Chapter Text
He called back each day—spent every day calling—leaving the dishes in the sink to grow crunchy and moldy. Leaving the bed unslept in and unmade because it didn’t feel right to do without her. Furniture began to gather dust; his hair began to grow longer and unkempt, his clothes weren’t washed and starting to smell like a mixture of body odor and cigarettes.
Eventually he stopped doing everything but calling the SGC, trying to figure out where they’d placed her, if she was okay, how they could take her when—as awful as it is to say—they gave him physical custody of her a year ago.
The last script studio stopped calling him and he no longer had a source of income other than the stipend that he got from the government which covered his monthly bills, with enough left over for cigarettes and booze.
This also brought forth a nurse—one he never asked for—who would try to get him to do stretches, and always ended up doing a little cleaning. The day she changed the sheets on the bed and made it he lost his mind. Threw a bottle of whiskey at the wall and for a moment it was a frying pan in a different house—it was his mom telling him how useless she was, and how she was just using him—but when she left, he literally became nothing.
He never leaves the living room of his apartment. Sits in his chair before the couch because what’s the point in pulling himself onto it when he can’t feel below his hips anyway and all he has is the memories of her laying beside him, running her cold, pointed toes up his legs and giggling when he growled in response before pouncing on her, devouring those giggles.
Then one day he gets a visitor.
Not Landry or anyone from the mountain—at least not anyone he’s familiar with, and he knows immediately that this is not Sam.
At least not their Sam.
Their Sam was meek, barely ever spoke to anyone—so concerned with work, with physics and the way things work, fiddling with machine parts and things she didn’t understand while standing next to Jackson, who explained what needed to be.
She wasn’t always like that—remembers her as being happier and more vibrant during flight school, but that all changed after the Battle for Antarctica when she lost O’Neill to a perfectly timed blast from Anubis’s ship.
This Sam is asking questions that the Sam he knows never would. Trying to rise up against Landry—against the curfew, the martial law, against how they got rid of elections because it was just easier to keep him in charge—he was a military general after all, who better to fight the Ori than him?
Offered her what little amenities he could, but he was down to just surviving on snacks and an ancient game show network because it reminds him of how soft her lap was and how her fingers were so calming against him.
Knows this Sam is rallying, that she sees the dark ties in place stretching out from President Landry over the country he has in a headlock, because no one else can stand up to him.
There was a moment he considered it—when he was first with her, sitting across from her in a wheelchair with a blanket in his lap, standing across from her at a swanky party supposedly thrown to honor him, but in reality, honoring the president who had jack shit to do with the attacks, and he didn’t care.
He didn’t care because the only thing that mattered that night was how her cold fingers folded into his in the middle of the room, a few feet astride the buffet, in front of the cocktail weenies he’d suggested—he’d approached her under the guise of retrieving a few in case she didn’t want to talk—because he saw her the way he saw her in his dreams, with an ethereal glow around her that could never be put out.
Even in the last few weeks he had with her, he still saw her with it, like a light orange hue illuminating around her body.
With a halo.
“Look, I’m sorry—” Carter stands after he alienates her enough, bores her with the sob story of his life leaving out the saddest bits—how he loved—still loves a woman, who was taken nine days ago—how even if he had the use of his legs, the use of his brain without it being addled with alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine—that there is no way that he could bring her back.
How he never even got to hold his daughter—in life or in death.
“I probably shouldn’t have come.”
Sam stands before him, a more knowledgeable person than him, a more learned one—sure, he could fly one hell of a jet, but what does that matter when the only place he wants to fly it now is straight into the ground over Area 51.
She’s more intuitive than him too, and can tell that something isn’t right, that in this world—different from wherever she came from—they can’t fully breathe, that all the restrictions, the laws, the riots, are for a reason aside what the government is declaring as homeland terrorism, and she knows that she should do something about it.
That’s when he knows that she’s using him to. Using him to suss out whether or not it’s worth giving up her freedom, her family, her liberties, to speak as a public figure against the president, the military, the government.
“Oh, no! No-no-no-no.”
He’s tired of being put on display—of being a martyr who’s still alive—just barely.
“You wanted to see for yourself, right? The price for sticking up for your principles? Take a good look.”
But he can’t show her, the only one who can is locked up in a maximum-security jail cell out in Area 51.