The woman called Maggie Clark frowned at the box of generic Fruit Loops before tossing them resignedly into her cart. It would be more accurate to say the woman who the cashier after squinting at her printed receipt and glancing at her purchases that all too clearly spelled out she was shopping for only one would call Ms. Clark or, lacking even that much interest, ma'am frowned at the box of generic Fruit Loops. Because no one called her by name, hers or the one printed in bold, black letters on the driver's license they'd provided her.
Not even Daniel. Daniel 'Johnson' who'd at least been left a semblance of his identity because he hadn't died in Technicolor on national news in a manner that made his name a household word for a day or two. When they spoke on the phone, he avoided calling her by either name, neatly sidestepping breaking their proscribed rules while refusing to call her by a name which wasn't hers.
And not Cam who'd managed to keep his name in its entirety because no one else in this timeline apparently had ever seen fit to lay claim to it. He didn't call, and when she forced herself to check in on him from time to time, he mumbled something unintelligible into the receiver that was something between Colonel, Sam, and Maggie. Maybe or maybe it was nothing at all. She really couldn't tell.
The relocation team had thought they were doing her a favor when they'd planted her in the midst of a city full of disinterested strangers. "The likelihood someone will recognize you and create an incident is substantially lower in the city," they'd stated authoritatively. But, they'd been wrong.
The cashiers who took the time to actually look at her instead of her purchases passing over their scanners would frown in a vague sort of unsettled recognition when she passed through their lines. Some of them would look behind her at the tabloids in the racks as though trying to place where they'd seen her face before. Librarians would smile over her stack of books and periodicals and murmur, "You look remarkably like..." and then they'd let the words trail off and shake their heads apologetically at their mistake.
Whenever she forced herself out of the apartment, someone was bound to do a double take at the sight of her. It was a never ending procession of mistaken identity--or not, depending on how you looked at it--here in the city where a million or so folks rubbed shoulders with another million or so strangers yesterday, today, and tomorrow and because of sheer numbers never grew accustomed to the faces that they passed.
They should have dropped her in small-town America where the people would grow used to her remarkable resemblance to a dead celebrity soon enough. After a time, they would have seen Maggie Clark when they looked at her and not Samantha Carter that astronaut who died when the Endeavour crashed into the Atlantic.
And maybe, someone might have called her by name and found a way to break through the oppressive wall that cut her off from them. Maybe. If they'd been strong enough to reach through her lassitude, her indifference, her apathy. Her depression.
"Get to the Gate," he'd said and then he'd died. And nothing she'd been through in the past year, not the loss of everything she knew, not the loss of herself, her career, her purpose in life, nor the loss of the few people who had been left her had lessened that pain or numbed the utter hopelessness in which she'd lived--if you could call what she was doing living anyway--since then.
He was dead. And for all she knew the life she wasn't quite living was horribly wrong, she couldn't change it. Couldn't hope to backtrack through time and gain back her own life let alone his. As long as she lived, she'd continue to wake up in a world where he was dead and a world where the man he was--if he lived at all--was not the man he had been. And there was nothing she could do about it.
The woman, who would have been called Maggie Clark if anyone would have bothered to try to learn her name, bit her lip, ducked her head to avoid meeting the eyes of another stranger who thought they knew her from somewhere, and walked out of the store leaving behind her shopping cart with its paltry contents.
The box of Fruit Loops lay where she'd tossed it haphazardly into the cart, a clue to a life torn from time and tossed just as haphazardly into this world. She wouldn't have eaten them anyway; she couldn't stand their garish colors or their sweet crunchiness. They were a connection to a man who might or might not exist somewhere in this world but who definitely no longer lived in the world she could never regain. He'd contentedly crunched his way through huge mouthfuls of them in a time forever lost. She'd thought for a moment looking at the bright package that she wanted the reminder of him, but she'd been wrong.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+
"Hey," Daniel said when he'd answered the phone.
She'd clutched the phone tightly in her hand and found she had nothing to say. She hadn't called to talk. She'd called to hear his familiar voice. To know she wasn't alone in this world.
"You okay?" he asked quietly, gently after only silence had come from her end of the line.
"I...I think...I...I...feel...like disappearing, Daniel," she said in reply.
"What do you mean?" he asked alarmed. "You'd never make it."
"Not that," she said, "not running disappearing."
"Then what?"
"I feel like I'm disappearing...dissipating like fog. Like I'm being wiped from time. Dissolving into nothingness."
He sighed and she could hear it so clearly over the connection that she felt the warm puff of breath against her cheek. And she knew she should have called Cam instead. Cam who had managed somehow to find a purpose of sorts in this world and who wouldn't put up with her melancholy. Not Daniel who had in very obvious ways lost even more than she had.
But it was too late. For a moment, he didn't say anything, and then with finality and intense regret he said, "We wouldn't be so lucky."
Heliopolis Main Archive
A Stargate: SG-1 Fanfiction Site
Endless Realities
by OffworlderStory Bemerkung:
This piece picks up a year after the death of Jack O'Neill in the original timeline and presumes that events unfolded pretty much like they were shown in the movie except it was Frank Cornwell leading the team that rescued Sam and Mitchell. SG-1 did not meet up with the Jack O'Neill of the altered timeline at all. There are a few other variations as well. Some because I didn't rewatch the movie often enough to catch where I made a change until it was too late and some just because that's how the story went.Site Navigation
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