Gen, epilogue, PG

Season 9: epilogue to “Ripple Effect”; spoilers for episodes up through “Ripple Effect”

 

Thanks to Redbyrd for excellent suggestions and questions (as always), and to my husband!

 

Disclaimers:

Stargate SG-1 and its characters belong to Showtime, Gekko, MGM-UA, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions, Stargate SG-1 Prod. Ltd. Partnership, and probably other persons or entities whom I’ve forgotten. No copyright infringement is intended. In fact, this story makes no sense if you haven’t seen the show, so I encourage you to watch! And buy all the DVDs! Just like I do! Dialogue and plot (such as they are) are my own.

 

 

Ripples

by Aelfgyfu

 

 

Colonel Samantha Carter, the one who belonged in this universe, the one who didn’t try to ‘borrow’ someone else’s ship to steal someone else’s ZPM, had a back corner table in the commissary to herself when the rest of the team came in. The look on her face probably accounted for the empty space around her table, but that didn’t stop her team. Daniel and Cam smiled and waved, and Teal’c nodded. She suspected they’d been looking for her. She still hadn’t gotten very far in her meal when her teammates brought their trays over.

 

“No Jell-O?” Daniel asked with a frown as he plopped himself down in the seat next to her. Teal’c sat across from her and Cam next to him. Yep, they’d been looking for her.

 

“I’m not awfully hungry today.” All three men now stared openly at the plate where she was pushing peas into mashed potatoes. Each one dodged her eyes when she looked back except, of course, Teal’c, who returned her gaze placidly while he ate.

 

“I know what you mean,” Daniel said softly as he tentatively poked at the food on his plate. “I’m not particularly pleased with myself this week either.” He had what they called steak. She was surprised he still ate it; he’d recently told her that he had found empty boxes outside the commissary labeled: “Beef. USDA Grade: Fit for Human Consumption.” Well, maybe the steak was safer than whatever they mixed in that glop Cameron had on his plate.

 

“Hey, it’s not like they were us,” Cam said. “Well, I mean, they were, but they weren’t. We didn’t do those things.” He finished putting ketchup on his meatloaf, which had the advantage at least of hiding its unappetizing brown color, and plowed into it with something suspiciously like enthusiasm.

“But we could have. Did you notice that Vala wasn’t on any of the teams that came through?” Sam countered. “The ones I asked had never even heard of her, or they’d seen her only when she hijacked the Prometheus and not again. If not for her, we’d have at least one beachhead in our universe too! Is it just the luck of having Vala around that made us not that desperate?”

“If you can call it luck,” Daniel muttered, apparently realizing a moment too late that he’d said it out loud. “Sorry.” He bent further over his food and began actually eating it, though he wrinkled his nose a little.

 

Cameron gave Daniel a look that the latter didn’t catch before winking at Sam. “Did the Prometheus get hijacked in every universe? Man, they shouldn’t let you on that ship if they want to keep it. There’s Vala, then our doubles. . . .”

 

Daniel raised his face from the close inspection of his food to glare at Cam, but suddenly his expression changed. “If Vala wasn’t with them,” he asked, “how did the Ori find Earth? I mean, we only ran into them because Vala brought information which led to the Ancient communications device, and then the Ori found us because Vala and I tried it, and it was Vala who actually got caught. . . .”

 

“So it’s not your fault the Ori found us,” Sam said quickly to Daniel. “They would have found us anyway.” She saw his face brighten just a little, and she smiled in return.

 

“Unless—no, that doesn’t make any sense. If they’d had her and then lost her the way we did, then they shouldn’t have a beachhead, because she’d have stopped it in their universe too.” Mitchell frowned. “Maybe some of the teams had Vala but didn’t include her on this mission.”

 

“Not the three or four that I asked,” Sam told him.

 

“So Vala did more good than harm,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “The Ori would have found us anyway, even if she hadn’t messed up the tea ceremony—which wasn’t really her fault anyway, though maybe she shouldn’t have told the Administrator’s wife to procreate with herself. . . .”

 

“We will find her,” Sam said, touching Daniel lightly on the arm for a moment. He frowned in thought. “You don’t really believe she’s gone for good,” she stated. Daniel shook his head.

