1. Welcome to the Neighbourhood

**Sucks To Be Us Sometimes**

Summary: _This week on Stargate SG-1..._ Mobs, riots and general villager mayhem. The team are chased apart and Daniel and Sam struggle to make it back to the 'gate together á la the same number of limbs they left Earth with.

A.N: A tad more serious than it sounds, I assure. Sort of a tag from the opening line of the Foo Fighters' song _Razor_, which I will now sing for you *coughs*

_Wake up it's time/We need to find a better place to hide..._

Enjoy the evils...

~Telaka

----

Until six seconds ago he had been keeping faith because of one circumstance that had held thinly in his favour – he hadn't been hurt. And until two seconds ago he hadn't warranted the possibility of being stabbed in the leg by one of his own people.

It was some kind of twisted bemusement that held him ridged with surprise so as he managed to stand firm, with a knife in his shin, sewn through as such so it stuck out again from his calf. It felt warm, though the blade was steel-cold and the wound hadn't started to bleed, yet – and it was only now, eleven seconds after being stabbed that he truly recognized who the stabber was.

And she him, it seemed, though she looked almost a stranger kneeling way down there in the tall grass and stone ruins, masked in grime and blood with wide, wild eyes and paled-to-nothing lips, dehydration haunting the colour of her skin and a pulse beating so fast she was practically salivating between short, sporadic breaths. Holding the knife deep in his leg like some huntress readying to drag down a prey ten times her size. But then as he looked at her and she him, and as her hand fell away from the black handle, he saw her expression twist into something altogether more recognizable, as Sam Carter – something altogether more soft and impugned and painful.

Daniel grunted and finally stepped back, lifting his eyebrows as he tried to gather together some semblance of words (any language would have done, really) to break the moment's awful silence between them. In failing to impress any conversation into the terrible awe though he just sat down, hard and silently onto some of the low, desolate stone ruins that framed the area of the event – the dry edges of a wide field of tall, yellow wheat stalks. A trickle of blood had begun to flow from the protruding tip of the dull blade which remained almost comically jutting from his shin.

Sam paused in a small, self-contained vortex of disbelief, holding deadly still as she entertained serious scepticism against whether or not what she had just done had really happened. It was almost too cruel after everything that had come just before this very second over the last few hours, almost too concentrated a stroke of cruel luck. And her head was pounding, she could barely gather the wit to focus her eyesight. But then Daniel hissed as he fingered the tip of the blade handle and in a flash she unbundled herself from her awkward crouch and dropped unceremoniously in front of him, a terrible look of realisation marring her already dreadful colour.

"Oh God, _Daniel_... I didn't know it was you! I thought—the villagers, it sounded like one of the men—I've been hiding... I didn't know; you and Teal'c and the Colonel—I didn't know _where_..."

Her hands hovered around the blade's handle, wedged firm, desperate to fix the mistake she had just made. But at that very moment, despite the dawning of the wound's pain, Daniel was more concerned for the way Sam was holding together – her whole body shaking, from her spine into to her hands and down through her ankles as if she was overloaded on adrenaline or some hyper shock. The way she leaned, bending her waist to the right, it looked like she had bruised some ribs and her right forefinger was staved and almost black – surely broken. There were streaks of blood and sweat where there was bare skin and he thought he could smell... urine. Chunks in her hair that he feared might be more than just bits of the terrain and both lips burst down one side, it looked like from some head-on collision with someone else's... head.

He wrapped a hand around her shoulder, beckoning her to ease up and break off the blameful gaze she held on her handiwork so as to look instead straight at him. He spoke gently with a tone of relief that he hoped hid the sound of pain. "We've been searching for you," he assured her sternly, "since the fire in the village."

Briefly Sam glanced at his hand on her squared shoulder. A solid weight from the touch of a friend she was unsure she'd ever see again. It was enough to null the worst of the shaking, to give her back some sense of professional focus. She held as still as she could next to him and he felt the expectancy for him to tell whatever fractured explanation he could offer. So he tried.

"The people have scattered; most fled to the hills, to other villages I assume. But many of the younger men and women stayed to fight amongst themselves. For us. For the right to ownership. They wanted Teal'c mostly. Jack, none of us, expected the herding. It was... it was insane; I've never seen such, such structured primal behaviourisms amongst that level of, of social sophistication—"

Daniel trailed off; currently was not the time to be in awe of the whole disaster's anthropological mysteries. Sam was vibrating albeit at some sub-sonic level now and he was bleeding, not too profusely but it would surely flow like water once they took the blade out. Always his favourite part...

"The Colonel, and Teal'c?"

Daniel grimaced; it was an almost unanswerable question, painful to consider. Neither was he so fond of how Sam kept dropping colour like a bleached cloth. Hell the whole mission had gone to the dogs and this was just the extra bone of contempt.

"We lost each other, not long after we lost you. We saw you being herded off towards the river; I was the only one who managed to break through the," he frowned, "the _mobs_ – Jack told me to keep going, to find you or to escape through the Stargate and bring reinforcements back. But I was forced across the river and I ended up following your trail..."

It concluded a bad outcome to an ill-fated recon mission, where there had until 24-hours ago been real hope of a successful trade of basic weaponry defences for locations to mines. But it had turned out the price for the locations, what had been asked as 'defences' but had actually meant a trade of slave labour, had been unacceptable and the people, though technologically primitive were also tactically savage beyond comparison. They had strategy of the kind Daniel could only compare with the wild; hyenas who use sheer force of numbers and muscle and their tactless laughter to drive away the lionesses, before turning on each other for the spoils. Behaviourisms which matched with none of the admirable stoical pride and relenting sense of community these people had shown SG-1 when first they had conversed over a meal of humble peasants food and water...

Travelling through the wheat fields after escaping across the river Daniel had thought Sam to be one of the vagrant villagers when he'd first spotted her, or the shadow of her bulk; a scout crouched behind some low ruins readying to flush him into a net of his peers. Which was why he had come at her from a tight angle using the tall wheat crop to stalk up to her and the nose of his zat to lead. Unlucky for him she had been high on adrenaline and a little blind of sense...

"They were together when I last turned to look, heading roughly east – opposite from us. It looked like Teal'c was giving them hell. Jack was playing his own strategies. They were in a better position to get back to the Stargate; I just hope they took it."

It was solemn and white but Sam nodded. She eased back into the grass at Daniel's feet to think. Which was no easy accomplishment. She couldn't tell Daniel, or she wouldn't, but her body was giving her hell. A splay of cracked ribs under her left shoulder blade and a shattered right forefinger as well as half a foot of broken toes were all the damage her skeleton had taken for her; her whole face throbbed like she had kissed a concrete wall, her gut wrenched as she lost her adrenalin rush and more than a little self-esteem and pride. Weapon-less, pelted with mud and shit, pissed on, they'd even stolen her boots which Daniel had noticed at an after-glance. Though in the end she had won, fought them hard and at enough of a distance to then hide, she had become entirely untrusting of the field's silence and the swallowing grey of the thick forest behind it. It had left her burned out but wired up on paranoia. So now she had to swallow hard and force a deep breath down a hot, stinging throat to allow for a moment of bare focus, just a second to think; there was still duty to perform, still an effort to be made for her friend's sake.

"Let me see your leg," she asked finally, gently. And they both felt it as she spoke, a sort of release of tension that had strung around them unconsciously, a moment that allowed them to catch up with the craziness, to become Daniel and Sam again, not just two people with familiar faces rushing around on mad instinct and hard habit.

"Do you have a kit with you?" he asked, extending his leg so it was almost straight; it caused his cheeks to flush with exertion.

Sam nodded then stretched behind the ruins she had been hiding along; where Daniel had reddened Sam paled as she pivoted and moved. They were a sorry pair, but they had seen each other through a kind of worse that was hard to imagine at times.

She felt the air around the handle, twitching her fingertips as she assessed the best way to pull the offensive intrusion out. Daniel watched her closely, trusting implicitly but tense with anticipation. It was entirely unpredictable whether this was one of these situations the colonel would have to laugh at, or would pull the major's ass out from underneath her so fast she'd get a concussion. But Daniel had a way of taking this sort of thing in his stride.

"Soooo, that's quite a strong... stab you've got. There. Good thrust...good, yeah..." Sam had begun to pull out swabs from the small first aid kit she had stashed in her BDU parka which she had shed, but she looked up at Daniel to spare him a foppish grin. The relief he felt at seeing it surprised him a little, and then he returned it with his own wry, pale smile.

Which was when she pulled the knife out.

Inside he screamed, like a girl. But he punched his fists into the stone he was sitting on and bit the inside of his lip so hard he felt the soft tissue bruise, keeping the scream to a sardonic whimper. She pushed against the flow of blood with a thick pile of swaps and he almost pulled his leg away, his body trying to buck away. It was spectacular, how one action so quick and mistaken, could damage so profoundly. He would be limping for weeks. Or at the least he had another scar to add to the collection.

To her credit though Sam was swift and deft, more skilled than any of them perhaps at stitching up her wounded, light-fingered and neat as she was. Jack had a disturbing way of fixing things up to look worse than the open wound they'd started as...

She used almost as much gauze as they had by the time she had cleaned, butterfly-stitched and padded the wound. In its way the result looked comical, a thick wrap of clean white bandage over his dusty and blood streaked fatigues – like a cartoon almost. It sang like a bitch though, even after the Tylenol she fed him. There was little colour left to his face but a slight yellowish tinge around his cheeks and he was resisting a deep, primal urge to lay down in the grass and huddle, as if embracing himself would ward away the enormously frustrating pain.

Sam was satisfied though, at least that the bleeding had been stymied and that Daniel's eyes were sharp, totally aware despite his pale colouring.

"We should consider where to go from here... What way back to the 'gate," she husked through her teeth, suddenly aware again of everything that hurt. The tightness of her face and the trimness of her words did not escape Daniel's concern. He frowned towards the now setting sun.

"Maybe we should set up camp, for the night at least. We're what, ten miles from the 'gate? Four from the village at least... We wouldn't make it Sam, either of us. I take it you've lost your radio as—Whoa, hey, _Sam_!"

Daniel lunged suddenly forward and instantly paid for it; he could feel the slice of a wound in his shin stretch longer, the blood eagerly flowing again. He cursed freely but he managed to grab Sam before her head pitched into the hard ground, as she slumped awkwardly to the side. Daniel might have been pale from the pain but Sam was practically translucent and, as he carefully laid her on her side, brushing unkempt clumps of ashen blonde hair from her forehead, hot.

