing had made her desire to do good on a cosmic scale and that it caused her pain to stop. He was a dear, but he had a tendency to project sometimes. He had suffered no end of trials on the trip to Egypt when, caught between Janet’s detailed analysis of the pilot’s flight errors and Sam’s mile by mile report of how far away from Colorado they were, he had resisted the urge to run, screaming, from the plane.
Sam had tried to delicately point out that, while she had some crippling emotional traumas, they weren’t really as connected to the ‘Gate as were his own. Daniel had laughed, and poured out their twenty-seventh cup of coffee since beginning their analysis of the Ancient artefact SG-14 had brought home three days earlier.
She was almost convinced that Teal’c understood. She knew he didn’t, couldn’t really, share her feelings, but he knew what she went through when they were off-base. Teal’c had not come to Egypt, which Sam did not hold against him, but if he had, maybe Sam would not have been so surly.
Sam recognized that it wasn’t healthy, that getting a fix, even inadvertently, from a friend was the SGC equivalent of trafficking, even if no one knew what she was doing. But she couldn’t help it any more than she could help her incessant need to dismantle technological gadgets. She talked about it sometimes with Cassie, but Cass never seemed to suffer as much as she herself did. Maybe, Sam theorized, it was because she was exposed a great deal more often that Cassie was.
There were no support groups. There was no one she could call. There were few, if any, like her in the Universe, caught against their will between two worlds and endlessly craving something that, due to a cosmic misalignment of element distribution, did not exists anywhere in her solar system. Except the SGC.
So she arranged her living room furniture into the closest approximation of a circle she could get without a string and a measuring tape. Feeling very much like she had when she had gone to her friend’s tea-parties when she was little, she stood up and coughed.
“My name is Samantha Carter….and I am addicted to naquadah.”
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AN: Hey, it would sure explain a lot!