 

“So how about that? Vala the Thief saves the day, and that’s why our universe is better!” Mitchell grinned. “So you think if she hadn’t done that, if the Ori did have a beachhead or two here, we’d be going into other universes looking for ZPMs to steal?” he asked Sam.

 

“I hope not,” Sam said honestly, “but I don’t know.”

 

“Well, I’m just glad we don’t have to. And I want to keep it that way,” Cam answered.

 

“Would you do it? Would you do what your counterpart did?” Daniel asked Cameron.

 

“I might,” Cameron answered thoughtfully. Sam started to object; Cam raised his free hand a little while continuing to wield the fork in the other. “Hang on. I mean, think about it. We have to believe that this universe is the only one that really matters.”

 

“No, I don’t think—” Daniel started.

 

“Well, maybe you don’t, but those of us in the military do. And Teal’c. Am I right, Teal’c?” Teal’c nodded slightly.

 

“Now wait a minute!” Daniel’s silverware clattered onto his plate.

 

“Well, he has a point, Daniel,” Sam conceded. “You didn’t have to make the decision that General Landry did: to seal off the rip so that we didn’t get overwhelmed with other teams.”

 

“But that wasn’t just for our protection,” Daniel said, picking up his fork and knife again, but he waved them around as he talked rather than using them to eat. “We had to protect all the other universes too! We weren’t helping any of these people by bringing them here. Once we sealed it, teams could just go back to their own SGC, or SGA, or whatever they called it. Sealing the breach was the best thing for the most . . . universes.”

 

“Huh,” said Mitchell. “Guess you’re right. But I don’t think that was Landry’s reasoning. And it can’t be. He has to take care of his command and his world. He can’t do what’s best for all the other universes if it’s going to hurt ours.”

 

Daniel set his implements down more quietly this time and pushed his glasses up a little. “When I went through the quantum mirror,” he said softly, “I asked the people there to give up their last chance to send people to the Alpha Site so that I could get home and warn our Earth. And they did.” The others digested this in silence. Teal’c continued to eat as he had throughout. Daniel added, “That’s what the other SG-1 didn’t give us. They didn’t give us a choice.”

 

“You don’t seriously think we’d have given them the ZPM if they’d asked for it, do you?” Cam demanded, shoving a bite of mystery meat into his mouth.

 

“Probably not. But would you expect the SGA to let me through the Gate instead of escaping themselves? Why couldn’t our alternates at least try to ask us? Maybe we could have come up with some other solution! They not only threatened everyone in Atlantis, and everyone that they may be able to help, they took one of our two operating hyperdrive ships out of use for three weeks! If we’d needed Prometheus to fight the Ori, we’d have been . . . in deep trouble. And what if, once Atlantis lost its ZPM, the Wraith captured the Daedalus? What if the information in the Atlantis database is enough to get them here? They endangered everyone, maybe the whole human and Jaffa and who knows what else population of this universe, to get something that might help them against the Ori! And a ZPM does nothing against the plague!”

 

“Apparently they faced a more direct military threat from the Ori than we do,” Teal’c announced calmly.

 

“Yes, but if they managed to use the Ancient outpost in Antarctica, the Ori would just release the plague.”

 

“But they can’t,” noted Sam, “because we sent samples of the cure back with every team.” She was still fiddling with her food, occasionally eating a bite but mostly moving it around in an attempt to make it occupy less space. The potatoes didn’t look any better with the peas mixed in.

 

Daniel let out a breath. “Look Sam, I got kind of off the topic there. And you’re right. We did for them everything we could. I don’t mean to make you feel bad about what the other team did. I’m just . . . mad that I, that my counterpart, went along with this whole thing! I’d like to think that I wouldn’t do that.”

 

“Your double didn’t do much,” Mitchell pointed out. “We don’t know what he thought of the plan.”

 

“Enough to come along,” Daniel snapped. Mitchell continued eating, but Daniel stopped again. “And he never warned us. He could have. He just acted all—he acted! They all pretended that they didn’t know how they got here, they pretended to be suspicious of us, they pretended to be working with us after they came to ‘trust’ us—none of that was real! He lied to us, over and over! He may not have done much, but he certainly did more than enough.” Daniel stabbed his meat with his fork and sawed with his knife.