She was already down to her black tee, her bare arms streaked with mud and worse. Daniel wrapped his hand around an elbow and squeezed gently.

"Sam?" he asked as he checked her pulse (quick, erratic) and felt her forehead (gloweringly hot). And to his relief and slight surprise she murmured back, an incomprehensible slur but she shifted slightly as she answered, trying instinctively to roll onto her back.

"Hey," he said feigning light hearted conversation-tone, feeling though like he'd just plunged into a freefall dive down a waterfall. It was far too unnerving leaning over Sam as vulnerable as she suddenly was, like having his back exposed. Too often he took her stoical, military professionalism for granted, wrongly understanding her to be indestructible on the front line, like Jack, Teal'c; exactly like none of them were.

Daniel took it all to one side for now though and focused, just as she had for him. He tried to coax her to open her eyes by helping her onto her back and cupping his hand over her right cheek. He watched her face carefully, scanning every twitch, every flicker that made it look like she would open her eyes for him. Her cheek burned under his hand and for a moment she was almost so still as to be like white stone, with her lips slightly parted to allow only a ragged trail of breath. Then, a twitch at the corner of her mouth, and with barely any volume, but through the weakest of smiles, she said,

"Race you back to the Stargate..."

----

A.N: A Chapter Two? Probably... Eventually...


	2. A Little Like Spanish Matadors

A.N: Rated T for Totally... whumped? Don't expect these updates to be as often as so; I just happened to decide to take a weekend off that I couldn't actually afford from the work I do that actually decides my career... So enjoy, or else.

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"_Hey we found a mine and it looked really promising and then Carter fell down a bottomless shaft."_ – 'Do No Harm' by Karen Miller. Read it, it's awesome.

~Telaka

----

_Like the huddle of ominous shadows you seem to instinctively find paths to cross with on a dark walk home; a reminder of her youth, of early hours spent skulking around suburban footpaths, skiving from her bedroom, bitter towards life but dulled by a pensive nature, never truly a dissident, only a frustrate. And once faced by a tag team of what she might have called thugs in her judgmental youth. Lucky to have escaped with her innocence and it would be a long time if ever before she went for unpermitted dark morning walks around the neighbourhood as a girl again._

_Only this was now, and this was anything but her neighbourhood; a gang of hungry grey faces seized by an orgasmic primal need for dominance and ownership glaring at her, so crudely tactful as to be efficiently unpredictable. So she had turned and ran, hoping to lead the outskirts of the gang away, hoping to give her team a chance to tackle the core. But more than ten had given chase and just beyond their salivating snarls Carter saw the colonel shouting, gesturing east, exactly where she couldn't reach to get back on the path towards the Stargate. Too late, she was committed now; ten to lead away, ten all for herself to show them some damn manners._

_Numbers often worked better than any tactical advantage though – it wasn't military science but a universal law that she hated about now. Slowed down in the river, though the water was only shin-deep, six of the ten had pincer-ed her in at the bottom of a steep sandy bank. She took down two with shoulder shots from her Beretta and then one had mounted a far too successful retaliation. Swinging with (what _damn_ well felt like) the dismembered trunk of a tree Carter hadn't even felt her ribs crack, only a sinking gold-white explosion in the back of her eyes. Then something that caused throat-clenching pain and she was disarmed, her pistol literally hammered from her grip._

_The old Ontario knife saved her life on a reflex. Only because of a blind strike that landed in a man's eye, enough to startle them, to give her time to scoop the pistol up in her left hand and clumsily shoot another's foot. Five chasing her after that; one dutifully remaining behind with his wounded; to finish the job and eat them for all she cared. She was running and bile was building around the back of her teeth and it felt like she weighed a hundred of herself as she moved through tunnel vision, with sporadic breaths that were hell to take in._

_Shot another one in the chest; she had been aiming for the feral woman's thigh. They kept yodelling to each other. They could easily match her flagging pace now and they ran around her in a loose circle, like hyenas. She'd seen it once, on the Discovery Chanel, not making this analogy up; they would circle the lame and the diseased for days if they had to, snarling and laughing while waiting for death rather than delivering it themselves. _Lazy bastards_ she'd thought out of context and up above the river bank had been a field of tall yellow wheat grass and even further some dense forest, some cover..._

_But she ate short green grass first as one made a daring move to tackle her. For a handful of seconds it had been too much and Carter had blacked out. She knew because she was distinctively missing her standard issue boots when next she levelled her gun, or would have had if it'd not been kicked from her hand, again. And could she smell... piss? _

_No use, standard close-combat, not with five-to-one odds. She had one gambit for this kind of situation, one crazy last call – one flash grenade._

_Deployment. Then a sort of tactical mayhem, five seconds to sightlessly crawl away, bare footed, following her internal compass, following the scent of pine as she runs against a sudden wind, leaving behind her an unorganized, yodelling chaos._

_Her ears feeling like goo, her entire upper left side disabled, weapon-less but for the knife strapped to her hip, wet in her hair (they were pissing on her?!), a broken forefinger. It might have been alright, had she not blindly run into the stone ruins._

_Swamped by another inane memory, it could have been any one of a hundred unspecific times it had happened to her but always against that same corner of the breakfast bar in her kitchen, when turning with a book in her hand or toast in her mouth, coffee under her nose or heavy thoughts in her mind; stubbing her toes, and the pain clenching the back of her throat and oh the frustration!_

_Stubbing her toes now and breaking three of them, not realise how hard she had been running until she was tumbling through the grass, rolling on top of her cracked ribs, using her blackened hand to stop herself then passing out with warm blood filling her mouth, spilling in from her lips... The yodelling, almost comical and yet—it made her stomach turn, somehow in her semi-catatonic state; the terror of a hyena's laughter and barking mad pain—_

—a hand pinning her down as she bucked then roared; a sound so surprisingly strong and violent they were both startled for a moment. Then a clenching around her stomach, so white and raw with pain as to be utterly overwhelming and the roar became a distressed croak as Sam was forced not by the hand pushing at her shoulder but by her own common sense to lie down again.

Daniel let out a tight breath through clenched teeth. He hadn't expected Sam to wake up so suddenly, so forcefully, after he'd spent the better part of the past half hour meticulously washing and binding some deep grazes on her forearms. She had lain through procedure out cold, until now.

It was close to the dead of the night and they were huddled next to a low campfire together set out in a narrow clearing in the forest behind the wheat fields. They had both dragged themselves as far on their own feet from the exposure of the open field but Sam had slumped into a daze again after the fire had been born.

Daniel was now busy balancing rags sterilised in boiled water in one hand and a needle and thread between his teeth, and gauze and medical tape in the other hand. They had next to nothing left as way of supplies – enough bottled water to last them just the night after using half their stash to boil, three and a half tasteless energy bars, and a dwindling context from Sam's small first aid kit. No radios or firearms, though Daniel still had his zat. No blankets, no canvas for a shelter, no sleeping mats, a steady fire but it risked exposing them so it was small and low. He worried the deep grazes along Sam's arms from the rough and tumble of her escape were infected (the stinging smell of excrement still lingered, it still horrified him), it was all that could really explain the light fever, but asides from washing them in boiled water and dressing them in what gauze strips they had left there was little else that could be done for that. They had no medicine but for aspirin and Tylenol. No sedatives or morphine, which would make what he had to do next all the more T.V-style garish.

He noticed Sam watching him now. Closely, suspiciously, almost comically. A wry stretch in her lips made it look like she was half grimacing and half smiling sardonically at him. She wore a hectic blush across her nose and cheeks from the fever. One eyebrow was cocked and she struggled enough to prop herself up on her elbows, though Daniel protested. He was harshly reminded of how proud the damn woman could be; her bandaged arms trembled under the pain of holding herself up and yet she held steady.

"What exactly are you planning there, Frankenstein?" She forced a dry humour into her tone as she nodded towards the sliver of metal sticking out of his mouth; really she was staunched by pain and exhaustion.

Daniel tried to play off the joke, tried to alleviate the desperateness of the night that they both felt in their injuries and weighted on their shoulders. He drew up an expression of exaggerated false innocence, raising his eyebrows high, shrugging, scratching behind his ear, mumbling through the needle clenched in his teeth. "Nofin'." he professed as he guiltily took the needle and thread and hid it in his fingers. Sam squinted through one eye, the facial expression equivalent of a growl. But she could taste the fresh blood in her mouth, and tenderly she licked each lip on the corner where the burst skin was deep and unbound, bleeding freely and constantly. It was murder to talk, impossible to smile and stung like a bastard.

"Yeah..." was all she said, the word trailing into a silent understanding between them. Deal with the immediate problems before tackling the bigger picture. They were bound by this spot in the forest next to their campfire for at least the rest of the night; it was as well a time as any to quite literally patch themselves up before undertaking the haul of their broken and abused bodies back to the 'gate.

Sam's mental reserves of strength bucked out at her body, forcing it to sit at a proper right angle, legs crossed and carefully laid so her broken toes sat over her shin. She watched Daniel warily from the corner of her eye, saw him heat the needle up and restring the thread. He crouched in such a way so as his knees took the weight of his stabbed shin, though it still shook gingerly. He began to talk, using a well adopted, distractive tone, something that was practically an art to the man.

"I've never heard you talk in your sleep before..." he ventured, almost trying to pry, though it was news now to Sam that she had said anything in her stupor. She kept passing uncomfortably from ice cold to desert hot and Daniel could see it in the sheen of her glassy eyes, the draw of the fever telling her what she already knew, of all the distress her body had suddenly come under. He pulled the needle back from the fire.

"I've heard _Jack_ say some pretty interesting things before. Almost always about his... socks; well maybe 'interesting' isn't quite the word... Ah, apparently I can be quite the conversationalist myself if you want to know how to say 'fish' in three different dead languages."

She tried not to smile as he came and settled squarely in front of her and scrutinized the badly burst soft skin. She had been swallowing back much of the blood and its metallic aftertaste was doing little to settle the irrational back flips in her stomach. The cut almost trailed into her nostril from above, and dribbled down to about the top curve of her chin. It was some consolation that she hadn't broken a tooth, or her entire jaw.

"How experienced are you at this?" she asked suddenly, warily, backing away slightly as Daniel moved his hand to cup her chin to hold her head in place. He looked at her almost apologetically. A very bad sign. Which didn't change anything.

