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“Stay with me, colonel,” Cam spoke from his sentry point by the window, watching what was happening outside. Not that it was particularly fun to observe. The Ori’s forces rounding up the civilians they had come there to protect. He kept hoping to see a glimpse of Teal’c, although he figured it was better that he couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe it meant Teal’c was in a position to get something done.
Sam rolled her eyes - as well as she could through the pain-and-morphine haze assaulting her senses - but said nothing. It was about the fiftieth time he’d said that.
“I heard that eye-roll,” Cam remarked, not even looking at her. “I’ve got a sixth sense for sass. Got it from my grandpa.”
Sam shifted slightly and made herself groan from the wave of pain that emanated from the wound in her stomach. “So you do have a grandfather,” she bit out around the pain spike, willing it to die down quickly. “I was beginning to think your grandmother reproduced asexually.”
Cam looked at her quizzically.
“You only ever mention your grandmother,” she clarified.
Cam smiled and looked out the window again. “Well, my grandpa died when I was pretty young. And even before he died, he was a pretty... stoic guy.”
“So nothing like you, then.”
“Hey, I’m stoic!” Cam pretended to be wounded, putting his hand over his chest.
“Teal’c is stoic,” Sam interjected.
“Oh come on, that’s not even a fair comparison!” Cam left his post at the window and moved towards her bedside - well, cotside. “Next to Teal’c, a stone statue would be a chatterbox.”
Sam tried for a grin, but it came out mostly as a grimace. Even these few short sentences she had exchanged with Cam were draining her last reserves of energy. If only she could rest her eyes, just for a moment...
“Hey!” Cam said loudly, snapping his fingers near Sam’s head. “What did I say about staying with me?”
“Sorry,” Sam breathed. “It takes a lot to talk.”
Cam chewed on his lip for a second, and glanced back at the window. She could almost see the wheels working in his head. He was so easy to read, sometimes. Sam was slightly surprised to realize how well they’d come to work together. They’d known each other for years, before the SGC, but not like this. The past year or so had shown her a whole new Cam Mitchell, one that was surprisingly easy to become teammates with. It was a shame that it seemed as if that year was all they’d have.
Cam pulled up a seat next to her. “Sam,” he said in almost a warning tone.
Could he see her defeat on her face? Could he read her as well as she could read him? Sam didn’t feel like knowing the answer. “Tell me a story,” she said instead.
“A story?”
“Yeah. About your grandfather.”
Cam talking was good. Cam talking meant that he wouldn’t look as hard into her eyes, to see what she didn’t want him to. It meant she could save her last bits of energy for when the time came. The time to say goodbye, when Cam finally saw how hopeless this situation was.
“Okay,” he drawled, eyes going unfocused for a moment as he searched through his mind for something good to share. “I don’t really have any stories about the man himself, unless you want to know all about the hours he spent in his woodshop making chairs. But I could tell you a story he told me.”
Sam nodded, just barely perceptible, encouraging him.
“When I was real young, my grandpa told me stories in bed. Fairy tales, mother goose, that kinda stuff. Like in The Princess Bride. With the old man telling his grandkid the story.”
Sam knitted her brow together in confusion at the reference.
“You’ve seen that movie. Everyone’s seen that movie! Westley, ‘as you wish,’ ‘you killed my father, now prepare to die...’ Any of this ringing a bell?” Cam paused, but received only a blank look back. “Sam. You’ve never seen - ? Jesus Christ! Now I know what we’re doing when we get back to Earth.”
Sam let a ghost of a smile cross her lips, even if she didn’t feel it.
“Anyway,” Cam continued with the air of a man who has just had some sort of injustice visited upon him. “One of my favorites was always the Princess and the Pea. There was this prince, right? Well he was getting older, and a prince has a hard time becoming a king and ruling his kingdom and all that without a queen by his side. He’d been trying to find himself a princess, but no matter where he looked, he couldn’t find a real one. Or I guess, he didn’t like any of them. Something like that, I don’t remember exactly how the story goes.” He shrugged slightly. “I’m not very good at this.”
