Chapter Text
The planet P8X-491 was beautiful, if deceptively hostile. SG-1 was deep inside an abandoned Ancient facility—a vault, really, designed not to store treasures, but to contain volatile, unfinished experiments. The air hummed with a low, chaotic frequency that made the hairs on Sam Carter’s arms stand up, the feeling escalating the deeper they went.
“This power matrix is completely unregulated,” Carter muttered, running a hand over a wall-mounted panel that felt unnervingly hot. “It looks like they were trying to bottle up a small, contained power source, but they walked away before it was stable. It’s cycling between two dimensions.”
Jack O’Neill sighed, his P90 resting across his chest. “Translation, Carter?”
“Translation, Colonel,” she said, not looking away from the pulsing crystal core at the heart of the room, “is that we have a plasma bomb on a four-minute timer that might also open a rift to an alternate universe. Or possibly just explode in a way that turns this facility into slag. Either way, bad.”
Daniel Jackson, meanwhile, was fascinated by the glyphs etched into the floor, not seeming to notice the rising whine of the crystal. He was tracing a symbol with his finger. “Jack, these aren’t Ancient. They’re a predecessor language, likely related to the Nox. Look at the syntax—it details a containment protocol that uses biological dampeners—”
“Daniel! Focus!” Jack snapped, realizing the whine was now a siren. “Carter, fix it or get us out of here.”
“I can’t fix it without stabilizing the phase shift, and I don’t have the right tools. I can only try to contain the thermal output long enough for us to make a tactical retreat,” Sam said, her voice tight with professional focus. She pulled two satchel charges from her pack, rigging them not for explosion, but for a focused magnetic pulse intended to disrupt the energy feedback loop.
With a shudder that sent dust raining from the ceiling, the humming intensified to a scream. A shower of crystallized material violently erupted from the containment vessel. It wasn’t a flash of light; it was an explosion of hyper-heated, unstable, razor-sharp shards.
Sam had been crouched directly in front of the device. Instinct taking over, she shoved Daniel—who was still arguing about linguistic syntax—hard behind a fallen pillar and yelled, “Get down!” before throwing herself back toward the wall.
She didn’t quite make it.
The brunt of the crystalline shrapnel blast hit her left side. Hundreds of fragments tore across her flank and lower back, but a spray of smaller, high-velocity pieces struck higher, one searing her left temple, and another grazing the edge of her ear before embedding near her jawline. It was like being hit by a high-velocity, white-hot sandstorm.
She didn’t scream, but let out a sharp, guttural sound as she crumpled. They were trialing new uniforms designed to resist light energy weapons on this mission. It was instantly seared and ripped, and the material fused into her skin around the entry points.
Jack and Teal’c were on her instantly, their weapons forgotten. The core, its energy spent on the projectile blast, pulsed once, went dark, and the silence that followed was deafening.
Daniel clambered out from behind the pillar, the dust settling on his hair. He looked at the smoking device, then at Sam. She was pale, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps, her eyes squeezed shut. There was surprisingly little blood—the heat of the shards had cauterized many of the wounds—but the damage was horrifyingly apparent in the way her body was contorted and the way her uniform was ruined on her entire left flank.
“Carter!” Jack’s voice was strained, high with shock.
“No… pulse… visible shrapnel… everywhere,” she forced out, her voice a reedy whisper. “Get… the hell out of here, sir. Now.”
Daniel stared in horror at what he’d caused. “I.”
“Shut it!” Jack shouted. “Teal’c, let’s go.” The Jaffa nodded and picked Sam, up careful of her injuries. She moaned in pain. The colonel stared angrily at Daniel who was grabbing Sam’s bag and packing her instruments. “We’re getting you back to Doc Fraiser, Carter. She’ll fix you up,” Jack said quietly to the 2IC.
Back at the SGC, the atmosphere was a controlled panic. Janet Fraiser took one look at the fused uniform material and the deep, clean puncture wounds littering Sam’s torso, and her face went grim. It wasn’t messy, but it was surgical-grade devastation. The initial X-rays revealed the true horror: internal damage beyond anything she’d ever witnessed in such a bloodless accident and crystalline fragments embedded deep in her abdominal and lumbar muscles.
Colonel O’Neill paced the waiting room, occasionally running a hand through his hair. Teal’c stood sentinel by the door, his face a mask of iron control. Daniel, however, sat frozen in a hard plastic chair, hands clasped tightly between his knees, head bowed with guilt. He didn’t speak. He just kept seeing the way the light had reflected off the incoming shrapnel, and the quick, self-sacrificing shove that had saved his life. Sam had reacted without a second of hesitation.
Janet emerged seven hours later, stripping off her surgical mask and gloves, looking exhausted. She shrugged helplessly.
