Work Text:
Another day in her apartment, another day in Zoom-land. Cassie’s long over it. She’s over it every day—as is everyone—but from the moment she wakes up she knows that today will be especially excruciating.
She misses Janet desperately.
It’s been more than ten years.
Just another day on her own.
She puts on another nice shirt and makes sure her screen doesn’t show her sweatpants or that her dog Gambit is resting his muzzle on her thigh. She adjusts the angle of her visible houseplant, and gives it a spritz with the water bottle, and when she runs her fingers over the leaves the chronic ache in her chest sharpens to an acute sting. She longs to be out with Gambit hiking through the national forests, maybe off I-70 or SH9… anywhere.
Anywhere else. With anyone else—except that’s flippant and untrue, and that’s why today is a bad day. She doesn’t want to be hiking with just anyone. She wants Janet and Sam at her back. And that’s impossible.
She sits through her obligatory Zoom meetings, necessary documents and relevant papers building up in her browser tabs, thinking about her adoptive mother. She tells herself to forget it, or at least put her grief aside until the end of the workday; heck, until her lunch break. But her heart’s not in it. Her heart’s gone south, from Denver down to Colorado Springs, down under Cheyenne Mountain.
As soon as her final morning meeting ends and the follow-up chatter in the Slack channel has quietened, she obeys its call: calls Sam. Even calling someone on the phone feels novel again compared to Zoom.
Sam answers on the fourth ring. “Hey Cassandra. Are you all right?”
Her voice is calm and clear, the vocal connection better than anything Cassie gets through a Zoom call. And thanks to that, the soft undercurrent of Sam’s concern comes through loud and clear too.
For a moment Cassie wants to say she’s fine, that she’s sorry, that she’ll call back when neither of them is working because it’s nothing. But it’s not nothing, even if it can’t be changed.
“Hi Sam,” she answers, stroking Gambit’s back. “I just wanted to call. Is now a bad time?”
“Not at all,” says Sam, cool, calm, fond. Almost parental. Almost. “What’s on your mind?”
Cassie sighs. “I keep thinking about… my mom. Um, how are you holding up?”
“I’m all right. I thought about Janet earlier as well, actually,” Sam says, voice still clear and fond, taking Cassie’s confession and follow-up attempt at a distraction in her stride, getting straight to the heart of the issue. “You know I usually remember her when I head down to medical, and obviously that’s quite often at the moment.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this time I had this memory of us from the time when all the men on the base fell under Hathor’s influence…”
Though she’s heard it before, Cassie finds herself soothed by Sam’s story. She relaxes back into the couch cushions, and Gambit snuffles on her lap, shifting to keep his head in the optimal position on her leg. She keeps stroking his fur, warmed by his body and by Sam’s voice in her ear.
It’s not the same as seeing Sam for real, but it’ll tide her over until they can meet again. It’s not the same as having Janet back, but the loss feels a little less sad and a little more bittersweet, and not so lonely.