Small Graces: Daniel
by Rowan Darkstar
Summary: "He knew it was inevitable something would break her."
Category: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Series
Season: Season 7
Pairing(s): Daniel/Sam, Jack/Sam
Rating: AO
Content: rape/non consensual sex, sex, sexual situations, torture
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. I have written this story for entertainment purposes only and no money whatsoever has exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author(s).
Archived on: 04/12/05
TIMELINE: Season 7, after "Fallen", before "Grace"
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is a little darker than my usual, so be warned and don't make assumptions based on my byline. This story may be read as a stand-alone, but it is most likely there will be three companion stories, each telling the experience from a different character's POV, and filling in the events (Daniel, Teal'c, Jack, then Sam).
Endless thanks to my incredibly fast betas: Teddy E (for reading it without a paper sack), annaK (for making me do it right), and Strix (for making me feel all warm and fuzzy and boosting my confidence:))
SMALL GRACES: DANIEL by Rowan Darkstar (rowan_d1@yahoo.com) Copyright (c) 2005
He knew it was inevitable something would break her. They had all been through hell on some kind of endless repeat cycle for years. Everyone knew they couldn't last forever. Even if the moments between--of hockey games and blue Jell-O on Sam's nose and beer and team night at O'Malley's with Murray in a cowboy hat--were gold. They had each other. The world counted on them every day. They got up and went to work, taping the pieces together best they could, missing a few bits around the edges now and then, but hoping no one would notice.
It was inevitable they would each shatter in their own time, scattering the pieces too wide and too tiny to be patched together in a couple of days with MacKenzie.
Daniel neared the break point himself a few times; ended up sobbing in Jack's arms on the supply room floor, found himself on the wrong edge of narrow ledges. But he managed the magical cohesion born of need, and he healed what he could on the fly.
Teal'c nearly broke when he lost his Jaffa strength, when he surrendered his symbiote. He rose again, whole in a different way.
Sam took everything the universe threw at her. She withdrew or bitched or swung from one to the other, but she never faded for more than a day. She never broke.
P3X-925 shattered her. And even then it was hard to see.
They were all taken prisoner. A rogue Goa'uld neither the SGC nor the Tok'ra had heard of, caught them off guard mere minutes through the Stargate.
A Goa'uld who was a little less than sane, even for a Goa'uld.
A Goa'uld who took endless pleasure in the torture of his prisoners.
A Goa'uld who was known for taking out his aggressions against his lot in life (ruling a meager following on the outskirts of the galaxy)--upon the women in his possession.
SG-1 was held captive for 11 days. Daniel and Jack and Teal'c endured extensive pain, were strung up on crude torture devices and left to bleed on cold and filth-ridden floors. Sam endured the same.
And then more.
The Goa'uld--Summanus, according to his Jaffa, Roman god of the night sky, night lightning--he tired of his male prisoners in a few days. Sam--he took away.
He kept her chained in his private quarters. He used her as he wished. Sam is physically strong, but a Goa'uld is stronger. And she had hardly eaten for days. She was left at his mercy.
Daniel knows her official report barely scratches the surface of her time in that room. He's not sure he wants the longer version. The one on his desk made him cry.
Another SG team came for them on Day 10. The eight of them fought their way out, escaped alive. Jack carried Sam out of the stronghold, wrapping her in an Air Force issue blanket from Col. Burton's pack to stop her violent shivers. She came fully conscious before they reached the Gate, insisted upon walking the last few hundred yards.
Jack's arm around her waist carried the bulk of her weight.
But she left P3X-925 on her own two feet.
They knew this mattered.
They have all grown intimately knowledgeable in the little things that keep the damage to a minimum, the small graces that help the tape do its job in the morning after.
Easy to see it should have been Teal'c's massive arms and steady strength carrying the weight of their injured teammate out of her private hell, not the fifty-something once-retired Colonel with the failing knees. But this was another of those little things; evident in Sam's white-knuckled grasp on Jack's tattered uniform, and the endless depths to Jack's eyes when he looked at her cuts and scars.
Daniel understands this.
He watches in the days that follow, while his friend tries to paste the pieces back together.
The glue isn't holding.
Jack notices it first. He orders Carter grounded from Gate travel for two weeks longer than the rest of them, but he doesn't banish her to leave. He knows she shouldn't be alone, and she shouldn't be idle. But Daniel is the one to realize this isn't enough.
He is the one painfully aware she is going through the motions and healing the physical wounds. She's doing all the therapy. She barely has a limp, anymore, and her shoulder is regaining full motion. She'll be cleared on her weapon in no time. She's acting the good little solider like she always has, from day one until the act can become real again--except this time...the illusion is thinning, and the reality isn't coming together.