Resigning into a military stoicism, Sam closed her eyes. She concentrated on the ideals of some of her field training, techniques of restricting one's heart rate and raising one's threshold that she knew the colonel to be a master of, even unprofessionally envied him for it. She could be anywhere, if she chose to be. Simply back in her lab at SGC, at home working through chapters in books her dad had given her for Christmas, in the mess hall having breakfast with the guys, explaining parts of a science to them that she could never have dreamed to be real, in another lifetime, or—

_'Son – of - a - _bitch!_' _she screamed inside her head, eyes suddenly wide, and yes she could have been anywhere but she was here, hiding of all things on this dreadful, lowlife planet with Daniel murmuring in her ear as he pierced through the top of the gash with the red hot needle, his voice a sort of low, rumbling constant of assurance, ignoring the situation for her and talking about dreams he'd overheard of Jack's, discussions he'd had with Teal'c about what was the best dessert in the mess, about the weirdest things they'd ever been offered at an off-world banquette ("Remember that, that sort of giant chicken they served us once, the thing that was the size of a, a... dog, a Great Dane or something. And it tasted like _fish!?_"), about the pile of reports he still had to fill out and how he was jealous that she never seemed to have a backlog to process of her own. One hand firmly cupping the back of her head to hold her in place, the other working as deftly as it could, though inside he was shaking as badly as a single leaf holding out against a gale.

Sam shut her eyes again, and forced herself to go with Daniel to the mundane, to the inconsequential, back to all the memories that made their lives what they were – in the surrealist of ways, happy. Daniel talking now about the last time they'd all played hoops together, the four of them at three o'clock in the morning because they'd been on stand-by for reconnaissance clearance ("--like a _whippet_, none of us saw that shot coming; Jack and Teal'c still owes us those twenties, come to think of it...") then all of them with coffee in his office, playing poker afterwards ("I guess good thing for you we didn't go with Strip..."). Remembering the rare couple of times they'd gone for drinks outside of the complex, outside of work together, once the four of them (it was just never not funny to watch a bemused barmaid serve Teal'c a pint of milk), and once just Daniel and herself. Because they'd both needed a friend that night, someone who'd listen unreservedly, and someone who could understand, everything...

She could feel him weaving every stitch, the thread tearing through her skin like fine sandpaper, almost intolerable as he put the final suture on the pale nothing of the lip itself. Then tying it off, cutting it as neat as he could with her knife and moving onto her lower lip. Daniel tried just to see the work but her colour had gone down to a waxy white and it was like the teal-grey shadows under her eyes were spreading to envelope every groove across her face. His leg was causing him bloody murderous hell and a sliver of his usual decorum just wanted to kick down the nearest tree and call it quits. It was too messy, too desperate. How dare these people demand Teal'c and a score of men like him for slave labour, because they'd driven their own 'stock' dry with cruel mastery. And what kind of audacity did they think they deserved to use primitive violence to protest. To cause _this_, upon people who were trying to trade in peace and respect.

Sam flinched involuntarily, her body rebuking because it had decided it had enough. Daniel held the back of her head firm though and with meagre triumph finished the last stitch on the top of her chin. He cut the thread as short as he dared and the work was not at all messy, but it could never be called pretty. Frankenstein indeed...

He put what scraps of their first aid supplies they had left back in Sam's kit and gave her time to inspect the work, pawing it gingerly with a grimace. Then he rationed them both a dose of Tylenol.

For a while they sat together in silence, close to the fire. Remembering everything Daniel had talked about, being distracted by the fondness of inane memories. He glanced at her once, while recalling any one of a hundred times where Sam and Jack had played stubbornly off each other, rebuffing science with idiosyncrasy, protesting universal law with can-do, will-do tactics. It was a good team, the best, and had been for four years now but he wondered how long it could last. It was something altogether harrowing, seeing Sam coated with the non-colour of fatigue and pain, glistening with fever and eyes cast down to the ground in resign of her own limitations. How long could any one of them last, when so easily everything could go wrong...

"Daniel."

He started, blushed at being caught staring, though his mind had been a million miles away, figuratively speaking.

"You should rest. I can take the next couple of hours to watch, and," she spoke over his open mouth readying to protest, "I'll wake you up as soon as it's your turn to take over. We've got at least four hours till sunrise by my estimate."

Which meant they had exactly four hours, give or take a few milliseconds. But what was the point in arguing – greater men had tried and failed to talk her down before and when Sam knew she was right, she was right, case closed. Teal'c, Jack, they could all tell you as much. And out in the field only Jack could order otherwise, by default of their military positions.

There wasn't much Daniel could hunker down into. He pulled his parker closer around his shoulders, used his hat and folded bandana as a cushion for his head and simply closed his eyes against so many things; the intensity of the low, orange fire, the throb in his leg, Sam, ghostly and distant between the moonlight and the firelight. Sleep came too easily, like a defeat, and there was nothing he could do now but uncomfortably dream.

----

A.N: All reviews for ch1 have been thoroughly appreciated and more would go down a treat, if you'll spare the time. Constructive criticism is yummy.


	3. Beware the Fallen Who Sleep

A.N: You guys say nice things and it makes me smile like a _Twilight_ fangirl at ComicCon2009. Can't believe no one pulled me up for writing that Teal'c drank milk in the last chapter though, even if that sweet little idiosyncrasy of his had totally slipped my mind... Also forgot to put in a disclaimer at the start stating that no, I do not own the collective asses of SG-1, their homes, names, cats, cars, technology – not a crap scrap of it...

Well, I've not got much other to say, except another song quote to get this chapter started... woop!

_We're going down, down in an earlier round/And Sugar, we're going down swinging  
I'll be your number one with a bullet/A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it... /We're going down, down..._

-Fall Out Boy; _Sugar, We're Going Down_.

Think that about sums it up for this turn. Enjoys the evil proddings.

----

_What the hell was this crap and why was he running away from it? Why was he leaving half his team behind whilst he shot bullets into the sky like he was some hick farm boy trying to coy a herd of ravaged wild dogs? What was he going to have to do to get it through Daniel's thick skull that in battle, if the good doctor wanted to keep his ass in one piece he had to _Listen. To. Him_? And his 2IC was no better..._

_He could hear T dialling up, he could feel the pre-emptive power of the 'gate shuddering across his skin and as he ran half backwards he could see the stupid-eyed villagers beginning to rear back, stop and buck as if affronted by an invisible barricade, their crude weapons and tactics held mid-air as they barked and snapped at each other, and yodelled at him. It didn't take an anthropologist to guess why – they feared the Stargate._

_They also harboured the taste for blood, they salivated for their justice in murder – as a soldier he knew that. So how long would unfounded superstition keep them back from satisfying primal instinct?_

_Final chevron locked and the effect of the 'gate's wormhole clouding into business enforced an extra side of awe and contempt into the villagers' misshapen believes. Holding them further back from their enemy, from himself and the Jaffa. Giving him enough time to pause and really see those gnarly, voracious faces, the hinged jaws lined with sharp, sand-yellow teeth and the grubby necks pulsating with heated adrenalin. To see, and thus know, that for this round there was no going back, that they must admit a dismal abandon. And that he would return to get his team back, even if it meant stringing every last one of them up to each other by their balls to do it...._

_._

So as he reminisced on the regrets of this mission so far, Jack imagined the face of the good doctor Jackson furrowing in the shadows of his locker, turning away as he took a chance to break through the mob and go after Carter instead of back to the 'gate, disappearing between the wild grass and shrubbery, down the riverbank, gone. Doing what he couldn't have done, and what he should have done anyway...

The locker room was empty, the hour was old and Colonel O'Neill was wired to the bone. With his teeth covered in a fine layer of fuzz, his eyes pensive and low, his pale mouth straight and expressionless. Shoulders tight like a cocked trigger, carrying the dark demeanour of some predatory animal waiting in the grey-blue dark of the room to strike.

And he had been walking around the base acting as much from the moment he and Teal'c had thrown themselves back through the 'gate three hour ago, and in doing so breaking his sincerest of honours – _no one gets left behind_.

Almost so quietly as to be just a vibration in the back of his throat he growled. –_kick both their asses when I find them..._

Jack slammed the locker door shut but took no satisfaction from the angry echo of the metallic sound bouncing between the corners of the room. There was only meagre assurance at best to be had in knowing they were moving out again at 0600 per the dot, in one hour from now. Taking good teams with him again, people who had arrived from nowhere and everywhere the second the call had gone out, not one man or woman absent from the role call despite the almost impossibly short notice they'd been given to get in, group and debrief.

The best their military had to offer. Almost...

Jack turned around, and very nearly shot the man standing behind him.

"_Teal'c!?_ Son of a— Give a man some _warning_ before you come up behind him, will ya?"

With an apology that was just the slightest incline of his head towards his shoulder the only member of the colonel's team left with him stepped aside as Jack threw a foot up onto the bench behind them and began lacing up his boots. With more vigour than should ever be required for lacing up a boot.

Teal'c simply stood to the side, like a status guard.

"Y' know, I'm gonna kick their asses from here to Abydos and everywhere in between once we find them," Jack promised, brow high, talking to his foot it seemed.

Silently Teal'c raised an eyebrow. He believed this to be one of O'Neill's less sincere threats.

Jack switched boots, began tying again fervidly, the line of his mouth turning ever paler, ever tighter. Like something dangerous and potentially very loud being wound up.

Then he straightened. Adjusted the sidearm at his thigh. Tightened the wrists of his gloves and headed wordlessly towards the armoury where Teal'c followed with a shared, silent determination for retribution.

----

He touched the ashen pink of her cheek lightly with the back of his grubby hand and gritted his teeth together grimly. It was sunrise and it was going to be as long as days came.

They'd swapped guard over their small, bare camp two hours ago when the sky had become not so much a dark, bruised purple as a pale, pitch-grey in the pre-emptive of dawn, and Daniel had been watching Sam sleep since. Or maybe sleep wasn't so much like it as curled in a cataleptic heap. One hand muzzling the lower half of her ashen face as she balanced precariously on her right side, blanketed in Daniel's parker whilst using the crook of her elbow as a pillow.

Daniel took some more Tylenol with as little water as he could manage. It was like hitting a brick wall with a feather pillow he knew but some innate past teenage association to the drug – taking it to alleviate the headaches of all-night study crams and exam blues (something he couldn't imagine Sam was too familiar with) – helped him believe that it helped. He stretched his wounded leg out warily, sickened at the feeling of the torn skin sliding and the fresh new scab breaking under the gauze. Fraser was going to have a field day with both of them. But not before Jack had had his turn...

Sam didn't stir as he rested a hand on her arm and counted her pulse, still flighty. She didn't respond to her name when he spoke it calmly in her ear. The fever had a stronger hold now as he felt her forehead and that she was all but blazing under her hand. A fine bruising had developed around the stitches holding her lip together and the black swelling in her broken finger had spread like pale ink to her pinkie and across the back of her hand. She seemed firmly resigned to unconsciousness.

