glimmers
by greensilver
--
The dock was cold and a little slippery beneath her feet, as though the rapidly falling temperature had turned it into one solid sheet of wood-grained ice. She sat on the far edge and curled her legs up inside the overly long drape of Teal'c's jacket, peering down into the water. Tiny bugs skimmed across the surface of the water, but no fish surfaced to dine; she dipped her fingers into the water and wiggled them a bit, trying to attract a fish. Jack insisted there weren't any, but there was always the chance that the fish were simply too smart to take Jack's bait. Maybe his pond had super-intelligent fish.
She felt more than heard his light tread on the dock. The planks were solid, but the chilled wood gave just a little underfoot, and the entire structure shook a bit with each step. She leaned back, pulling her hands out of the water and flicking heavy drops across the surface of the pond.
"Your fish are super-intelligent," she said, peering up at him. In the light from the cabin windows, she could just barely make out one side of his face; her gaze tracked the visible half of his mouth as he smiled.
He lowered himself onto the dock, plunking his feet into the water. "My nonexistant fish?"
"I think they're hiding from you, sir." She leaned down to run her fingertips over the pond's surface again, flicking a few drops in his direction. "It's a super-intelligent fish conspiracy."
"You know, you're not too old to toss in there, Carter," he said, watching her hands lazily drift through the water.
She gave that statement at least a few seconds' consideration, and flicked more water at him. It was a calculated risk, but then, she was fairly confident he wouldn't actually dump her into the pond - not in the dark, anyway.
He kicked up a short spray of water that just barely missed them both. "Do you know why I'm not going to toss you in the pond?"
"Because I'm wearing Teal'c's jacket?" she guessed, tugging the jacket a little tighter around her body to emphasize the point.
"Exactly," he said, splashing her a bit as he pulled his legs out of the water and clambered to his feet. "C'mon. Dinner is ready."
She grinned up at him. "Who cooked?"
"Daniel," he said, and offered her a hand up. She just squinted up at him, watching the lit side of his mouth twitch in poorly concealed amusement. After a moment, he relented. "Okay, fine. I cooked."
She grasped his hand. "How much beer did that involve, sir?"
"It's chili, Carter. You can't make chili without a can of beer." He hauled her to her feet, letting go as soon as she regained her balance.
When she started forward, his hand settled on her back, guiding her along as she navigated the dock in the dark.
-
In the moments just before dusk, when sun was distant enough to be tolerable and the sand began to cool, Sam stretched out on the dunes and stared up at the sky, trying to overlay her reality with a perfectly formed image of how things should have been. There should have been grass, to soften the ground beneath her; there should have been clouds, to break up the monotony of the endless indigo above her.
Despite her best efforts to the contrary, the sand never turned to grass.
-
Samantha Carter had never been particularly inclined toward writing, but she found that the words came easy when there was nothing else to occupy the hands and the mind. In the scorching heat of Egyptian summer, there was nothing to do but survive - just the repetitious tasks of daily life that she'd never had to contend with before; the physical labor that fed and clothed them, the social niceties that kept them welcome amongst the locals. There was no laboratory here, no data to analyze, no scientific discoveries to make; the only advanced technology around was firmly in the hands of Ra. As much as she liked to fantasize about marching into his temple and stripping it bare of technology, the quest to cure her restless boredom didn't justify any possible risk to the timeline.
When her hands reached out for a microscope, her fingers closed around papyrus. As she wrote, her mind spun down slowly, gently, until her thoughts were almost quiet and her fingers were nearly still.
She wrote in English, which was in and of itself a severe violation of the timeline. At first she'd taken hieroglyphic lessons from Daniel, and had tried to keep a journal that way - but she couldn't think in Egyptian the way Daniel could. The symbols were beautiful, but her thoughts didn't translate into birds and snakes as easily as Daniel's seemed to.
Her compromise was simple, if final; when a sheet was filled, she destroyed it. If Daniel were half as smart as his obnoxious self-confidence implied, he'd destroy his writings too, hieroglyphics or not. The new Daniel didn't seem to think very much of her, though, and so she never bothered to suggest it.
The new Daniel was nice enough, to be sure; but underneath it all, he was sharp, critical, and perpetually dissatisfied. She was pretty sure that he never looked at her without making a silent comparison, and every time his mouth tightened at the corners, she knew that she'd been found wanting.
At first, she'd thought that someday, when she didn't see another Daniel Jackson and he didn't see another Samantha Carter, maybe she'd ask him what that other Sam had been like; but now, she had a feeling that Daniel's measuring glances were telling her everything she needed to know.
-
The dock is cold and a little slippery beneath her feet, as though the rapidly falling temperature turned it into one solid sheet of wood-grained ice. She stands at the far end and stares down into the pond, watching for the pale silver glimmers of fish just beneath the surface.
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