Title: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Author: Bree
Rating: PG
Spoilers: vague reference to The Devil You Know.
Summary: A tragic accident leaves twelve-year-old Samantha Carter in a coma, and the adult Sam can no longer tell the difference between past and present.
Notes: Kind of a strange, silly fic. The title is from T.S. Eliot.
“Watch this!”
Julia squealed with delight as she folded her arms across her chest and spun around and around, her skates making a rhythmic scratching sound on the ice.
Sam laughed. In a week, it would be Christmas, and both girls wore red ribbons and tiny gold bells in their hair. Her mother had been wrapping presents in the chill of the afternoon, and she had adorned them both before they bounded out of the house. Julia’s bells jingled as she did her spins.
“Show-off!”
Her friend stopped abruptly, giggling and red-faced. “What can you do, Sam?”
“Well,” Sam answered, zigzagging up and down the frozen pond. “I’m faster than you, for one thing.”
She took off rapidly, skating the length of the pond and back again. Julia stayed close on her heels, still squealing. They made it five times around before Sam had to stop and catch her breath, which materialized in little white puffs. It took a few seconds for her to notice that it had become eerily silent.
“Julia?” she asked, turning behind her. There was no one there, only the ice and snow, a blinding blend of white. “Julia!" She said again, becoming worried.
Two small, gloved hands flailed above the ice. Sam screamed.
Instantly, she was on her knees, grabbing Julia’s outstretched arms. But her friend’s heavy winter coat and skates pulled her down beneath the water, and she lost her grip. Sam pulled off her own coat and skates and insanely, instinctively fell in after her.
She grabbed Julia’s collar and tried to hoist her towards the surface, or at least keep her from sinking further. Sam had never been this cold--the water stung and stiffened her limbs. She wasn’t strong enough to help Julia, and she could only watch her terrified eyes widen as she gasped for air and got none.
“Sam! Girls!” Someone cried from above them, though Sam could not understand the words. She managed to glance upwards at the blur that was Jacob Carter. Sam wondered briefly how he could have gotten there so fast. There were others with him, holding his legs as he put his face in the water and offered her a long plank of wood that looked as if it had been broken from the fence at the front of the Carter property. He was gesturing wildly with his other hand for her to grab it.
Sam turned back to Julia. Her eyes were still open, but they seemed to stare at nothing. Her arms no longer reached for Sam. They floated slack. Frightened, Sam released her and took hold of the plank of wood. Within seconds, she was gulping mouthfuls of air and burying her head in Jacob’s warm embrace.
“I need blankets!” Jacob shouted, pulling her out of the way so the other men could try and pull Julia out of the ice. “I need to get her warm!”
Her stomach hurt, and she twisted to her side, expecting to throw up. But she didn’t. Her head was next, and the dull ache started at the base of her skull and spread so rapidly that her vision blurred.
“Sam? Can you hear me?” asked her father.
He sounded very far away, and she could barely feel the pressure of his arms around her. The white of the ice filled her eyes. “Sam! Say something!”
Without warning, the white turned to black.
Jacob and Emma Carter sat side by side, watching their daughter sleep. The only sounds in the stale hospital room were the muffled clicks and hums of the machines. Sam’s face was devoid of color. Her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of her soft breathing.
The doctor, a red-headed man in his thirties, entered quietly and lowered his head, the sympathy plain on his face. “Colonel and Mrs. Carter,” he said gently.
“Dr. Lavery,” said Jacob, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “How is she?”
“I’m afraid she’s in a coma.”
“This just isn’t possible,” said Emma. “She couldn’t have been under that water for more than a few minutes!”
Dr. Lavery glanced at the little girl and furrowed his brow. “There’s every reason to believe that she’ll wake up, and she’ll be fine. Her body temperature is back to normal. All we can do is wait.”
“Am I going to die?” she asked.
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
She hadn’t meant it to be one, and yet she had not expected an answer. It was still so dark and quiet, she assumed she was alone.
“Where are we?”
There was a pause. A wonderfully cool breeze caressed her face.
“P8X-747. Not much of a vacation spot, but they got fish! Sure, most of them have two heads, but as long as both are bitin’--”
Her companion flicked on his flashlight. Sam turned and regarded a handsome, gray-haired man in fatigues. “That’s . . . nice, Sir.” She smiled uncertainly.
She knew him. She could see his face under hundreds of strange skies. Joking, angry, baffled, and tense. He reminded her of one of her father’s military friends, with eyes haunted by all that he had seen and done. And here they stood together, in a cave filled with oddly-colored rocks and faded hieroglyphics of some sort.
“Am I going to die?” she asked again.
The man she now recognized as Colonel Jack O’Neill placed a hand on her shoulder. Only her shoulder was much higher than it used to be, and a lifetime of memories she hadn’t yet acquired swam like two-headed fish in her head.
“No, Carter. You’re not gonna die. You can’t die.”
The dim light seeping in from the opening to the cave was suddenly eclipsed by a great shadow.
“Colonel O’Neill, Major Carter, I believe I have located the source of the energy signature you detected earlier.”