 

“Wow,” said Mitchell.

 

“I take it this doesn’t bother you?” Sam asked, a little defensively.

 

“No! It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!” Cam gave a slightly goofy grin. “I sound like I’m back in grade school, don’t I? But that’s the point. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t you.” He pointed his fork at each of them in turn and then used it to scoop up another bite of potatoes, which he seemed to enjoy a lot more than she did.

 

“Indeed,” Teal’c said. Sam and Daniel held still, waiting for him to say more, but he simply continued eating.

 

“Look, Sam,” said Daniel soothingly. He could somehow manage that tone without being condescending. “I’m really pissed at my double. But I’m pissed at him. Not at me.”

 

Sam did not find this comforting though she appreciated his efforts. “Well, you can afford to be.”

 

Daniel frowned and swallowed a bite. “What do you mean?”

 

“We can’t be sure exactly what your double thought or how he justified it to himself, but I think we can be damn sure it wasn’t his idea! Who decided to steal from another universe? Someone who could think of how to get between universes.” Sam forced herself to stop pushing food around on her plate by putting her silverware down and her hands in her lap, where only Daniel could see her twisting her fingers around each other.

 

“You,” said Cam without surprise.

 

“Not Sam,” replied Daniel angrily, “the other Sam.”

 

“But it was the other me,” said Sam. “None of us can deny it. She’d be the only one to come up with a plan like that. No disrespect, Daniel—or Cam, or Teal’c—but you’re just not going to think of that, are you? It was my plan. I came up with the concept, and I figured out how to execute it.” The paper napkin in her lap became entangled with her fingers.

 

“Hey, whoa, pronoun trouble,” Cam said with a glance at Daniel, whose lead he was clearly following. “You can’t call that other Carter ‘I’.”

 

“I can’t?” Sam said, knowing it was a little childish but annoyed that he was arguing about pronouns. She started to tear the napkin quietly.

 

“You can’t,” Daniel pronounced authoritatively in Mitchell’s place. “Look, we’ve all been here before. Well, except for new guy”—he nodded towards Mitchell. “Teal’c is not responsible for the version of Teal’c that destroyed Earth in the reality I visited, or the one who attacked Cheyenne Mountain in the reality Kawalski and your . . . Doctor Carter came from. I’m not the one who blew off Katherine when she approached me to join the program. You’re not responsible for the choices the alternate Sam Carters made in the realities we had contact with years ago; I mean, one was engaged and the other was married to Jack O’Neill!” He gave her a good-natured smile, but Sam really wished he hadn’t brought that up, and she could see the smile melting off his face as he realized it too.

 

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” asked Cam with something dangerously close to a smirk. “And one of you was on maternity leave. . . . How many guys do you—” A look of bewilderment crossed Mitchell’s face before he looked at Daniel accusingly. “You kicked me?” he said in disbelief. “You kicked me! Under the table! How old are you?”

 

“Years of being around Jack O’Neill,” Daniel was openly smirking.

 

“You would do well to remember that,” Teal’c advised.

 

Sam had to laugh. She caught her breath and finally managed to get some more food into her mouth. The guys were trying to make her feel better, even if they didn’t seem at all sure how to do it.

 

“The point is,” Daniel said after giving Sam a chance to recover and eating a few mouthfuls himself, “that that Samantha Carter may have looked like you and had your rank, but she was not you. She did things you didn’t do and you wouldn’t do.”

 

“But I don’t know that,” Sam admitted. “I’m not sure.”

 

“Well, what did we do when we . . . got them?” Daniel asked. “We didn’t gloat. Well, except for keeping the other guy’s pants.” This time Mitchell definitely smirked. “We didn’t try to get any advantage from them. We didn’t even beat them up, though their Teal’c seemed quite happy to rough up our Mitchell.”

 

“Yes!” Sam said in relief. “Teal’c, that doesn’t bother you?”