He is sitting in her lab, working late, pouring over a translation from a techno-artifact SG-19 brought back and urgently requires intel on. His arm is against hers, because Sam is soft like that. She's never cared for personal space. Not with SG-1. She has been staring at the calculations in front of her for far too long. He taps the back of her knuckles with his own. "Hey. You okay?"
She draws a slow breath, stares into space. For a moment, he questions whether or not she even heard him. Then, she says, softly, "My shoulder hurts." In all the years he has known her, she has never sounded so small.
Two days later, he hears her in the Level 19 ladies' room, throwing-up the first real meal he's seen her eat in days. He hovers outside the door, both waiting to help (God knows how) and guarding her privacy from passersby.
She is startled to find him in the hallway.
"You okay?" he asks. Again. It's starting to sound wrong to his own ears.
She nods. Again. "I'm fine. It's just...a reaction to some of the meds I have to take." Which is so close to 'could-be-true' (pain-killers, antibiotics, post-rape cocktail), he doesn't have the guts to call it a lie.
"Are you keeping Janet in the loop? Are you sure you're getting enough to eat?"
"Yes, *Dad*," she says, and she attempts the grin and sweet blue eyes that usually win her the world. But she has no spirit and no humor to give, and her gesture is devoid of charm. She knows it. She starts to walk away.
Daniel reaches out and catches two of her fingers in his. He doesn't speak, only holds her gaze and her fingers and asks with silence.
She melts a bit. He glimpses the cracks and maybe the whisper of tears. "I'm fine," she says. "Really."
On Thursday, she walks out in the middle of a briefing; no warning, just an apology thrown in the General's direction, and a brisk and silent exit.
Jack looks at Hammond, his chair already shoved half back, his thighs tensed to spring. "General?"
"Go, Colonel." Jack is out the door faster than Sam
Daniel and Teal'c talk to Jack a half hour later. He tells them, in the quiet voice he uses when he doesn't want to hear his own words, that Carter had a flashback. He sent her home early.
Daniel pulls off his glasses, pinches the bridge of his nose and waits for the pain to go away.
He hears the slam of Jack's office door and feels sick at the sound.
Teal'c's arms are clasped behind his back, and Daniel can hear the rapid breaths. The alien across from him would rip Summanus to shreds with his bear hands, given less than half a chance.
On Friday night, Sam doesn't answer her phone when Daniel calls to ask her to dinner. She doesn't answer again when he calls before bed. He grabs his keys and drives to her house.
He waits a while, but she opens the door. She's still dressed. Tight jeans and a tighter tank top, an Oxford shirt loose and hanging open around her. Her hair is soft and gently mussed about her face. She has on a little make-up, and small gold earrings that catch the porch light. He is always fascinated by Sam in jewelry. He so rarely sees this side of her.
"Hey," he says, almost like an apology. "I probably shouldn't have just...dropped by, but I tried your phone, and..."
She looks a little guilty, glances away. "Oh. Yeah. I...turned off my phones, except for cell calls from the SGC."
Even now, she is the soldier, the warrior before all else.
"Everything okay?"
"Yeah. I just wanted...some quiet, you know?"
"Yeah....you want me to...disappear?"
She shakes her head. "No." And he hears the first hint of a tremor in her voice.
"Really?" His boyish insecurity shows before he can tuck it away.
She brushes at her forehead with the side of her hand, then hooks her thumb on her jeans' pocket. "All the hovering? It actually...*is* helping."
He feels more like 'her Daniel' than he has in weeks.
Half an hour later, and Sam is lying on her back in front of a golden fire, knees up and hands resting on her belly. He's sitting beside her, one knee raised and wine swirling in his glass. She's had a few glasses herself, but she's not drunk. He knows his Sam too well. She's a little flushed, a little dew-eyed and drowsy, but still able to recite the quadratic formula if he asked or delineate the reasons she can't be in love with her commanding officer.
He thinks he should stop with the wine himself, because he's starting to wish he could swing around and rest his head on the flat of Sam's stomach; he's having memories of Apophis and Phoenician number systems and the tang of Sam's perfume.
Yeah. Sam Carter wears perfume. Even on missions. At least the first day.
Sam lifts a hand to her forehead, rubs at the tension lines there, and he starts to feel the tight knot in the center of his stomach that cinches every moment he glimpses the hell eating her from the inside out.
