Chapter Text
You glance up, noticing Daniel walking over to your desk, holding a lukewarm mug of coffee. He looked nervous, shifting his weight and his eyes glancing over to the nearby whiteboard with you and your team’s most recent work as he approached. He tried to look casual as he leaned on your desk.
“Hey, I uh…” For a moment he stared into the black of the coffee before looking up and making tentative eye contact with you. “I heard from Sam… About what you’ve been going through. N-not anything specific! But… Just that you’ve been having a rough time.” He glanced around the room. A few of your team members still lingered but were a ways off, either last minute squeezing in some work studying the most recent artifacts the SG-1 team brought in today, or getting ready to leave. “I’m sure I speak for everyone on the team that… Um… That we’re all here for you.” He glanced down again at the coffee and nodded, mostly to himself. “Oh! I’m sorry I didn’t mean to keep you!” His head shot up and he took a step back gesturing towards the door. His voice softened as he searched your face, ”If you were making your way out...” With some distance between the two of you, he managed to keep decent eye contact.
“Not at all Mr. Jackson,” You adjust your glasses as you sit up from the hunched-over position you were in at your computer. “I was just trying to get some last-minute cataloging done from SG-1’s expedition today.” Your desk is a mess with papers, it always got this bad whenever artifacts got brought in from the field, doubly so when you were coordinating with Sam and her science team on any technology. “However you make a good point. Maybe I should wrap up.” You give him a slight smile, which he returns as you start to clean your desk up. “Sam and me were going to catch up on our show before the new episode next week.”
A familiar doorbell ringing sound snaps you out of your thoughts, you quickly get up from your couch in your living room and hurry over to the door.
“Sam! Come in!”
A smiling face greets you, the short-shorn blonde holds a box of your favorite candy as she enters your house, giving you a big hug. “It’s great to see you back at work!” You had noted the touch of relief upon seeing you today on base, it seems you were missed.
“It’s good to be back!” You reply as she squeezes the breath out of you a tad, just another reminder that the military types you hang around with could probably deck you in a heartbeat.
You and Sam walk back to the living room where you have the show queued up and popcorn sitting out ready. She hands you the box of candy as the two of you sit down for those episodes, An activity you sorely missed. Sam sat opposite of you, gratefully taking off her shoes and curling up on the couch. You both watch, glad to get more and more absorbed in the fictional media. You cherish the escape from your own life at the moment that this kind of stuff gives you, you don’t think you’d be able to cope with everything quite as well as you had.
“...and I couldn’t stop them… I should have been able to stop them… I tried… I tried so hard… But I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t good enough!”
Suddenly all the emotions you had been longing to bury came flooding back to the surface again. The man crying on the screen and his words, too much. You immediately stood up and almost ran into the nearby kitchen, just to get away from the scene. Your vision begins to threaten to blur completely as tears well up in your eyes, you cover your face with your hands, trying to steady your breath. You feel a presence appear at your side and Sam’s voice drowns out what little you can hear of the TV in the next room.
“Hey, are you okay?” She asks as you feel her place a hand on your shoulder. All you can do is shake your head, you’re worried that even speaking would open the floodgates of tears already on the verge of breaking loose.
You feel her pull you into a hug, “It’s okay. Is it… Them?”
“Mmhm.” You manage to vocalize a small noise for confirmation as you hold your hands to your face even tighter.
“They’re trash you know. You deserve so much better. Nobody deserves to be treated like that… Least of all you.”
All at once the kind words of your best friend are like pulling the pin on a grenade and your tears spill forth as you bury your face into their shoulder. Your quiet whimpering turned to wails. You hold onto her as if letting go would threaten to topple you over.
“It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.” She says to you reassuringly. “We can get Teal’c to beat them up if you want.” The joke didn’t go unappreciated and your sobbing gave way to a small amount of laughter. “Though he might have to fight Jack to be the first one in line.” She pulled back out of the hug examining your reddened eyes and tear-stained face, before she headed over to the paper towels and handed you one to wipe off your face.
“I don’t know how to tell them…” You begin to clean up your face, with the occasional sniffle. “Daniel came over today and was concerned about me. Said you told him I had been having a rough time… I could tell he was a little anxious but, it was still nice.”
“Yeah, he asked why you’d been gone for those two weeks. I told him that you had some medical problems…”
“You could have said it was cancer.”
“I didn’t feel like it was my place to.”
You nod, understandably getting that news was probably shocking, you remember when Sam accidentally overheard you speaking to the base doctor about it as she passed by. She was certainly floored by it.
“I can make you something?” Sam offered.
You glanced up at her and smiled as you wiped the last of the tears away. “Yeah, that’d be nice of you Sam…”
The two of you spent the rest of the night talking over cups of tea. It wasn’t a happy discussion; topics gave way to more somber and upsetting news each time, but you needed it. To process and lay out everything that had happened to you was an arduous task, you had hopes that returning to work would provide you a sense of normalcy but it just reminded you of how much extra you had to carry in your life now.