But he couldn't start carrying her out of here, not for all the good intentions and love for a friend in the world. He could barely entertain the joke that was the prospect of walking the ten miles (or longer if they had to detour) back to the 'gate on his own two feet. It made him shudder... So Daniel began to shake her gently, persisting with his hand around her shoulder and a tightness to his voice that suggested growing concern.

"Sam? Hey, Sam... Sun's up, probably about time—"

And suddenly there was a fully charged zat pressing into his throat, nosing his jugular where his breath hitched in surprise. Inch by careful inch he unwrapped his hand from around Sam's shoulder and drew away slowly, as she pressed harder with the weapon into the soft, fleshy underside of his chin.

How she had taken it from his hip in the instantaneous transaction between unconsciousness and fevered awareness was the result of an unbeknown art to Daniel. But he had forgotten a vital thing he did know, and that was how dangerous this woman was, this solider. That there was a damn good reason why O'Neill often took Carter alone into battles with him, though it defied everything the anthropologist believed in her truer nature. But then, he had never pretended to understand the military, any of them...

He swallowed deliberately and licked his dry lips, mindful of every twitch of an expression he made now. "He-ey... _Okay_, Sam. It's okay. It's just us, here, still on P5X-180 remember? You stabbed me in the leg, I Frankenstein-ed your face so everything's pretty even on that basis now and oh thank God..."

The last of the sentence tumbled out in a hurried whisper as from his throat the weapon first folded in on itself and then dropped away altogether. His hand flinched towards his neck and he touched it tentatively, mouth shaped into a little _o_ and eyes furrowed at Sam.

She threw the weapon down onto the mulched ground between their knees and resigned to hanging her head in indignant realisation. She sighed and it sounded at best bitter towards herself.

"Maybe you'd have been better off trying your luck with the villagers..."

For a second there hung an awkward silence between them as they both absorbed the implications.

"Sucks to be us sometimes..." Sam murmured.

Daniel said nothing to disagree.

----

He felt like he was being dealt a scuff on the ear, or a patronisingly deliberate underlining of the rules at best because of untrusting concerns. He scowled, he murmured, he turned the tranquilizer gun in his hands and he even clucked his tongue, but Fraser wasn't so coy as to be abashed by O'Neill's bare faced disgruntlement as she ran over the safe-to-lethal, and thus the limit to the dart's dosages with him. Nor was she without the full authorisation of General Hammond, who was by their sides now as the event horizon shimmered in the background, casting them all aglow in an eerie pre-emptive light.

"I don't want you coming back with a headcount on this one Jack. All that matters is getting our people out."

Jack wrinkled his brow, heaved his shoulders, looked to Teal'c and his mono-expression for some solace. "Y'know... They started it," he pointed, waving a blameful finger at the Stargate, and despite his limp humour the general could see the burn in his eyes.

"Son, just bring back the rest of your team."

Not unkind words, but that was the final matter and Jack nodded, with exactly that intention.

He turned now, held the dart gun to his chest and rallied his people – SGC's 5 and 6; Major Castleman and Lieutenant Colonel Holmes' teams. They led out at a brisk, stalwart jog up the ramp, the Major and the Colonel at the head of the march, Jack and Teal'c fetching the rear. They didn't look back, and Hammond prayed for them, for the whole mission, again.

----

Sam cast Daniel a glance from the corner of her eye as Daniel gazed over her shoulder long into the middle distance. Leaning over the invisible boarder line between the forest and the fields, crouched so close they were almost on top of each other watching, waiting.

Sam held the zat close to her shoulder, baiting her breath as she swept the perimeters with a soldier's keen eye. Daniel came to steady himself with a hand on her shoulder and he used the paused moment to rest his tormented leg. Between them they had about as much pallor to their faces as a bichon fries, disregarding the hectic blush of fever bridging Sam's cheeks and the grey-green grime that coated their hairlines.

"I'd say we're about two klicks down from the village at a southeast angle now, meaning our perimeter is wide but not necessarily out-of-sight, especially once we get to the flatter grass around the river. Besides, I'm not sure how far and to what style they have a guard posted around the territory. However, if we keep low and close we should be pretty hard to spot, or at least it's more likely that we'll spy them before they do us. See how the wheat is wilder;" she began to point at the disconcertingly picturesque scenery, "these fields are less cultivated, meaning there should be more boulders, shrubbery, dips etcetera to break up our movement. The river can't be more than another two, three klicks from this point, assuming it doesn't bend too drastically. So basically..." she paused to spare Daniel a proper look over her shoulder; he was almost at her ear, following where she had been pointing, "from here, it's do or die."

Daniel cocked a brow. "That's a little melodramatic, is it not?"

Just slightly, for it was sore even to talk now, Sam smiled. "Yes. But if we lose our wits now we'll pay for it more than we already have. I'm not counting on this being a clear run; if the villagers truly have disbanded into hierarchal chaos then they'll be rogues and vigilantes waiting and hiding all around the outskirts, planning to jump back in and take the castle for themselves as it were. If we're so lucky as to cross paths by coincidence then we do our best to hide, and in failing that..." she trailed off and waggled the zat at her shoulder, then on an after note promised, "Unless I find the bastard who stole my boots; then we raise hell."

Daniel laughed softly through his nose, but he wondered how much it was a joke, really. He looked down at their feet, perched in the softer ground that petered out from the forest, before it became the harder grit on the fields. Each of them wearing one boot, for Daniel had given Sam one of his as a sort of makeshift cast for her broken toes. He had no idea how effective it was as such, she wouldn't say a thing about the pain she was in, had in fact taken the lead in their two-man troop and concentrated all of her energy into getting them through the forest's edge to a point that satisfied her strategically wherein they could begin heading back towards the river and thus the Stargate. Leaning next to her now he could practically smell the heat rising from her goose prickled skin; she smelled of sickness from the fever and the infections in the deep grazes on her arms and exhaustion from everything else. She looked glassy eyed, though she also looked deadpan determined, and he may not have been military or understood military, but he had to respect its people's stamina under the worst of circumstances.

"Here," she whispered now, and unexpectedly handed Daniel back his zat. He began to protest, not out of unwant but because of plain common sense. He'd developed at eye for shooting down targets in the last four years, it was sure, but she still had a damn sight better instinct for it than he ever would.

Sam unsheathed her knife from her hip. "Have you ever stabbed someone before?" she asked plainly, cutting into his argument, and the whole presence of the question threw him off entirely.

"No..." he answered slowly as he took the zat, beginning to see her point.

Sam simply nodded. "Lets keep it that way."

----

A.N: I wanted this to be longer, to finish by diving into ever more trouble, but my brain's sort of crapped out on me and I'm thinking starting the trouble afresh as the start of a new chapter would work better, snappier, if and when I get the time to write it. College is hitting harder the closer it gets to Christmas so who knows... Hope you all enjoyed this sort of filler of events though, at the least.


	4. Free For A Run?

A.N: Can't really apologise for the lateness, it was an inevitable. Final year dissertation's due in a week and a half so it's a miracle at all I got this done in my weary free time. But it was fun, as always.

I'm reading Sally Malcolm's Stargate SG-1 book _A Matter of Honour_ just now. and if you haven't already so should you. Fandemonium rocks. Support it!

....

Daniel shot the first one down from a distance, a knee-jerk reaction but also a served warning. Watched the unnaturally blue light coil around his natural form, and then the villager surrender into a foetal position in the grass, curling slowly inwards on himself like a leaf on the burn, twitching and salivating slightly from the corners of his ragged mouth. At the feet of his comrades, who bore no reaction but a mutual grumble – interpretation of: open to speculation.

Daniel reared up beside Sam, moving away from the unnervingly quiet and slow horseshoe advance. They were being herded, again, by seven, no eight... eight, Sam verified counting in a way that was instantaneous, the answer suddenly there without the sum.

Hick-eyed, hungry in that unsettlingly non-literally way, and as relentless as a bad intention, these were a breed of villager all unto their own, a step out from the 'high brows' they had begun their negotiations with in what felt like a lifetime ago. Feral in the way they smelled, in the way they yammered at each other in at best mono-syllables through broken teeth and thick tongues, armed with crude weapons, and cruder, crueller skills. Yet Sam had seen battles won by bombs made out of carton plastic and tool shed nails.

"Please!" Daniel begun with a more usual one of his diplomatic gambits; hands up and level with his chest, palms out and flat, speaking a word that suggested mutual modesty and asked of humble tidings. That begged for decorum, for an equation building towards a peaceful solution. In many ways too sophisticated an express for some. Too abstract a concept, appealing for something that invoked a need for civility that possibly went beyond these people's hierarchal capabilities.

One individual, ranking near the middle of the arc formation, spat into the tinder-dry grass as he stalked. He mumbled and he looked to his comrades and in the way that Sam could count enemy numbers without actually the motion of classically counting, Daniel knew a leader without having to be told. Even if he did know the word for it in twenty-plus languages...

"Please," Daniel tried again, speaking more slowly, regardless of the fact that he had just spotted Sam's pistol in his hand, "We have nothing left to offer, not without the rest of our team, not without our... our _talree_," he dictated around his lucid tongue these people's adopted word for leader, complete with the roll in the 'r' that made the 'ee' short and sharp.

It seemed to prompt a short stall, a pause in their gait as they entertained morbid curiosity over the banter, though more out of mocking than acute attention, Daniel feared. The 'leader', he had a keen eye and it was looking for, it seemed, the answer to who'd be better to rip apart first...

Sam side-glanced towards Daniel, her left hand at her hip where she had moved the sheath of her knife round to. He kept eyes with the leader, held a finely balanced expression; open respect spread with self-possession; _We mean no further harm, but we will defend ourselves by any and all means._

Their pathway back to the Stargate was now blocked, as the villagers stood around them in a loose one-eighty arc. Like a stand-off in an old sepia movie, neither side ventured to move but only stared, contemplating the effort and reward involved in the first move.

As if to prove Daniel's foresight keen, the one with Sam's gun, the leader, raised it, held it at a sloppy angle as if he'd been watching too much MTV and squeezed the trigger.

Daniel found himself on his knees. Not because the shooter had anything of an aim – the bullet flew high and wild – but the jerk-reaction to the bang forced his legs to collapse, the wound enraged and pitiless with pain. In the same instance Sam cheetah-dashed to the left where the group too had flinched at the gunpowder explosion and scattered enough to cause a break in their formation. She inspired confusion by running and gave Daniel two clean shots with his zat and then there were six, three simultaneously launching after Sam with a waving entourage of copper-bound spears and sandstone picks.