 

“It does not,” Teal’c answered. Daniel was already starting to say, “See?” when Teal’c finished, “Colonel Mitchell was not seriously harmed.” Daniel stopped what he was saying to gape for a moment.

 

“You didn’t kick him,” Mitchell said accusingly.

 

“How would you know?” Daniel snapped. “If I kicked Teal’c under the table, do you think he’d react?” Now they all looked at Teal’c. Teal’c smiled slightly but did not answer. Daniel went back to his food.

 

“The point is,” Daniel said, apparently once he remembered himself that he’d had a point, “that you didn’t do anything wrong, Sam. And I know you. I have confidence that you wouldn’t do it. You do what’s right.”

 

“But you don’t know me!” Sam insisted. “Look at what my Replicator double did!”

 

“That wasn’t you either,” Mitchell pointed out.

“You weren’t there,” she said quietly, turning sideways in her seat to face Daniel more. “Daniel, we know what happens when you get power. You were ascended. Did you try to be like Anubis? No! You played by their rules for as long as you could, but you also helped people as much as you could. When the Ascended stopped you, you came back. When you took control of the Replicators, you froze them. You didn’t try to use them against anyone. You didn’t try to get more power, or hold on to power.”

 

“I couldn’t control the Replicators,” Daniel replied dismissively. “Stopping them for a few seconds was the only thing I could do; there’s no virtue in that. I don’t know everything I did while I was ascended, but there were a lot of good things I could have done that I didn’t.” He hesitated and took a big gulp of coffee before continuing. “I do know what Shifu showed me of myself. I’m as capable of bad things as you are, Sam. More, in fact. Way more.”

 

“Only in a dream that someone else controlled! We know you, Daniel, and you don’t really behave like that.”

 

Cam was looking confused. “It was just a dream, right? I read that report; you didn’t really bomb Moscow.”

 

Daniel swore and flung his utensils on his plate. “You shouldn’t have seen that version of the report. I never should have written that version.” He cursed again. “I should have stuck with the first one, the one General Hammond said was ‘too sketchy.’”

 

“You wrote what you did to convince others of the threat,” Teal’c reminded him.

 

“But since we no longer had a harcesis, I didn’t need to!”

 

“Hey, sorry,” Cam said. “Didn’t realize that was still a sore point, or I wouldn’t have brought it up. But Sam’s right. You’d never bomb a city just to prove a point! God, you died of radiation poisoning to save a city that wasn’t even on this planet!”

 

“I died because if I didn’t stop that reaction,” Daniel said sourly, “I would have died, and Jack and Sam and Teal’c would have died, and Jonas, and millions of other people. It wasn’t a hard choice. That was hardly virtuous either! And there were worse things in that dream, things I did. . . .” he added.

 

“Worse than bombing Moscow?” Cam’s stunned question stopped everyone from eating for a moment, even Teal’c.

 

“Well, maybe not worse, but . . . other things. Things that didn’t make it into any report. Things I would like to believe I couldn’t ever do.” His voice was low but forceful. “But I know how they felt. They felt like me. I could do those things, Sam, but you can’t. The Replicator version of you was not you. I was in her head, remember?”

 

“But you’ve never been in my head,” Sam objected.

 

“No, but I’ve worked with you for—how long is it now? Eight years? I do know you. I know what you’ve done, and what you won’t do. I know that you’d never betray us. I know that that Replicator Carter was nothing like you. Well, she had your brains, but her desires, her fear, her hate—that was nothing like you.” Sam wanted to object, but when Daniel was saying such good things about her, she found she couldn’t. “And what I was trying to say minutes ago, before I lost track of what I was saying,”—that clause was rather pointed, and punctuated with a glare at Mitchell—“was that we did not take revenge on the other team for fooling us, beating one of us up, taking his pants”—he was deliberately provoking Cam, Sam was sure—“and generally making us look stupid, as well as endangering us and our entire universe. We let them go home and gave them a little help and advice. We did our best to help all the teams. Sam, you led the charge! You figured out what we needed to do, and you did it. The rest of us just kind of stood around and . . . watched. You chose the best alternatives.”

 

Sam nodded hesitantly. “So why did the other one . . . ?”