Jack squeezed her shoulder. It was a comforting gesture, though Sam was no less confused. “What’s going on . . .”
The Colonel frowned and turned to the shadow in the opening. “We’ll be right there, Teal’c.”
Julia’s mother crept into the room, clutching her patent leather purse with white knuckles. Her red hair was coming loose from its chignon, and thin tendrils fell across her pale face and red-rimmed eyes. “Oh Sammie,” she whispered helplessly at the sight of the child.
“I want to thank you,” she murmured gently, stroking Sam’s clammy forehead. “Your father told me what you did for Julia.” Saying her daughter’s name out loud cause the tears to start flowing again. “You couldn’t have helped her, you know, there was nothing you could have done. But I’m never going to forget it, honey. Never.”
She bit back her sob and bent over to kiss Sam on the cheek. “I hope you wake up, Sammie.”
“Hope you wake up,” she said to herself. Hope I wake up.
“She is quite dead, Major Carter,” Teal’c observed, a slightly puzzled expression clouding his rigid face. He knelt beside the young girl in the faded peasant dress, whose flaxen hair tippled like silk beneath her, and he closed her terrified eyes.
“Was it that thing that killed her?” she pointed to the multicolored orb which rotated like a tiny sun on its intricate silver stand. It whirred and hummed with the force of the energy it was emitting.
“Sounds like a fair guess to me,” Jack answered.
Sam looked from the orb to the colonel and back again. Her blood was suddenly very cold. The world turned on its side, and she collapsed to the ground.
“Carter!” Jack cried, and instantly he and Teal’c were on either side of her, helping her up.
Jack studied her face, and he suddenly understood. “Carter, did you touch that thing? Did you? Answer me!”
She regarded him blankly. It was amazing how there were some things he just knew. Problems, puzzles, equations . . . he never bothered with them. But there were some things Jack O’Neill just knew. He wasn’t one to bother figuring it out, not like her and--
“Where’s Daniel?” was all she managed to say.
“There’s a strange energy coming off her,” Dr. Lavery said. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Samantha Carter was flat lining. All about her, nurses and hospital staff ran back and forth, and someone charged the paddles.
“I don’t understand! She was going to be all right . . .” Jacob Carter said helplessly. In the dim early morning, for two weeks straight, he had come to the hospital and watched over Sam.
He was gently pushed to the back of the room.
“Charge!” said Dr. Lavery.
A jolt of electricity spread through her body, battling the strange energy for supremacy.
“What happened?” she murmured faintly.
She was lying on her back, and two big, round suns hovered in the sky above her. God, she needed help. A man’s face eclipsed the light. He was younger than the Colonel, with softer features. His two bright blue eyes blinked helplessly through glasses dotted with beads of perspiration.
“The villagers call it the Memory Orb. I’ve been doing some research while you guys were in the caves. It was designed by the Goa’uld that used to control this planet as some sort of torture device, similar to the Tok'ra's memory recall device. It takes you back to a time when your life was in danger.“
“There’s been a few of those.”
“It finds you at your weakest. It . . . kills you in the past in order to kill you in the present.”
Daniel, he was Daniel. His words sounded farther and farther away, and she could barely feel him shaking her. Like her father when he had pulled her out of the ice.
“There was an accident,” she told him. “Someone died.”
“But not you, Sam! You have to remember. That’s the only way to beat it!”
“Remember what?”
“That you‘re alive!”
I’m alive. I’m alive. I lived to be a fully grown woman, a fully capable soldier. Ready, willing, and able to take lots more stupid, impossible risks to save her friends.
“The energy emissions are dissipating,” Dr. Lavery breathed. “Amazing.”
The nurses backed away from Sam, who tossed and turned as if trying to awake from a nightmare.
“I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive,” she said.
Jacob Carter made a joyous noise and sprang to her bedside to cradle his daughter in his arms. “Yes you are, honey. Yes you are.”
Sam opened her eyes and looked up at her father. “I was dreaming.”
“About what, Sammie?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t remember.”
_______________________________________________________
“I’m okay. I’m going to be all right.”
Daniel helped her to her feet, and she met the bewildered stares of Jack and Teal’c.
“Sir, I’m going to say something I don’t often say, and I think you’ll appreciate it.”
“What’s that, Carter?”
Half-leaning on Daniel, she pointed at the humming orb. “Blow it up.”
Jack grinned and nodded in agreement.
“So what were you remembering?”
Daniel asked her, the curiosity spilling out of him.
Sam frowned. “A friend and I were skating, and we fell through some thin ice when I was little. I was in a coma for two weeks. And it’s so funny, I hardly even think about it now.”
Jack and Teal’c were proving they could break out the C4 without her help. “You better take her back through the Gate, Daniel,” Jack said. “Get Frasier to have a look at her.”
Sam and Daniel both nodded, and they headed back into the trees towards the Stargate. She glanced back at the orb, and at the body of the girl who hadn’t escaped its trap. She wondered what memory had dragged her down with it. There were some things you should never forget, and some things you hope you never will.