"Sam!" he cried uselessly as two of the remaining three hounded on him instead, though more cautiously with a zat raised like a hackle and pointed towards their abdomens. They were of no challenge, except for the spear that clipped past his ear, more artfully thrown than the gun had been fired and rudely (he was sure he'd felt a few whiskers being clipped) reminding Daniel of the true ability of these people. He struck them down where he knelt and focused lastly on the one who had remained still where he stood, their _talree._

And as he saw him, Daniel felt his pupils constrain, his tongue turn paper dry and his grasp on the situation slip so entirely as to feel like he'd never had one. Only now did he notice with any real worry the thick strap across his broad chest that held something to his back, a pouch it seemed, perhaps. But, it was what was in his hand that he had pulled from his back that panicked the archaeologist now; the _talree_, plain faced but confident, it could be seen in his serene eyes, held a small wicker ball and a flint, and with it he was going to burn the place out.

....

The dash had cost her much of her resolve; now the muscles around her cracked ribs were inflamed and angry because of her haphazard gambit, and her broken foot curling into cramp. But it was not without its gain. The three chased after her but in a staggered charge, badly out of synch with each other. Theirs was not a well formed troop, probably together only out of misguided loyalty and the gluttonous desire for glory. Perhaps they thought in this madness they could take control of the village, after they had finished the hunting.

The first came charging and baring a short dagger made out of poorly sourced metal and a creviced bone handle. Sam ran with her back to him until she felt him lulled by false arrogance, believing that she could not see him or gauge his poised strike. Then she parried by stopping so suddenly as to cause him an off –balancing halt, and in the same instance grabbed his raised wrist and butted him in the gut with the handle of her own blade. He folded with instantaneous satisfaction and then the major thrust the heel of her hand into his nose – not so profusely as to splinter it into his brain, not as if they were in some movie, but so he would be seeing stars even before she swiped his feet from under him and landed him hard into the ground.

The second one took no heed from this effort and heaved a spear ahead of himself at her neck. It was in honesty a closer call than she would have liked but Sam dodged it, held ground as the man kept running, flecked with spittle and mud around his mouth, and then at the nearest possible moment grabbed the spear from the ground and forced the attacked to run into it with his own neck. He sprung backwards, arms and legs akimbo as he reflexively tried to shield his face while crashing. Sam pinned him in place, spearing the underarm of his garment with unnerving precision.

Then the last one ripped her off her feet.

....

"Alrighty boys and girl!" (for Captain Samantha Malcolm was the only woman amongst their ranks on this trip and no the irony of her name had not been lost on the colonel), Jack crooned, waving to their tight, defensive formation around the 'gate and in particular addressing the other two SG team leaders. "Holmes, I want you and your men in a line as you see fit sweeping the territory from here to the coordinates of the village. Castleman, take half your team along a wide westerly bend around the village coordinates; go as far as fifteen clicks and if you find nothing head back. Teal'c you're with them. The other half of your team, Castleman, are with me. We'll take an eastern bend, do the same. If you," he began to dress the whole again, "come across anyone who so much as makes a comment about your _mother,_ tranq' them. We are no longer here to negotiate and quite frankly I don't feel like making any more friends today. These people are spontaneous but primitive, so keep your heads low. And you heard the General; no bodies, keep the damage to a minimum."

Every face was stalwart with understanding, their stature tense but in the way that if they uncoiled, their efficiency would be devastating. Jack was satisfied with his lot.

"Okay lets move out. And next time we're here lets have all our people with us."

....

What atrocities had he caused in another life time to—

Daniel banked backwards again, again had to shield his bare face from a burst of new flames and wondered if this wheat might not be something the US military could use as a new form of gunpowder because its ability to catch fire was spectacular to the _nth_ devastating degree.

"_Sam_!" he hollered over the dry roar of a landscape being tortured, feeling the dreads of thick onyx smoke beginning to claw at the tender flesh of his throat. "Sam? Come on Sam where—"

Two figures, like charcoal sketches moving between the bunches of flames and angry smudges of smoke; one taller and being bared down upon by the slighter of the two, until Daniel saw the bigger one strike out with an arm uncoiled and coiled back again like a snake. Then he saw Sam stagger backwards, gripping her shoulder, or perhaps her neck... Details were moot in the new chaos of the fire. He saw the bigger figure follow her retreat, loom over her. Daniel began at great pains to run, was shouting through the patches of flame and smoke, watching... as Sam's silhouette straightened again, braced, then struck back from the hip.

He saw an arc of hazy red through the smoke as she pulled her arm away again, and the last of the villagers' troop collapsed, like a dead weight before her. Then, following him, as if finishing a terrible dance, Sam too fell.

The fire was a whole new hassle of relentlessness that made Daniel pine for the devil he knew. He side stepped another rush of flames, but harried himself to keep moving towards Sam, fearing the loss of his bearings as bushes were torn asunder around him, as he stubbed his toes on ashen rocks and very almost broke his neck teetering on the verge of nasty dips.

Then he almost did collapse, by stepping clumsily onto something soft and cylindrical that made his gut creep. Daniel leapt back as drastically as leaping could be achieved with his messed leg, and looked down with his mouth pulled in a grimace. It was the villager, with his grey skin paled and eyes closed, the tip of his tongue lolling from his mouth. Blood trickling from a deep nick in his neck.

Daniel did that deliberate thing of when you don't check your watch on the train because really if you are late then there's no point knowing it until you're at the office begging for a little decorum from a boss who takes all his delight in retracting decorum from his lowlier bidders. He didn't check to see if the villager was still breathing. It was not a choice taken lightly, but rather made out of a cruel practicality Daniel could see no way around. This man would die in the fire of his _talree's_ making anyway, if he wasn't already dead...

Sam was a foot away, had twisted in her fall so now she lay on her side, slightly curled like a _C, _and was motionless. A deep bruising had already begun to bloom across her jaw and down one side of her neck. As Daniel scrambled towards her he saw a young, solitary tree growing out here in the field catch alight. It was maybe twenty feet from their heads. They had to get past it to be able to start towards the river again as on either side of its spindly trunk were the only gaps Daniel could make out in this disaster where they might repurchase their freedom.

"Sam!" A hurried hand on her shoulder, shaking it roughly, and a palm lightly slapping her cheek. There was blood and worse sweeping from the stitches now vainly trying to hold together the gash across her lips. At its core, on her neck, the bruising, which Daniel could only assume had been caused by the snake-strike the villager behind them had dealt her, was so dark as to seem like blood and for a horrible moment everything went still and fuzzy (thinking your world is going to end not because of your death but because of the tragedy of another's) and Daniel could do nothing to check against the belief that she had been killed.

Then a branch on the tree snapped and with a crash blocked one of the gaps off. Daniel snapped-to and, shaking as if he were about to put his ear into a bucket of acid, leaned down and listened for a breath.

A second went by, two, feeling like a lifetime at three—

Then it came, bubbly, short, full of pain. He pulled away white as wax, not with the tremendous pain in his leg anymore but with sick relief.

"Sam," he urged more quietly but still on the paper thin edge of panic, sliding a hand under her cheek so he could frame her face, squeeze it gently, trying to massage her back to consciousness.

"Sam stay with me here, because, I can't..."

He trailed off. Her next breath was louder with effort, heavy with a gurgle that sounded like blood stuck in her throat. It was futile. There was only one way out for both of them. And it was both of them or neither of them.

Daniel hurried now with a forced professionalism, drawing inspiration from her own military stoicism. He took off the boot he had leant her, saw her foot was mangled by cramp and swelling, and did his best to ignore it. He put it back on himself, laced it up tight enough to threaten blood loss. Then he picked up her knife. It had rolled out of her hand and lay precariously close to her face, blade pointed towards her neck as if in accusation. The blood on it gleamed in the fire light (which continued to ravenously encroach) but already it was hardening, dulled by the past. Despite her earlier moral, Daniel doubted Sam had ever stabbed a man any more than he had. Certainly never killed one. He knew her aim in a gun in battle was almost always to the knees or the shoulders. Rarely to the heart; never to the head.

He sheathed it back into its place at her hip. He thought he remembered a story, of the knife once belonging to Jacob. It would be her choice what she did with it after, _when_ they got home.

Daniel had one eye on the gap beside the combusting tree; it was tight, would have been too tight if they'd had another option at this point. His throat burned, his eyes streamed, he had no sense of how far the fire had spread or where it would keep going to. The river was key; once they reached the river then he could cry all the live long day about how much pain this was about to cause him.

He lifted one of Sam's dead-weight arms and braced on his good leg. Then in a move that was laughably void of grace, Daniel at once heaved her onto his shoulders and stood with all his remaining might.

He cried out. It was an indulgence; this was impossible. He took a step and his leg buckled. Across his shoulders Sam slipped. But he caught himself, stifled the yell of frustration and anger and sickening worry and began with a heavy, graceless gait to walk. _Get past the tree, that's all, through the gap and we're on the home-strait..._

Which was a lie, but for now all he needed to do was catch his stride. He couldn't ignore the awful stabbing in his shin, which felt as if it was tearing through the core of his bone, and went from his ankle right up to his groin now. He could only try and defeat its significance, push it to the back of his mind so the pain was still there but not everything in his world, not making the edges of his vision red and fuzzy with sickening exertion.

He had to shrug his shoulders every few steps to stop Sam slipping off. She was by no measure heavy, but she was solid with lithe muscle, she was no feather weight. She hung around him limp as cloth and only a ragged tear of breath every few seconds reminded Daniel that what he was carrying was still alive.

Tense and braced, he finally stepped through the narrowing gap, feeling the knees of his pants singe, his lips chap. He wanted to shield his face but he persevered with one arm twined tightly around Sam's left leg, the other gripping her wrist truly for dear life.

It was like breaking through a wall. The fire for now seemed self contained, as a line that arced back the way towards the forest. But then if they hung around Daniel was sure it would begin to follow them towards the river, envious and un-accepting of their escape.

At what Daniel thought of as a run but seemed more a disabled hobble, he began to move again. Forced himself not to think of the eight bodies somewhere in that disaster, all still alive perhaps, including the _talree_ who he had shot with his zat just a second too late. It would be a difficult report to make on this, because he had no idea where his morals now stood, leaving those men behind to die.

He didn't look back but gritted his teeth at forward, made slow ground, hated every step of it, and did not see the one charred body tumbling out of the wreckage after them. smeared with ash and a single mindedness as alien as anything the Stargate had ever taken them to.