“Doc?” Jack’s voice was low, demanding.
Janet exhaled slowly. “She’s alive. But barely. The shrapnel acted like tiny, super-hot bullets. They shredded muscles, where there should have been massive internal bleeding; thankfully or not, time will tell, but they cauterized the wounds. Some I could fix. Some I couldn’t. We had to go in deep to get every single crystal piece out. Those shards were metabolically active. If we left anything behind, it would have fused with her cells. I. Honestly, I don’t even know how it would have done that, either, but watching it when the skin was already attached to...”
She gestured wearily. “We found three significant fragments above the neckline—one we managed to remove easily, but the piece near her left temple was deep, requiring delicate removal. She’s going to have permanent scarring on her face and ear. More critically, one of the larger shards went low and lodged near her left ovary. We got it out, but the damage to the tissue is significant. Her recovery will be long, and… frankly, we don’t know what this means for her reproductive future. Major, life-altering surgery.”
Jack nodded, his eyes fixed on the small recorder in her pocket. Teal’c remained stoic.
Daniel finally spoke, his voice dry and scratchy. “Can I… can I see her?”
Janet looked at him, noticing the tears in his eyes. “She’s not awake, Daniel. She’s stable, but she’s not going to wake up for a while.”
“I know,” he said simply. “But I need to see her.”
The ICU room was quiet, sterile, and cold. Sam was dwarfed by the machinery—the rhythmic beep of the monitor, the hiss of the ventilator doing the work her own muscles couldn’t manage easily. She looked fragile, stripped of her rank, her uniform, and her brilliant intellect, reduced to a patient fighting a war on a purely physical front.
Daniel walked to the bedside. He moved his gaze up first. A strip of gauze covered the area near her left temple and ear, held in place by surgical tape. Her face was otherwise untouched, pale but peaceful. He moved his gaze down and saw the dressings distorting her figure underneath the thin blanket. A massive, complex structure of thick white bandages covered almost the entire left half of her torso, a thick swath of padding secured tightly to stabilize the damaged area. Her left arm was wrapped just past the elbow. The dressings extended noticeably lower toward the hip and pelvic region to cover the second, critical surgical site. Even through the bandages, he could sense the physical damage underneath. This wasn’t a graze. This was an ordeal.
Jack appeared in the doorway, holding two Styrofoam cups of terrible black SGC coffee. He handed one to Daniel.
“You don’t have to stay here, Daniel. Get some rest,” Jack said, his voice flat.
Daniel shook his head, taking a sip of the bitter liquid. “I need to finish the translation on the Nox protocol. Maybe they mention how to neutralize this power source without blowing it up next time.” He knew it was a lie, a flimsy excuse built on academic habit. The truth was, he couldn’t leave. He felt tethered to the rhythmic beeping of her life support, compelled to witness the slow, arduous process of her survival.
Jack leaned against the wall, taking a long drink of his coffee, his eyes never leaving Sam. “You know, she saved your life. Again.”
“I know,” Daniel whispered. He watched the subtle movement of her chest beneath the sheet, forced by the machine. “I was arguing about linguistics. She was solving the problem and covering our asses.” He set the coffee down on the side table. “I owe her more than a debt of gratitude, Jack.” His voice cracked guiltily. “Again.”
Jack just nodded, his expression unreadable. He knew the debt they all owed Carter, but he also saw the look in Daniel’s eyes—a fierce, protective focus that was new, and deeply concerning to the older officer.
Jack stayed for another hour, talking to Sam about base logistics and telling her a remarkably dull story about fishing. It was a normal, mundane, loving kind of attention. When he left, his hand rested briefly on Daniel’s shoulder, a reminder that he was supported and he wasn’t the only one.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You too, Daniel. Go home.”
“I’ll stay a little longer,” Daniel replied.
He didn’t leave. He sat there, pulling out a small notepad. He couldn’t focus on the Nox. Instead, he simply watched her. He watched the monitors, memorizing the cadence of her heartbeat. He watched her breath, counting the shallow rise and fall. He watched the way the hospital light caught the tiny, fine hairs on her pale forehead.
The guilt was a hard, cold knot in his stomach. He was the scholar, the one who relied on others to protect him. Jack had taught him so much, yet he was still so weak. She was the warrior and the scientist, yet she had been the shield.
As the late-night silence of the infirmary pressed in, Daniel leaned forward, picking up the dry hand resting on the sheet. He held it gently, his thumb brushing over her unblemished knuckles. He wasn’t thinking about a colleague, or a friend, or even a co-worker who saved his life. He was thinking about a woman, a brilliant light who had almost been extinguished. And in the quiet solitude of the room, he realized with a sharp, terrifying clarity that the world without that light would be unbearable to him.
This was more than teamwork. It was devotion. His vigil had begun.