Sam tried to shake her head, though she ended up just tilting her head slightly to one side. “It’s fine.”
There was a sudden noise and a shout from outside, and Cam looked like he wanted to go take another look out the window, but he also looked like he wanted to stay exactly where he was. They both stared at each other as the noise died down outside, waiting, but nothing else happened. After a moment, Sam had to look away, not being able to take the emotions she saw playing out in Cam’s eyes. She’d been close to death before, but somehow never quite this close. She’d never before felt the yawning expanse of nothing seeping in at the fringes of her mind. It scared her - probably should’ve scared her more, but the morphine was doing things to her thought patterns - and try as she might, she couldn’t keep Cam from seeing that. In a way, she wished she were dying alone. She didn’t want him to watch her die.
Cam cleared his throat, drawing Sam’s attention back. “So one night it was storming pretty badly,” he said, moving forward with the story. “And there was a knock at the door. It was a girl, looking all the world like a drowned rat, but claiming to be a princess, and needing a place to stay the night. The prince wasn’t one to turn away a pretty girl in need, regardless of her royalty status. But he and his parents cooked up a scheme to test if she was really a princess. They set up her bed with a whole bunch of mattresses, but stuck one, single pea right in the middle, underneath them all. And I know you’re thinking, well what the hell is a pea under the bed gonna do? But the next morning, when the so-called princess came down to breakfast, and the prince asked her how she slept, she said she slept terribly. That there was something hard under her bed, and it bruised her up something awful. No normal person would have been bothered by the pea under all those mattresses, only someone as delicate as a princess. So the prince knew then that he had finally found a real princess to marry.”
Sam blinked at Cam, confused at his pause.
“That’s the whole story. I think. I said I wasn’t very good at this,” he said apologetically.
“It was a nice story,” she said, and closed her eyes. His voice had been relaxing, the slight southern drawl - or was it twang? Sam was no linguist; Daniel would know the right term - comforting.
She felt a hand on her arm.
“No. Sleeping.” Cam said sternly.
Sam blinked her eyes open. “Tired.”
“I know that, but I need you to stay here, on this plane of existence, with me.” There might have been an edge of something in his voice, but Sam was too exhausted to parse it. Regardless, his pigheadedness couldn’t overtake her body’s will, and she felt herself falling. She let her eyes slip closed.
“Samantha,” Cam said, in that way only he ever said her name. With an emphasis on the th sound, drawing it out. His grip tightened on her arm.
Sam thought that this was good. This was a perfect moment to die in. As much as she didn’t want Cam to see it, she was a little glad he was there. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Just tired. So she let the darkness wash over her, and his hand on her arm was the last thing she focused on before going under.
***
Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately, a thought which briefly flashed in her mind as she awoke - she wasn’t dead yet. She woke again, and when she did, the pain and the fear were back, as the morphine had worn off. She tried to tell Cam, to let him know she was saying goodbye, that the end wasn’t far now, but he wouldn’t have it.
As it turned out, he was right to be pigheaded. Somehow, they pulled it together. Somehow, she made the right fixes to cloaking device, somehow Cam managed to turn it on and expanded the field, and somehow, she managed to live when she was sure she would die.
Later, when she was in the infirmary, feeling a million times better physically, a lick of shame crawled up her back when she let her thoughts drift back to the events on the planet. That was possibly the first time she’d ever truly given up on anything - and to give up on her own life? When Cam had visited her in the infirmary, he cut off anything she tried to say. She would have done the same; he just wanted to spare her the pain of going back over what happened. But she felt like she needed to say something. What, though, she wasn’t sure. But she didn’t like that Cam had seen her like that: weak.
She spent two weeks laying in the infirmary bed, growing increasingly restless. And increasingly confused. She had little entertainment or work to distract her - the general had expressly forbidden anyone to bring her one of her laptops, and no amount of bribing or begging worked on anyone, even Vala. Though Vala had brought her some magazines to “bring her mood up,” several of which were full of naked men. That hadn’t helped. Well, much. So instead, Sam spent a lot of her time staring at the wall, worrying her lip, and replaying her conversations with Cam over and over.
