[Stargate SG-1] Present Tense
Title: Present Tense
Author: telepathicpixie
Rating: PG
Character: Samantha Carter
Word Count: 515
Notes: 100_women prompt #7 - present. Spoilers for Continuum.
Summary: It’s funny, but she’s not laughing.


It’s funny how the past changed everything, but the present is the only thing that matters. The past, as important as it might be--or had been--or will be--in the grand scheme of things, might as well be a dream at this point. The future, for her, doesn’t exist, because even if she keeps on living and going forward in time, it will never cease to be anything but this never-ending hellish now.

She’s not going anywhere, physically, emotionally, intellectually…

She tries different jobs before giving up, because she can’t be a secretary or an insurance agent or a fry cook; she just lives on the government’s money and fills up stacks of notebooks with wormhole calculations and advanced astrophysics. She eats Fruit Loops just to prolong the aching place in her heart that tells her, once upon a time, Jack O’Neill wasn’t the man on the sub. She watches documentaries about herself and feels nothing when she sees footage of the crash where she died, but she turns her head at Southern accents and nearly chases after a dark-skinned man who almost looks like someone else and buys rhinestone barrettes she never wears. She purchases a discount book on the pyramids and never looks at the back cover, because having a picture of someone she knows but has never met is worse than not having any pictures at all.

Sometimes, she sits out in the yard and stares up at the sky and thinks about Abydos and Langara and Cimmeria and the Land of Light and wonders if they’re better or worse off for not having met anyone from Earth. She wonders if Sam-the-astronaut’s father died of cancer, if Mark is still married with kids, and if Jack would think Charlie was a fair trade for his team. She thinks about Jonas Hansen and Janet Fraiser and Charlie Kawalsky and considers trying to find them, because they weren’t on the list of people to never speak to again—only because nobody thought to mention them—but decides she would only feel more selfish, seeing them alive and still wanting things back the way they were.

She wonders if Sha’re is still alive somewhere and then wonders if Daniel ever wonders.

Mostly, she wonders how long it will take her to finally go completely crazy. She thinks she’ll just start screaming the truth in the middle of the grocery store one day and the government will come and lock her away forever. Ba’al couldn’t have dreamed up a better punishment for SG-1—or almost half of them, anyway—if he’d orchestrated the whole nightmare himself, but giving him credit for this particular hell would be too generous. He’s the reason behind it, but he didn’t create it.

At the moment, though, she’s still pretending this reality is really real—which it is, after all, but it’s not and it never will be reality to her. She thinks she can keep on managing, so long as she focuses on living in the present she’s been confronted with instead of remembering the past and future she no longer has.


Table here.