He sets down his wine glass and stretches out on the rug beside her, knees up, parallel with hers. They talk about their first apartments, and Lieutenant Carlson's rusty blue Toyota, and how Daniel's paper boy almost knocked his elderly neighbor off the porch one morning with a mis-aimed Wall Street Journal. And Sam seems to be relaxing into the conversation. Smiling, almost, for fleeting moments.
So, she catches him completely off guard when she rolls into him, wraps her long arms around his neck, and cries like he has never heard.
Daniel holds on hard and buries his hand in her feather-soft hair. He kisses the taut tendons in her neck. "Sam. Oh, God, Sam. It's okay. It's okay." But it isn't, he knows it isn't. It's hell on Earth, it's Jolinar on Netu, and there's nothing Sam can do but keep breathing until it fades enough she can see the light again.
She presses her strong, soft body to his and he won't let go. She's trembling from deep inside. "He's all over me," she whispers, and her breath prickles his neck and his ear. "I can't get him off of me..." Daniel can barely sort the words from her hoarse sobs. His teeth ache.
"He's not here, Sam," he says, with all the confidence he can find. He speaks into her hair, breathes in her ear. "He's not here. Just us. Just my Sam. That's all I feel, all I smell. Just...you."
She pulls back to find his gaze, arms still around his body, and blue meets blue in the midnight firelight. He has less than a moment's warning as her gaze drops to his mouth, before she pushes forward and covers his lips with hers.
She tastes like wine and ice cream and sunshine on wooded planets. He's dizzy and lost before he scrambles back to his senses and pulls away with the pop of lost suction.
"Sam?"
"What?" She's breathless and tearful and her shirt is off her shoulders and he is viscerally aware of the deeply beautiful woman touching so much of his body.
"Sam, this isn't...you don't want this. Not now. Probably not ever."
"*Why?* You don't..."
He combs his fingers through her hair again, swallows the lump in his throat as he feels the flush of heat in her tear-stained skin, remembers her lips on his forehead when he was a hundred years old. "No, it's not...it's...because it's us, Sam," he says simply. "And because you...want someone else," he says, with all the kindness he has.
The tenderness rips down the last of her walls. She's crying again, she's like a child clinging to him, and he wants to hold onto her and never let go. But instead of speaking, instead of apologizing or reasoning or telling him she knows he's right, she pulls his mouth down to hers and kisses him hard and deep. Her leg wraps around the back of his, and he's suddenly far far too aware that the erection he could hardly avoid is pressing up against the crotch of Sam Carter's jeans. Heat is radiating off her in waves and her hands are gripping his clothing, pinching his skin, and he has never felt this much of her at once. He's drowning in Sam Carter. It's his Sam all around him, the arms and legs and stomach and breasts he works beside each day, yet he's in a world he's never been in before, because those last few inches mean the world, and Major Carter's gone and Samantha is driving her tongue down his throat and smearing her tears on his cheeks and sliding her hands beneath the shirt tail she has yanked from his slacks.
"Sam, stop!" He hates how hard he has to pull away. The last thing on Earth he wants is to hurt her.
"Don't," she pleads. "Don't. Daniel, please don't..." Her fingers are clinging to his shirt, and she's pulling his shoulder close to her face, breathing in his skin.
"Don't what, Sam?" he asks, still as gentle as his panting breath will allow.
"Don't...leave me alone."
"I'm right here, Sam. I'm not going anywhere."
"No, I...I need you."
"Sam. We can't do this. You're not ready...and you don't want me. Not... Sam, you're not the kind for casual sex. I know this, don't try to tell me otherwise. And you're not in love with me. But you *are* in love with someone else." They're not supposed to say this out loud, never out loud, but this is the last desperate edge and nothing can be held back without risking more loss.
She shakes her head against him. "No, I..." *am not too drunk to list the reasons I can't be in love with my commanding officer...*
"Yes, Sam. And he loves you. And I can't--"
"But you love me, right?" She is looking up at him again. The wide-eyed child who lost her mother.
*Oh, God.* "Sam, I--"
"No, not like...but just *me*. Samantha Carter. I'm someone you love, right?" And it's the hidden whisper of genuine question in her voice that finally breaks his heart. Breaks his will. How could she have fallen so far when everyone was watching?
Instinct takes over. He combs his fingers through her hair, caresses her damp cheek. "Sam. There is no one I love more." He realizes with something of a jolt, that his words are true. She's his family. Jack and Teal'c and Sam.
"Then be with me," she whispers, sniffing and brushing at her nose like a child.
