Love Under Duress

Love: A Retrospective Glance

Pairing: Carter/Fraiser
Warning: Angst, spoilers for SG-1 "s07e17-18: Heroes", major character death

Love is beautiful. Love is warm and cold, gentle and harsh. Love is the eye of the storm; a momentary reprieve from the harsh winds of life before it slips away through your fingers and you are lost yet again. Sometimes love can seem to last almost forever, but sometimes it withers and dies, like a rose peeking through the cracks of hardened desert sand.

Love is an unknown variable, an unpredictable circumstance. Love is a fighting chance, a spark of hope against a vast army. Love is crueler than death, Sam thinks. Unlike death, love plays favourites, and Sam wasn't one of them. Maybe, it could've been almost okay. Maybe she would've watched her from afar. Maybe she could've even approached her as more than she was. More than a colleague, more than a friend.

If things had turned out different, maybe the love in Sam's heart wouldn't have withered and died. Maybe she would've stayed in the eye of the storm forever. But Janet was dead, and the storm had returned in full force, its harsh winds whipping against her back, freezing raindrops mingling with hot tears.

Maybe if she was different, maybe if she hadn't loved Janet the way she did, it wouldn't hurt so much. Some people don't need that kind of love to stay in the eye of the storm, why couldn't she be like that? She was wrong, of course. She knew that Janet was a part of her being, in a way that could never be undone, and when Janet left, Sam's heart went with her. Even if she was just a friend, her heart would still hurt like this.

After the ceremony, it seemed like everyone forgot about her. She was never mentioned. She seemed to just disappear from their lives. Sometimes Sam thought she could see her, turning a corner in the hallway, sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria. She kept her mouth shut. And slowly, Sam learned to forget. She tried to forget.

Sometimes, when she was falling asleep, she pretended that Janet was beside her. She pretended that Janet had returned from that mission. She pretended that Janet loved her back. Sometimes she pretended that Janet was on a secret mission. She pretended Janet would be back soon. She pretended that Janet would step through the door at any moment and kiss her until she could forget about the last few months that were surely a nightmare.

It probably wasn't good for her mental health, pretending like this. She didn't care. Maybe she had accidentally pretended herself into a pretend reality, one where everything would be alright. She tried to lose herself in her work. She stopped going to the cafeteria, it reminded her too much of when she would eat with Janet. Daniel and Teal'c; they made sure she still ate and slept, but they didn't know how badly Janet's death was affecting her. She doesn't know if Colonel O'Neill even noticed at all.

Love, she thought, was the worst. Love was what tore people apart from the inside. It ate them up from the inside out until there was nothing left but an empty shell- a hollowed out version of what they used to be.

Maybe one could argue that death was to blame- for death was what had taken Janet away from her- but Sam knew the truth. She knew that it was her love that made her feel this way. Her love had never left her, but now it was a pathetic, withered thing. It made her sad, but it also made her angry. What had she done to deserve this? It was unfair. She wanted to lash out.

But those feelings left as quickly as they came, and what was left was only a feeling of sadness, hollowness. Maybe she could heal. Maybe she could learn to become full again. Only time would tell. It hurt to wait like this; drowning in pain, tears not enough to describe the feeling.

But that's only love.