She wondered why it bothered her so much. The others on her team had seen her in weak moments before. Watched her failures, or held her while she cried. But Cam seemed to idolize her, in a way. At first she’d brushed it off as simply a sort of hero worship after finding out about her contributions to SG-1. She knew that it had surprised and impressed him to find out that old nerdy Sam Carter from all those years ago had gone on to save the world once or twice. But as they worked together, she could tell his hero worship had changed into something more like a real appreciation. Rather than being impressed by the details from some old reports, he got to know her, the person behind the reputation. And Sam appreciated that. Sometimes she was never able to get past Colonel Blew-Up-A-Sun-Once Carter with some people. Sam wanted him to know her. After her relationship with Pete - its anticlimactic ending notwithstanding - she realized that it felt good for someone to know her as just Sam.
After two and a half weeks, she was released from the infirmary, although she was put on medical leave. The general insisted she go home and rest until she was 100 percent. Sam tried her big eye routine, promised that she could still get rest in her lab, smiled her biggest smile, but the general was not Jack - and oh how she missed him in that moment - and was much, much more difficult to persuade. Landry “graciously” escorted her off the base, with strict instructions not to come back for a week.
Sam had spent all of 3 hours at home before growing bored. And before she knew it, she was at Cam’s front door, ringing the doorbell, with a dvd gripped tightly in her hand.
“Sam!” His eyes lit up and he wore a huge smile. “Great to see you up and around!”
She smiled back, her stomach doing a tiny flip-flop. Oh, Jesus, she thought to herself. She had been on autopilot the whole way here, her brain not really catching up to her body until this moment, when Cam smiled at her and her world tilted. You’re in a mess now, Samantha.
Cam ushered her inside, all but pushing her down onto the couch, fussing over the pillow behind her, running off to fetch her a drink. She usually hated this kind of attention, but somehow, it didn’t feel so bad coming from Cam. It felt almost natural.
“What’s that you got?” He asked after bringing her a glass of iced tea.
“Well, I’ve been informed that I needed to see this,” she said, holding it out to him. He took it from her and started laughing.
“The Princess Bride! Oh, Samantha, you are in for a treat,” he grinned and moved around to set up the dvd to play.
***
She didn’t know what she had expected from the movie. The blurb on the back, which she’d quickly scanned, didn’t seem encouraging. But she ended up enjoying it. But it might have been partly due to the company. Cam laughed at every funny moment, sometimes almost before it happened - he must have seen this movie quite a few times before - and his laugh was infectious. Sam found herself giggling quite a few times, ignoring the twinges of pain that the action sparked in her abdomen.
Over the course of the film, she’d first kicked off her shoes and put her feet up. Then she’d found herself sliding down the couch until her feet were almost touching Cam’s leg. At some point, he’d pulled her feet into his lap, and there was more than one moment where Sam had been distracted from Westley’s adventures by Cam’s warm hand on her ankle, absentmindedly tracing patterns into her skin, sending tingles up her legs and back down again.
While the credits were playing, Cam stretched and made a grunt of pleasure from the action. He was always so comfortable around her. Sam found she liked it. She thought she could lay here forever, her feet warm in Cam’s lap, the dimming light of the setting sun outside and watching silly movies. She wondered the last time she’d felt this content. Not since Pete; early in the relationship, anyway. So... years.
“Thanks, Cam,” she offered. He looked at her, and she willed him to see the real meaning she had behind the words. Not just a shared movie on one late afternoon, but for sticking with her on her self-imposed death bed, for refusing to let her give up, no matter how much she had tried. She wanted to say these words, but old shut-up-and-bear-it habits that the military had instilled in her over the years were hard to get over.
But he seemed to get it; at least she thought he did. “Anytime,” he said. He put a hand on her knee. “Hungry?” He asked.
She wondered when the last time it was that he felt content. She knew before joining SG-1 he’d spent a long, unhappy time in the hospital and doing rehab. She wondered if it had also been years for him. Sam wondered if he felt as content now as she did.
“Starved.”