"Sam, I love you, of course, I love you, but this isn't what you need right now. You need to--"
"What I need..." She's shaking so badly, he wants to crush her to him until the tremors quiet. She's like a leaf in the wind and she's supposed to be a warrior and it's china hearts and crystalline glass and she's delicate and blond and fragile and *God, Sam*... "What I need...is for the last person inside of me, to have been someone I love."
Three deep breaths in the golden light and the silence. And then he's kissing her as hard as she kissed him before. His hands are up under her tank top and her skin is like velvet and he pulls her against him, rolls her on top of him and her weight is solid and real and tender.
This is wrong. This is right. None of it makes sense anymore. But it's Daniel and Sam, and she's home to him in so many ways. She's the best friend he's ever had and he will *not* let her down, not like this. He is scared that he *is* letting her down with every needy touch of his hands, but he doesn't see any other way this can end tonight. The hard truth is, Sam's hitting rock bottom and he's the only soft thing left between her and the cruel gravel ground.
He tries not to notice the sharp stones ripping his back even as he cushions her softness above.
Their progress is hard and fast. Gentle and desperate and clinging. They tear away only the clothes they have to. She wants him touching the length of her body every moment. She wants his hands on every inch of her skin. Wants his imprint to melt the cruel touches and wipe her clean. He knows it won't work, but if it helps even a little...
Her jeans have been shoved away, and his hand is inside her silk panties. *Sam Carter wears silk panties*, but he doesn't want to get too involved, not in that way, because he's doing this for her; he has to remember his best friend has been tortured and repeatedly raped and she's crying out for help. He's helping her the only way he knows how; that's all.
He hopes he can bring her to climax with his hand, break her drive, before he has to carry things too far. But she won't have that and he knows it. Sam's too smart. She told him what she needs, and he wants to say it's wrong, but a part of him understands too completely.
He surrenders to her tugs at his pants, and he positions himself above her.
"Condom," he says.
She shakes her head, "No. Skin." But then, "Wait....yes... I know you're clean, Daniel. Besides trusting you, I know you've been cleared in Medical, but...I... They still have to test me again, in a few months... I can't get pregnant, I've had the shot, but you..."
He shakes his head, kisses her again. "No. You're okay. He was Goa'uld. He wouldn't have anything we need to worry about."
"We can't be positive, we can't..."
But this he understands; knows this is why the food hasn't stayed down. This part he can give her. He grabs her chin. "Sam. Look at me." She complies before she can think. The good little soldier following orders. "There's nothing--poison--in--you. Not you."
Her eyes fill. "Daniel..."
He silences her with one hand on her lips, one sliding across her clit, and she closes her eyes and gasps. Gradually, he eases his length inside her, and she doesn't have the strength to push him away.
She's so wired and so strung out and emotional, it doesn't take her long to be far-gone aroused. She almost loses the thread a few times. He can see her mentally jump from her living room carpet to the black floor in her nightmares, see her threatening to shove him away, then forcing herself into the present, sinking into the arousal. He tries not to watch too much, but she's beneath him and her skin is painted in firelight, and she has her head back, biting her lip and squeezing her eyes tight as she pants for breath; she looks just as he knew she would. So beautiful. So purely feminine. But, he's seen her tortured, and he knows there is always a similarity. The anthropologist in him knows this is where sado-masochism comes from. The man in him doesn't want to believe.
She pulls him against her and claws into his shoulder as she nears her climax. His is just around the corner. He hasn't done this in a while, after all, and he's skin on skin inside the most beautiful woman he's never kissed.
He knows she needs to go fast, before she can get mixed up in the memories, while she can still stay in the present and reclaim her life. He knows, in the end, she needs Jack. He knows this desperate need is the very reason she's not on the other side of town tonight. She loves Jack. A lover's touch should be washing away the hate. But he knows she doesn't want the opposites to meet. He understands she never wants Jack and the nightmare messed up in her head. But Daniel's different. Tonight she needs to make love to her best friend, not her coveted lover. She's not in love with Daniel Jackson. He wishes he could be certain of the same in return. But tonight is not about him. It can't be.
He's letting this happen. Seven years and they've never let anything cross the lines. None of the foursome has broken the rules. They've never let the powder-keg explode. But Daniel's letting this happen, and he knows it's not the end of the world; hopes it's not the end of *their* world.
She comes like a hurricane and screams past his ear and digs her nails into his back. He climaxes inside her, because she holds him tight to her hips and won't let him pull away. She wants his mark inside her. Wants to wash it all away. He gets it.
They end in tears. But she still doesn't let go.
Neither does he.
Because Sam Carter's falling tonight. And he's the only soft thing between her and the ground.
*****
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