 

Daniel fielded that question too. “Maybe that Sam Carter thought what she did was for the best. In fact, I’m sure she did. I think she was wrong, but she never looked pleased or smug about it. None of them really did.”

 

Mitchell injected, “Ooh! Mine did!” but Daniel ignored him and continued.

 

“They captured us and they stole the ship and they were going to steal the ZPM because they thought they had to. And it is a tough call! They’re sure millions, maybe billions, will die. If we lose our ZPM, we don’t know what will happen. Maybe we’ll lose everything. Maybe we’ll find another ZPM, or another way to defeat the Wraith, or defend Atlantis. And maybe, maybe we should have considered their request.”

 

“Request?” snorted Cam. “Now it’s a request? Which side are you on anyway?” He turned to the Jaffa sitting next to him. “Teal’c, are we sure we’ve got the right Jackson?”

 

“It should have been a request,” returned Daniel, ignoring the aside. “If only we’d had an extra ZPM . . . but we don’t. And we don’t go trying to steal anyone else’s. It would be a big help to have one here and now, wouldn’t it?” Sam nodded slowly as she thought about where this was going. Cam nodded too. Teal’c didn’t budge. “And now we know how to get to other universes! Why don’t we go through and take one so that when the Ori do break through—and they probably will—we’ll be ready?”

 

“Because—” Sam broke off. “I see your point.” After a moment and another couple of bites, now feeling better, she asked, “How did they know we had a ZPM?”

 

“How do we know this was the first universe they tried?” Daniel countered, barely beating Mitchell to the punch.

 

“My God.” Sam straightened up. “As soon as they arrived, we were comparing notes about our universes, and it came up right away that they had an Atlantis base but no working ZPM! I think they asked us about ours! You think they’ve done it before?”

 

Daniel had just realized the implications of his own line of thought. “And they might do it again. And we sent them home to do it.”

 

“They may find themselves too preoccupied to try again,” Teal’c pointed out. “They lost valuable time on their failed plan, whether it was the first attempt or not.” He was nearly done eating. Sam had another bite of her now cold, completely unappetizing food, giving her plate a long look. At least now that it was cold, she couldn’t smell it much.

 

Daniel noticed. “Hey, your gravy has congealed even worse than mine.” He looked at Mitchell’s. “Better eat up,” he told Cam unnecessarily.

 

“So we’re the good guys, right?” Cam said with food still in his mouth.

 

“Well—I think we made the right choices in this case.” Daniel answered. He hesitated but finally said in a very low tone, “Oma Desala told me, ‘There is only one thing we can ever truly control: whether we are good or evil.’ I’ve done bad things. I’ve made mistakes—I’ve even done evil things.” He held up a hand to forestall the objections of his teammates. “But on the whole, I think I’ve made more good choices than bad ones. I’m not evil. That’s the only way I can keep going. It’s hard enough without taking on the guilt of other versions of myself.” He looked at Sam, and she felt that the next words were addressed only to her; Cam and Teal’c could hear, but Daniel had his full attention on her. “Sam, you can’t think about what you could have done. You didn’t do it. You did all the right things here. You’ve made mistakes too, and you’ll make more. But you can’t keep playing what if. It will drive you crazy. I know.”

 

Sam wished it were just her and Daniel. It was hard enough to say this in front of him, and maybe Teal’c, but they were family; Cameron was still kind of a new addition. But she had to say it now or risk losing . . . well, risk losing her nerve. She was very grateful this corner of the commissary was otherwise empty. “But you really do know what you’re capable of. And you’ve only hurt people under alien influence.”

 

She had much more personal things to say, but Daniel didn’t let her get there. His explosive snort attracted attention from distant tables; Sam wished he’d been quieter. He saw her looking around and dropped his voice. “Was I under alien influence when I translated those symbols for the Trust, and they used Osiris’s ship to kill thousands or tens of thousands of Jaffa? No! I blew it! Completely!” He was getting louder, and Cam glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the room.  “All by myself, without any alien technologies making me do it.” Daniel suddenly jumped and glared at Cam. Sam knew Cam must have kicked him from Cam’s little smile, but Daniel did lower his voice. “It was a mistake! I went off half-cocked, I thought I could handle it, and thousands of people died. Yes, you too can probably screw up horribly. But the point is, you didn’t. You haven’t. You can’t hold yourself responsible for anything the other Carter did. Don’t let this eat away at you, Sam. You did fine. You gave them all the help we could reasonably give. Let it go.”