....

He smelt it before he saw the evidence of it, a sweet, dry scent like burning herbs, but too dominant to just be someone's cooking. Like it was filling the horizon sky, rising from a—

"_Fire!_"

It was Captain Harrows who called it, Castleman's newest team member and a whippet of a young man, flighty with untrained energy, razor fast and in dire need of more off-world experience, but brimming with an unharnessed potential and raw talent that made his youth forgivable. O'Neill nodded, called them with his fist to wait. Major Cross, Catleman's second, came and stood attentively at his shoulder, a powerful figure with broad shoulders and thick legs, a man who could run forever. After a moment the colonel pointed, with the nose of his dart gun, towards just a slight bit more east than their current heading. Tips of smoke plumes were curling up over the tall grass horizon. They hadn't yet reached the river, nor was the forest even in sight, but they were close. O'Neill trusted his instincts as much as he had ever trusted his men.

With a wave and now at a jog they carried on towards the fire.

....

_Now_ Daniel was running. Perhaps because there was only flight left in him, or perhaps because he could not risk stopping, for if he was forced to put Sam back down he feared he wouldn't be able to bring her home.

They had a lead but it was closing, the stunned and burned villager, the _talree_, gaining with a limp that was just a little slighter than Daniel's, giving him a perverse advantage. The river was close enough so as he could smell its sweet coldness, hear its babble. Daniel wasn't sure what it even meant now, if they crossed it before the villager. He was running towards it as if it were some magical check point, as if once he passed it he'd be safe, they'd be unattainable.

It simply wasn't true. It just was do or die.

"_Sa-am_!" he cried, sort of in the way of biting one's tongue, shouting to distract from everything else, the pain and the danger and the utter unjust of this. "You-owe-me-a-steak-_dinner _when we get back to Springs!"

....

"Sir?" Harrows again, eyes darting back and forth, head spinning on a neck that kept extending like a dog's on the prowl. "Did you hear that?" The boy's nostrils were flared. O'Neill felt an unexplainable desire to trust him.

"What is it captain?"

The boy cocked his head, held his ear out. He couldn't have been any older than twenty-five. The general was pulling them in younger and younger, O'Neill mused while he waited for Harrows to decide what it was he was hearing and if it mattered.

"Someone's... shouting. A man, sounds like—"

O'Neill swung his vision to the horizon, where not ten feet in front of them they had reached the river. He could hear it now too, someone shouting at someone else, and something about... steak dinners?

He burst into sight from over a slight incline that overlooked the other side of the river. Hitting the downhill gradient towards the riverbank at a bad angle, balancing a deadweight bulk on his shoulders that looked suspiciously like his major—

"Daniel!"

Daniel glanced up just as he slid onto the sandy riverbank heading straight for the water. He looked as surprised as Jack felt. O'Neill raised his dart gun and Cross and Harrows automatically copied. Daniel skidded into the shin high water where he finally succumbed to his knees by slipping on a rock. Sam dropped from his shoulders and O'Neill's stomach pulled at the torn sight of her.

Then the villager leapt over the hill after them. He ran down with decidedly more cunning and, unabashed by the frontier of soldiers, dove straight for Daniel.

O'Neill shot him without hesitance. He managed to strike him in the chest. It caused him to stumble but then he crashed into the water and aimed a fist straight at Daniel. Daniel got there first though, punching him with a ferociousness that had been building in him since he'd ran after Sam, almost 24 hours ago. The _talree_ stumbled back, blood sprouting from his nose. He teetered, gained a poor footing and went to lunge again. Daniel felt a tug at his hip. A moment later the villager was engulfed in a familiar blue electric light and this time he dropped without fail.

Everyone froze for a few seconds. Then Sam broke the moment by dropping Daniel's zat in the water and swearing loudly, before she collapsed back into the river.

....

It was a sombre procession of grey faced men that greeted Teal'c and the other men back at the 'gate. Cross watching their six as Harrows helped Daniel to hop and Jack carried Sam over his shoulders.

The Jaffa nodded slightly as O'Neill ordered him to dial up. He shifted Carter's weight gently across his back as he surveyed the flat land behind them. Her ragged breath was not a comforting sound, and Daniel had told them little of what had happened, but his eyes were haunted by bad turns.

Then the Stargate exploded, and beckoned them home.

....

A.N: There'll be one more chapter after this, and them I'm planning to put together all my notes and false starts and such which went before and behind making this little piece, into like a behind-the-scenes/making-of chapter, if anyone's interested in reading it? Trust me, this story is anything but how it started off as...

As always reviews and constructive criticism are wholly welcomed and appreciated.


	5. Lets Maybe Never Do That Again This Week

A.N: This came out a lot quicker and shoter than I planned, but more naturally as well when I was writing it. I could have dragged it out, uped the post-physical-trauma, the angst, etc etc but I think Carter, especially, is stronger than that. I wont say much more, I'll let the chapter speak for itself and you guys make your own mind up about it, but for me it feels right, how it came out in the end.

((Imagine each new scene which is broken up by a ... at least a good few hours after the last.))

.

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and is far the best ending for one." - Oscar Wilde, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_

....

The curtain around the bed, heavy, grey and pattern-less, felt like some proverbial and impenetrable cold shoulder, giving privy only to her wounded pride and that she might not wish to see anyone in the many days of impending recovery and tenderness to come. Or it was just that Janet was warning off visitors during the first crucial hours of post-op'.

_Good luck with that..._ Daniel mused as he watched Jack saunter in to the infirmary now, casual as could be with his hands cradled deep in his pockets and his brow inquisitively tipped towards the archaeologist sitting off the edge of the bed. The two men nodded casually at each other, both feigning insignificancy to the visit, though it was not always Daniel's way to be so nonchalant after the fact.

"Well... I've still seen you looking better," Jack chimed, as he waved a finger in a circle around Daniel's pale face, and then shrugged his shoulders. "And I've seen you worse. A few times, actually. Like, the time you went _caveman_, for example..." Jack trailed off, wondering what he was saying and why at all now.

Daniel nodded though, appreciated Jack's tonal attempts of sentiment more than any mastery of congeniality, and always would.

"Yes of course," he smiled tightly, remembering but only for a second.

" _Any_way, Janet's officially given me as much 'downtime' as I need to be back on my feet and so, well, I've got plenty of cataloguing and—"

"Nonsense," Jack scoffed, looking casually at his fingernails. "The general's given us all a bit of leave regarding the fact half my team's shut down at the moment on doctor's orders, and Teal'c's been _insisting_ on another Star Wars marathon since the New Year, so, y' know... I could do with help there. I need... beer, and jest, and someone's ass to kick at poker while T repeats every damn line that Ford guy has to say. For some reason he does that... Plus, he doesn't _share_ his ice-cream! S_ooo_—"

"So, come pick me up Saturday," Daniel resigned, but not without a small smirk.

Jack nodded, smiled in satisfaction, then clasped his hands together loudly. Daniel hadn't missed his hesitant but deliberate glance towards the curtain around the bed on the other side of the room though.

"Ah... Yeah, um, Janet says the operation went well," Daniel informed at length as he reached over to the bedside table and put his glasses back on. "The puncture wound from the broken rib wasn't as bad as it'd seemed in the x-rays apparently. So the operation was quick, smooth."

With the way Jack stared at his boots, kicking his toes and scrunching his hands into fists inside his pockets, Daniel assumed he already knew as much. His shoulders were tight, his eyes small and distracted.

"Jack..."

The colonel looked up, his attention honed by the vacillate in his friend's cadence, the strong to quiet way he said his name as if he were teetering on a confession. For all his downtime there was still a report Daniel had to make by the morning, and Jack had a feeling he was about to receive the blurb.

"You know... In her defence, all she had was that knife. And... I could smell excrement, in her hair, urine on her clothes when I found her... But I think, or I don't think, she ever meant to kill that man. If she could have helped it, if I'd given her the zat..." With great difficulty he paused, considering and knowing what it was that struck him hardest. The colonel wrapped a hand around the metal frame at the end of the bed, leaned so most of his weight was on his left leg, and said nothing, but waited with a look of wired heed.

"Jack... I don't know what this is going to do to her."

Had anyone else been around, had anyone else dared to ask, Daniel would have said nothing. But it was Jack, and what choice did he have but to confess what he most feared to the only man he explicitly trusted.

"Daniel..." Jack scrubbed a hand through his bristly hair, scratched at the bit of his skull that rounded out just above the back of his neck, and let his shoulders drop amid a heavy sigh. This was the first time he'd heard any details of what had happened with his people on P5X-180 and it sunk his stomach to hear it, to decipher Daniel's broken account of events. His expression was tight, but not unkind as he spoke. "Major Carter's a soldier. First and foremost, out there she's a ranking member of the US Air Force, she knows her duty, and... well it sucks, quite frankly, at times. Believe it or not, not all the boys and girls sign up for killing and I know Carter's never had any intention of wearing blood on her hands in the name of some screwed up idea of patriotism. But the job is what it is. It's what they train us for. She'll do as well as we all do after the 'first one', and after the one that makes you lose count; justifying it until it makes sense in your own head, or at least until it stops keeping you awake all the live long night..."

Daniel grimaced. He could taste the flavour of debate, but he could not sum up the appetite for it. Jack stood upright again, and grasped Daniel's shoulder this time.

"Which is exactly why you keep friends who are outside of the military. Talk to her, and tell her what she needs to hear. You're... good at that."

Daniel looked at his knees as Jack stood away.

"Fraiser told me what happened to your leg by the way."

Daniel looked up again, as if he'd just been kicked. Jack was, in his rueful way, smiling.

"Steak dinners all round indeed."

....

Curled in a _C_ on her side and for a moment he's not in the infirmary standing at her bedside but back there on that planet; he's dwarfed by pillars of acrid purple-grey smoke, denied passage by tall, angry licks of orange and white, and no matter how valiantly he tries to run he cannot reach her in time, he cannot save her from the strike that almost crushes her windpipe, and he cannot save her from her own actions...

...but then he's standing there again in front her bed, and though it takes a moment, face blank, stance still, Daniel forces himself into the now of the matter, to Sam lying safe in front of him and to what he might say to her, or hear from her, eventually.

Words are something he's always known how to utilise, like Jack and any weapon he manages his hands on, and if he hadn't he might have been a down-and-out long before he'd even become an apparent sham within his old profession. At times he fancies he'd have been a politician in another life, and wonders selfishly what he would have had from that life that this one seemed to keep denying him. Peace, stability, a wife to come home to—

Sam stirred. It wasn't the movement of a conscious person, she merely flickered in her sleep so as her leg stretched back and her hand curled and loosened, curled and loosened, as if kneading something. Daniel touched the sheets with two fingers where they were still tucked into the mattress. Then he pushed his glasses up his nose and wrinkled and unwrinkled his brow and then he glanced haplessly at the ceiling. At times, when words would not come, Daniel stressed.