 

Sam  couldn’t believe he didn’t think her mistakes with her Replicator replica were worse than his cooperation with the Trust to save Krista’s life and Teal’c’s freedom. When she hesitated to reply, Cam chimed in. “Hey, take Jackson’s word for it. His double was part of it all. If he can live with that, and he already has a guilt complex the size of Cheyenne Mountain, you can live with what your double did.”

 

“Thanks,” Daniel said sarcastically. Sam giggled a little with relief. She knew that Daniel didn’t blame her for what that Replicator had done to him—and he didn’t blame her for that Replicator’s escape. He should, but he didn’t. Obviously, none of them blamed her for her alternate universe counterpart’s actions either.

 

“Why did he come along, anyway?” Sam asked. “They didn’t need a Daniel Jackson for their operation.”

 

Cameron was all too happy to answer; he must have thought about it already. “Well, having all of SG-1 helped them sucker us. I mean, having Jackson there made them look like they had to be on the up-and-up, ’cause we know he’s so—”

 

“Oh, great! So it’s my fault we believed them?” Daniel groaned. “You try to make Sam stop feeling guilty by making me start? Just after making fun of my  supposed guilt complex?”

 

“Hey, I’m not making you feel guilty! It’s just a fact! Having their Jackson there made it all that much more plausible.”

 

“It is not a fact,” Teal’c replied, “it is an opinion.”

 

“He’s right about the guilt complex, though,” Sam giggled. “Teal’c, didn’t General O’Neill once say that Daniel didn’t have a guilt complex, he had a whole development?”

 

“I believe O’Neill said, ‘subdivision,’” Teal’c said, frowning as he made a show of working to recall it. “But perhaps he said, ‘suburb.’”

 

Daniel grumbled, and Sam knew they were trying to distract her. And it was working: her burning questions didn’t seem so important now. She appreciated the help enough to take some of the heat off Daniel at her own expense. “So how come I end up married in some realities and having a baby in at least one? What is it about my personal life? Did you guys have different—” Daniel closed his eyes for just a moment and pressed his lips together. Sam realized at once that she had said the wrong thing. She had assumed they really hadn’t had different lives and would just tease her a little about hers. That was a dumb assumption!

 

Even Mitchell saw Daniel’s reaction. “Hey, who did you marry?” he asked her, taking the attention from Daniel.

 

“In one reality, apparently, Pete!” Daniel and Teal’c both raised eyebrows. “Yeah, I know. Maybe. . . .”

 

“Hey,” Daniel said, immediately concerned for her again, though he didn’t need to be. “You can’t think that way.”

 

“Well—”

 

“Trust me,” he said into the mess of food. He hadn’t eaten much and had been pushing the remainder of his food together into the center of his plate, piling the potatoes on top of the meat. “I found out that one of me is still married to Sha’re.”

 

“Hey, that’s great,” said Cam with genuine warmth. “At least—”

 

“Yeah,” said Daniel, looking up briefly with a little smile. “At least one of me. . . . And they have . . . children.” He looked down at his plate as if he’d just realized he was shoveling the food into a heap. He slowly let go of the implements. “Sam, you can torture yourself about what could have been. I can wonder why that Sha’re lived and mine didn’t. What little thing or split-second decision might have kept us together?” He looked at Sam with even more intensity than he’d looked at the wreckage of his meal. “So I stopped asking. I didn’t find out why he still had a wife. I stopped asking the other . . . the other ‘me’s about their personal lives. Because it’s too late to change the past, and you can play the ‘what if’ game forever, but what do you have at the end? What we got from the Gamekeeper. Nothing. Second-guessing yourself doesn’t change anything. So don’t worry about who your other selves married, or whether they have kids. Cassie needs you now; you’re in a real way her mother now, even if not on paper. And Captain Hailey has a great mentor and will continue to shine—not to mention several other young SGC officers you’ve helped bring along, and a few civilian scientists. Your personal life worked out differently here, but”—he looked around the table at the others and gave a wicked grin—“you must be happy with what you have, right? Because you’ve got us!”