In the background Janet was hovering, patiently. He knew it was about midnight. Sam still had another 12 hours before they took her off sedation. It was useless; anything he might chance to say that could help would fall only onto the ears of the doctor about to shoo him out for the night. So he tapped the bed frame a few times, held a breath, and limped away in silence.

....

They hadn't put a call out for her yet, and she knew if panic got the better of Janet, or just plain outrage, then they would; they'd get the colonel to do it probably because they were sneaky like that, and she'd go back and she'd stay in the infirmary with a mood like hell.

But it felt good to lie down in the relative emptiness of her quarters now, in the conditional privacy it gave her. The bed itself was as comfy as they came, with one of those 'NASA approved' mattresses she saw on infomercials during the rare times she watched television, usually with the colonel or Daniel, or to even greater wonder and entertainment, with Teal'c, in the rec. The decor left much to be imagined but already she had her eyes shut, lying back in the brown darkness of the room, uncaring but for the concentration she expended on forgetting the awful pain in her ribs. She even managed to get half way to sleep, before she sensed, rather than heard, the door opening.

"You look like hell, Sam..."

She didn't move, she barely opened her eyes. "Really? Because I thought I fancied my chances at winning the Miss Stargate: SG-1 pageant this year..."

"Yeah? Sorry but my money's on Teal'c."

It hurt, but she couldn't help cracking a smile, sardonic as it was around the edges. She heard the door closing and saw through her half drawn eyelids the side lamp turning on.

Daniel settled himself in the armchair by the corner.

"How's the leg?" Sam asked. With an effort that hurt more than she dared show on her face she sat up, digging the palm of her good hand into her eyes and stifling a yawn.

"Better than you, that's for sure. Why aren't you sleeping it off in the infirmary? You've still got twenty minutes before Janet starts her shift and finds you missing."

Sam dropped her hand from her face and for the first time since she'd shot the _talree_ in the river she looked at Daniel. Catching her eye, Daniel saw what Jack had seen in him; a friend who had looked better, but had been worse... and he wasn't sure what was sadder.

"Well, if you won't stay in the infirmary, Jack's having another poker night this Saturday."

Very slightly, Sam smiled again, and Daniel felt some weight lifting of his chest at the genuineness of it, helped by a shine in her eyes that brightened at the prospect of some team downtime. They didn't get enough of it, they were both thinking in tandem.

The cut along her lips had been unsown and sutured again with surgery glue. It was still puckered and bruised, but stood less of a chance of scarring, though Janet had warned Daniel that his sewing efforts, while valiant, might impugn that hope. He apologised for it now.

Sam touched the wound tenderly and shrugged. "With the fights we've been through, it's lucky I'm not known as one-eyed Sammy, or hop-along Carter."

Daniel laughed, a short, half-surprised bark of a sound that made Sam raise her eyebrows. For a moment then they were comfortably silent, remembering any number of times they'd had together now out in the dangers of the field.

"Daniel..."

The man looked up, offered Sam his unwavering attention, his warm eyes and his placid expression that at times she felt she could just tell everything to, open up a whole world of pain and confessions and everything about a life that felt lonelier than it should. His was a friendship so invaluable she wasn't sure what she'd do, what any of them would do, if they lost it.

"It was a tough call. But, I knew what I was doing when I made it. I know that a part of you still finds it difficult to understand some of the decisions we make, especially the colonel and myself. Hell, I've never used that knife for any more than repairing my kit, or taking out splinters. But, I had to do it. And I'll probably regret it for the rest of my life, because he wasn't anything other than a man... behaving the way he thought... he thought—"

She faltered. Where she had begun calm and sure, now she spoke low and to herself, as if suddenly realising something she'd forgotten.

Daniel uncrossed his legs with care and limped over to the bed, sitting down next to her.

"You'll do what you have to, to help yourself justify it," he said, repeating what Jack had told him, "and I think you're right. It was you or him. No one can condemn you for that and I know who I'd have picked if I were faced with the choice. Who any of us would pick."

Sam was frowning, as if trying to ward off some greater expression of pain. She fiddled with the heavy bandage keeping her broken finger straight, picking at some stray threads. Daniel could see, under her black tee, the slight bulges where there were more bandages wrapped around the better half of her torso. The price had been too high for such a trivial mission. It had cost more than Sam could afford, he thought, worried.

But despite it all, or perhaps desperately because of it, Sam smiled once more.

"I think I remember one other thing, actually, after the fire and before waking up again here."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "Uh-huh..."

"Something about a steak dinner?"

.

_End_

....

A.N: Epilogue, which will be a complation of all my notes and deleted work for this story, to come very, very soon...


	6. Epilogue, of a Sorts

_Epilogue (of a sorts)_

A.N:

So, here it is, my first ever attempt at a behind-the-scenes vignette for one of my fan fictions. It's a little daft and it's a lot of fun for me to post because more work goes into my fanfics than probably there should be put in, considering the zero £££ reward... But the reviews I've gotten from you guys have over the past few weeks really given me a boost and a relief from the avalanche of 'real' work I have to do. So, I don't know if this is so much a reward for you all as it is a chance just to see, if you're interested, how I indulge before I rethink, rewrite, and re-edit everything to make the final piece. Expect a lot more whumping, a lot more angst and a helluva a lot less sense...

----

Exerts of a Whumptastic Nature

**(Note)** So this all begun as a _very_ different idea: In brief, Sam finds a way of going after Orlin not long after the concluding events of season five's episode _Ascension_. But instead of the plan falling exactly through as she'd hoped (something akin to building her own DIY Stargate was all I'd really considered) she ends up in this sort of nothing plane of existence/Ascendeds' half-way house-planet-place, thing... Something like the diner in _Threads _but, a whole planet... In the end it was too complicated for the little spare time I have to work on fan fictions, to contrive a convincing story worthy of the plot bunny itself, and all I wrote of it was the aftermath of Sam landing on the planet after a spectacularly wrong trip through her DIY 'gate.

I am an avid 'whump' writer, as the kids call it these days, and have been unwittingly since I was ten and wrote _Pokemon _stories. Back then it was Ash. Lately Carter has been my main victim, predeceasing T'Pol from _Star Trek: Enterprise_. That just gives you an idea of why what's written below is all I bothered to pen of the Orlin story idea. The piece has been directly translated from the original hand-written-on-paper piece I scribbled whilst visiting friends in Vancouver this summer, no editing, cutting or adding has been had at it, so it's a bit rough overall, and I apologise for that. Enjoy anyway!

... ... ...

It's swollen, she thinks, that palms width of ribs just under and slightly behind her right breast. At least, it's bruised and maybe even bloodied. On her own it's hard to be sure, it's almost too soon to try and look under the fabric of her tee.

For just that moment it's good to be alone. She's always felt funny about people paying vigil to her unconsciousness. Not so much when sleep is a mutual task but when she's lying in a sickbay ward, wacked this-way-up and backwards on morphine, or knocked down on her ass in the field, the only one who didn't see the blast coming. There is a sense of embarrassment in coming-to with one's CO and whole team peering blurrily down at you, as if amused, that she had never quite managed to come to reasonable terms with.

But the moment of relief hardly lasts as no one could expect it to when the pain reels in and the reality of aloneness swamps all other perceptions.

Though not for long. It may have been sentimentality that spat her into this mess, but she was still military, practically born and raised, bred almost, and the military do not sit and weep whilst they lick their wounds.

Sam Carter (_Major_) gives her body time to throb, and her mind in turn a chance to realise where the wounds are, the trouble. Asides from a handful of her ribs on the upper right side it's her cheekbone on the same side; there are tears streaming from her eyes that at this moment have nothing to do with emotions. And a staved finger, the index on the left. Shooting might be tricky with a tremble in her aim but she'll have to do her best. She'll do no worse than what the colonel would expect from her.

She had little doubt that they were howling for her blood now, the politicians and worse, those in the military who had become men of politics; those yellow-toothed dogs who had grown weary of their patriotism and saw more pleasure, more gain, in playing with names and reputations that for some reason or another displeased them.

Though in fairness jumping through an illegal Stargate was bound to earn her a bounty she probably deserved.

Was she surprised she had landed in a forest? –No. But almost immediately she knew there was something far more to it than just its obvious alien-ness. The air was breathable, she could smell water, she could hear the fauna (the food) and she was for now alone and apparently not intruding on any dangerous indigenous specie's territories. She had everything from that to be thankful for, and yet she knew. This place could be her last. It felt likely of a destiny that might finally lead to her death.

... ... ...

**(Note)** So if you were paying attention you might have noticed the injuries Carter sustained in that short passage are strikingly similar to the ones she suffers in _Sucks To Be Us Sometimes_. That's basically where _Sucks _(a really, really unfortunate title to abbreviate) began from. I couldn't be bothered with the epical of semi-ascension theories and where-did-Orlin-really-go-after-_Ascension_ ideas. _But_, I did want Carter in an almost a-typical whumping short story, one that dealt with her in the way of _Line in the Sand_ but more wild, more desperate, and more SG-1 old school. So then I wrote what is below... (Again it's rough so please be forgiving.)

... ... ...

Someone was... running, across the grassy field, they were running fast as legs could go. Through the dirty dark of the night, the mud-sweetened air, through the tinder dry grass that was before the lake. She could only hear it, and it sounded no better than the disillusion of wishful thinking. Surely there was no one left, after the fire, after the abductions and now gone also those lucky enough to make it to the Stargate. This galloping of frenzied feet, it was just the cruel hoping of her mind, the conjuring of a wry imagination.

Her head she could not have lifted for love nor money, not even for the promise of these running feet to be real. Her neck was warm from the fresh blood of a deep scalp wound, her ribs miserably broken and bruised – every one of them it felt like. She could barely feel her fingers or toes. She was for death now, not any more special this time than the scores of charred and empty bodies around her.

It seemed more worth it now to succumb to the end, the painless void, than to keep up the struggle of life where hope had faded so completely as to feel like she had never had any.

But someone was running...

He managed to stop only by throwing himself to his knees, his momentum so great for it was powered by fear and desperation, and even a sliver of elation at finding her. He swung his gun to his side and with a gentleness that defied the sporadic madness in his gaze, in his wide eyes and the urgency of his trembling hands, he turned her off her side and onto her back.

She hissed, her lips drawn long and tight in a fierce grimace with her eyelids scrunched. But then just as quickly her face fell lax, her mouth casually agape, and every muscle going limp.

... ... ...

**(Note) **Yeah I'm such a lazy ass. I literally stopped there just because I was having way too much damn fun in Vancouver at the time. The above was however meant to be an S/J piece. I'm anything but opposed to the shipping, in the show. I find it harder to write it myself though, I think I'd rather leave the speculating of that particular relationship to the professionals in the end. In fact, I've never been much of a shipper (writer). I'm avid on the friendships. It feels more real, my attempts to write the friendship rather than the speculative romance. In my personal opinion I failed miserably at it once in an _Enterprise_ fic and ever since I've preferred the buddy moral.

So that's the tale of origins, if you like. By the time I went back to spending my spare time writing fan fics (about a couple of months ago) things for _Sucks_ were starting to truly form...

----

The Original 'Chapter One'

Or a rant, if you will. That's how this story really started off becoming what it is now – as a sort of discontented stream of my own thoughts vented through Sam via some letters she'd written, which Jack consequentially finds and thus asks Daniel to 'translate', worried that his 2IC might be losing it, just a bit. Then lo-and-behold I was writing this whole circumstance around the letter, that Daniel (though it was originally meant to be Jack) and Sam were involved in, with whumping/comfort/angst/sardonic lols/vague back story all to boot... Where the exert below stops is where I decided to start again and turn it into something I might actually want to post online as a legitimate story.

It was also whilst writing this that a simpler idea for another other story on this account, _I Hope You're Smiling_, popped into my head so I actually scampered off to write that first. _Then_ I came back and re-wrote this as then untitled first chapter...

... ... ...

_--that end? ... Do we accept the pain more easily if we all who have chosen to serve a law that belongs unto a greater force than ourselves as individuals choose to accept it as a contracted inevitable, even a worthy bestow for the greater universal good? That it is okay to bare brunt in the line of duty, to take shrapnel as we dive to bid full our commands, to lose integrity in that bit of our life we say is our personal part, because it is decoded on paper that there is a hierarchy which is, once sworn to by oath, undeniable._

_Or is there a more desperate need that comes from a personal darkness, which forces us to resign to the catchphrase, 'that's life'. 'Take mines, my name and change it into rank so under you I cannot disagree. I am your hands, I am your machine, call me by my dub of duty and my blood is yours to spill.' _This_ is life? Because without it, some of us would simply starve of loneliness? ..._

He had read it three days ago as a private favour, to decode meaning behind a stolen confession. It had been wrong and important and though he had begrudged the tasked at the time, now he pondered it with severity, worried that his determination to realise it was of no real consequence was in vain.

It was a breed of translating that he was entirely unsure of, and he feared that his sentimentality to his friendship with the author was causing a problem of clarity in a way he had not experienced before. The words were there and he knew what they had to tell. But not what they honestly meant...

Sighing and looking away from the broken sky through the treetops, he laid an open palm to her cheek, pressing slightly so she might be able realise his touch, in case she had even the barest of wits left to feel anything by. She was hot and damp now, and he was cold. It was early morn' upon a frosty world, and as he stared vainly at a wan sunlight she was ever more paling under the grip of a ferocious fever.

Beneath a waxy grime of blood and bruises she looked so familiar to him it was harrowing. Because this was definitely Sam lying at his side, the most fiercely intelligent and adaptable soldier, the warmest and the keenest friend and often the most human amongst them at times when tragedy and doom threatened to snap their sanities. His friend, their right arm comrade, their companion, at times their commander, and always their most loyal follower. But now so still and bare, her voice lost to only a ragged breathing and just every so often small gasps of pain to communicate with on this estranged alien world.

Daniel had found her during the grey night time prior. Then she had been wild-eyed and white with pain, holding her fraught position with just a dive knife as a weapon behind a ruined stone shrine; suffering worst from a shattered knee and a splay of cracked ribs both under bloodied, torn skin. Also some deep, yellow grazing along one eye and her nose and burnt fingers where her guns had been forced out of her hand. Clumps of hair missing, a deep slice through her upper lip, no shoes: and blood and spit, and urine everywhere.

The shrine had been on the grassy fringe of an open field that carpeted into the thin woodland where they hid now. An erratic track of fire scorches and boot treads cutting through the off centre of the land suggested the mob had come from the North-west, and then straight across the open without fear, brazenly propelled by a mob-mentality. Had she come ahead of them also from the West? It was possible. Perhaps she had found a village that-away after they had been forced apart. Or perhaps she had been laying low in the woods and someone had flushed her out, like dogs on a fox.

She had been breathing hard and thinking fast when he'd rounded on her location. Her guns were gone but gripped in her left hand was the dive knife, held with all the desperate fierceness of one clinging determinedly to her last defence. When he'd come upon her, thinking she too was the enemy waiting to spring on him, he had been a hair's breadth from a stabbing in the shin. He was lucky and nothing more; the adrenaline had ebbed fast from her system since the attack had ended, and her strength was at best only enough to keep her awake and breathing at the same time.

She had lasted a half hour of bare consciousness and it had been long enough to learn that neither of them knew of O'Neill or Teal'c's whereabouts or of a good idea for getting back to the Stargate yet. So he had set them up a camp for the night and now morning was here hailed by a weak winter sunrise.

He lifted his hand from her flushed cheek and checked his radio, again. Dead, just white noise; it sounded almost worse than the implications of the letter...

_Because without it, some of us would simply starve of loneliness? ..._

It had been coy of Jack to send them off in yonder direction to 'check things out' alone, believing as he did that Daniel could conjure a conversation from her that might reveal in one glorious sweep her pool of innermost fears and beliefs, what the letter might really imply of her relationship to her job and her team. No one wanted to believe Sam was ready to quit on them, no one believed it period. But self doubt in her ability, in her worth to the program and to them – Jack wouldn't have it, and he was willing to pull it straight from her ass, if he was sure any of it meant anything for certain.

Of course, after the fact they always say _the best laid plans..._

Daniel had been particularly grated by the smell of urine in her hair and in the grass...

He had several theories behind the cause of the mob, but regardless of them at all, this was meant to have been a non-contact mission, a 'search n' sniff' as Jack sometimes woefully dubbed them. Check out the environment, scrape a little at the ruins, take notes on the vegetation and even do a little bird watching. No contact was expected. He and Sam had been sent and so wondered in a loosely Western line towards a river, Daniel hoping to find abandoned tools of primal human civilisation and Sam covering him.

It was part set up as much as it was just another routine recall mission. Jack and Daniel were the only ones privy to the letter, and Teal'c would only learn of it if he sussed O'Neill's true intentions, which he was not unknown to do on more than the off occasion. Jack had a tendency to overestimate the extent of Daniel's communicative abilities though. Or, perhaps it was that Daniel underestimated himself...

Regardless, they had never gotten round to the discussion Jack had been hoping for. Chaos had ensued, and it had taken a day for Daniel to recover his own bearings. It was by luck mostly that he had even found her...

"Oh Sam. Sam, Sam, Sa-am..." he murmured, as he doused the simpering embers of their weak fire and checked the splint he'd made for her knee. Probably not a job Frasier would be proud of, but all things considered etcetera. He took a little positivity in how she flinched when he straightened out her leg for her. She wasn't catatonic. Yet.

They would have to move soon. Daniel had sacrificed what he could to keep Sam warm during the night without giving himself hypothermia. She was draped in his windbreaker and he'd given her his boots and gloves as well. Eventually he'd resigned to cocooning himself around her, for both their sakes. It had been a sleepless night, listening to her ragged breathing underneath his chin, tensing whenever it stopped, wincing when she gasped in pain. There was nothing he could do for her ribs; it was going to be a hellish trek wherever they moved on to. For now though, he had to try and rouse her...

----

I Haz A Shooo!

**(Note) **This is actually a 'deleted scene' if you like from chapter three. I'll let it speak for itself. It's cute, but it was utterly useless in context so I scrubbed it.

.... .... ....

Daniel and Sam looked at each other through a close, low gaze, tight and straight between the eyes, noses almost touching and breath paused. Held it for a small world of time it seemed, clenching teeth and fists together, tightening every muscle around their jaws, squaring their shoulders whilst trying _so-damn-hard-not-to-laugh_...

But it was impossible, and Sam lost again by a snort of giggles that escaped through her nose this time. Because for ten minutes now they had been unable to suppress an irrational hysteria of entertainment caused by one of those inane moments that is funny just because it is.

Sam had needed a splint for her foot before they could start walking again. For whatever primitive logic, the villagers had stolen her boots so Daniel had sacrificed one of his own to be used as a sort of makeshift cast. He had tied the laces up for her on account of her broken finger and it had been then, sitting back on a small boulder to take stock, that they had shared a silent joke, or at least had found an unreasonable humour in the sight of that one boot on Sam's foot that was at least four sizes too big. It was lame and they both knew it but here they were anyway sitting on rocks laughing, scratching away tears from the corners of their eyes, catching their breath back from the moment. It was utterly ridiculous, and perfect.

----

Appendix

As I said in my author's note in chapter one, the whole thing, asides from deriving from ideas of Orlin and semi-ascension, and random, indulgent whumping and an overall progression of notes and ideas, was inspired by a song – Foo Fighter's _Razor._ It's a beautiful song (and I don't say that lightly, I'm not a big fan of mush) that struck me with the image of (originally) Jack and Sam stranded in a forest together, cold and lost and full of tension and brimming confession, until I decided it was going to be Sam and Daniel and the whole idea of two friends bound to protect and help each other by just that, unconditional friendship. That's what I imagine _Razor_ describes. Go listen to it. It's nice.

The more action packed stuff I choreographed (to better or worse effect, you decide) whilst listening to the song _Sugar We're Going Down_ by Fall Out Boy. I will never again be able to listen to that epic song without imagining Sam and Daniel running like lunatics together into a fight. It makes me smile just typing about it.

Also _Fight the Good Fight _and _Carry on my Wayward Son _by Triumph and Kansas respectively are way up there on my favourite tunes at the moment (discovered on the _Supernatural_ season one soundtrack.) Very SG-1-like lyrics. Love it.

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And I think that's it for my slightly disjointed, very much fun to share vignette of _Sucks to be Us Sometimes_. The whole thing was a blast, it was great to get back into fanfic writing after so many years and even more fantastic to get a response from you guys the reviewers. Thank you as well everyone who put this story on their alerts and their favourites, and I really do hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did working on it.

~Telaka


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