 

“Hell, yeah!” Mitchell contributed exuberantly. Sam could see others in the commissary turning to look again. Teal’c gave another hint of a smile and nodded deeply. If Teal’c had taken his usual seat facing out over the room, Sam knew heads wouldn’t be turning like that. Everyone would keep their eyes at their own tables.

 

“So what makes us different from the other versions of ourselves?” She guided the conversation back onto safer ground.

 

“Well, most might be very like us,” Daniel said. “I think the team that tried to steal our ZPM wasn’t entirely different. But yes, I think I’d say in this case, we are the good guys. We made the right choices. I think that in the end, that’s what it comes down to: what we decide each time we have a choice. So we can’t just rest on our laurels.” He pushed his plastic tray back. “Let’s go be good guys?” Teal’c raised an eyebrow as Daniel grinned at him, and Sam knew she must have missed something. At least she knew she’d missed something; Cam didn’t even seem aware of that.

 

Sam nodded. They all stood and picked up their trays. They had reached the most crowded part of the room when Cam’s voice rang through the commissary, interrupting all other conversations: “Hey! Did you make a pyramid out of your food?” She didn’t hear Daniel’s muttered answer, but Cam’s reply was loud and clear: “You’re a certified genius, and you play with  your food?”

 

“Do they not say it is best to eat using the food pyramid?” Teal’c said in his usual tone. They all stopped dead. Sam turned to find Cameron staring open-mouthed at Teal’c, who was looking back with an absolutely calm, straight face.

 

“Did he just make a joke?” Cam asked. In the moment of silence that followed, one could have heard a pin drop, which helped reassure Sam that their conversation—and her anxieties—hadn’t been overheard. She hadn’t realized how loud it was in there until everyone stopped talking.

 

“No,” said Daniel, “he’s serious.” Daniel too had a straight face and continued on to deposit his tray. Teal’c followed him. Noise around them resumed, including not a few stifled laughs.

 

“They’re messing with me!” Cam said accusingly to Sam, apparently simply because she was the only person left.

 

“You just noticed?” She felt much better now. This was her team. She didn’t always understand them completely, and vice-versa, but they understood each other well enough. Maybe they couldn’t resolve all her insecurities, but at least she wasn’t alone. They dropped off their trays and rejoined the other two, who were waiting expectantly.

 

“So, Teal’c,” Daniel continued as he turned away from them to walk out the door, “do you think that when the time comes, Mitchell should really cut the green one? Or do you think that’s his evil twin’s revenge for keeping both pairs of pants?”

 

“It is difficult to say,” Teal’c responded.

 

“Maybe he’s just messing with me too!” Cam said with just a slight edge of desperation in his voice. “There is no green one!”

 

“Well, we can always hope,” said Daniel.

 

“Indeed,” said Teal’c.

 

Cam turned to Sam and appealed to her with his eyes. “Don’t ask me,” she answered. “I’m one of the good guys. I can’t get inside his head.” She smiled sweetly and followed Daniel and Teal’c through the doors.

 

The air in the hallway felt fresher than that in the commissary, and Sam relaxed some tension she hadn’t realized that she had in her shoulders. As they continued down the corridor, Daniel asked Teal’c, “And do you know what Jack called our newest Asgard friend?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Kvetcher! For someone who pretends to be dumb, he has a pretty wide vocabulary.”

 

As Daniel continued to chatter, Sam grinned at Cameron. “Their Daniel didn’t talk this much, did he?”

 

“Not that I noticed.” Cam gave an answering smile.

 

“Good. We’ll put that on the list of warning signs: a Daniel that doesn’t go off on every subject that comes to mind.”

 

“And a Sam who doesn’t have several theories about how she ended up here?” Cam asked.

 

Sam thought for a moment. That one counterpart had always been around, but she’d been relatively quiet, now that she thought about it. “Yeah. Put that on the list too.” Maybe her teammates did know her that well.

 

 

 

 

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The Mead Hall