Unrequited

by Sam Walker

He loved them.

Loved them all, really. Not in the same ways. For different things. But he loved them, with a deep heartachy yearning that scared him.

He loved the way Sam bullied him to eat right and sleep sometimes and not stay up all night, and then went and got involved in whatever he was doing or he got involved in whatever she was doing and the next thing they knew it was morning and Jack was giving them that paternal "You been reading under the covers AGAIN?" look. He loved that. He loved that she cared.

He loved the way Jack could switch from officer to friend to delinquent screw-up brother to wannabe father-figure in the blink of an eye. He loved that they could finish each other's sentences. He loved that Jack could be happy enough to see him that he'd hug him in a room full of marines and call him Spacemonkey, whatever that meant. He loved that Jack touched his heart in ways he'd never felt before.

He loved Teal'c too, perhaps even more because by all rights he shouldn't. He loved the solid dependability of the man, the way he could speak volumes in a single phrase or gesture, the way he could take Jack out at the knees with a single look. Whoever said Teal'c didn't have a sense of humor just didn't know him very well. He loved that there was nothing overdone about Teal'c. Everything was economical, and spare, and carefully considered. Whatever Teal'c did he did for reasons. He loved that Teal'c was knowable and unknowable, an enigma and an open book.

So yes, he loved them. Probably more than he should, in this man's Air Force, but what the hell he wasn't really in this man's Air Force anyway. That was what he told himself, on the dark days when he realized he was more of a soldier than an archaeologist, when he remembered a time when his only ambition had been to make Sha're laugh.

He had killed people. He never wanted to remember that. But he figured as long as Sam and Jack and Teal'c loved him, he was still basically okay.

And then something changed. Jack stopped finishing his sentences. Sam stopped coming by late at night to harass him about working, because Sam was busy and it wasn't with work anymore either. Teal'c became more of an enigma and less of an open book, because all of a sudden Daniel realized that just maybe Teal'c would give up Earth and the Tau'ri for a chance at vengeance. He could even pin down the day they had stopped being a team. One day Sam and Jack and Teal'c stepped through the gate after nine days on another planet, nine days of him worrying himself sicker that maybe they were dead, and all of a sudden they were an impenetrable three-person team that had just saved the world. They had in-jokes he didn't understand, plans that didn't include him, a new wavelength he couldn't tune into.

He tried not to mind, because he loved them and that had to mean something.

It got worse. At night when he did his watch, he would try to think of all the things that were wrong, made little lists of them in his head as if by going through the list and fixing them one by one the whole situation would get better. He stopped complaining that he never got to do anything archaeological anymore, because maybe it sounded strident and obnoxious. He tried to stop talking so much about archaeology and linguistics, because Jack always glazed over and even Sam looked bored, but he didn't really have anything else to talk about. He got quiet. Maybe he was talking too much in general and he should just stop. It hurt more than he was expecting when he realized that nobody had noticed.

Eventually he just stopped trying. He did what was expected of him and no more. He traveled with his hand on the butt of his gun and didn't pester Jack to let him check out distant formations. He didn't rock the boat. After a while he realized he was dying, slowly, from the inside out, but by that point he didn't really care enough to make an issue of it.

Every once in a while he would pull out the little snapshots he had in his head, and remember what it was like way back when. He ran through them one by one: Sha're's laugh, the light in Sam's eyes when she figured something out, the strong warmth of Jack's arms around him, the smell of the candle wax in Teal'c's quarters when they meditated together.

He still loved them, maybe even more now than he had in the beginning. But he wasn't all that sure anymore that they loved him back.

Somewhere along the way, Daniel Jackson had gotten lost.

"Sam," he said to her once, leaning against the counter in her lab, "promise me something. Promise you'll never forget me." She turned puzzled eyes in his direction and gave him a slightly awkward confused smile. He smiled back, to ease the tension, and she ended up taking it as a joke. She didn't promise.

"Y'okay?" Jack asked cursorily as he wandered through Daniel's office on his way to lunch.

"I'm tired, Jack," he said. He was tired of fighting and losing. Tired of losing without fighting. Tired of throwing himself daily against a brick wall he couldn't see or touch. Just tired.

"Get some sleep," Jack said kindly, and left for lunch. Which really said it all, as far as Daniel was concerned.

"Unrequited love," he told Teal'c later. Teal'c raised his eyebrow and said nothing.

Then one day they went on an archaeological mission, an honest-to-goodness archaeological mission. At least, that was what he told himself. Really, it was a quest for more technology, better toys to kill people with, but there was an archaeologist to talk to and nobody to kill and that was really all he was aiming for these days. But beside the archaeologist there was a bomb, and an accident, and his gun was back in his hand because his words had failed him once too often and this time he was damn well going to take a page out of Jack's book and speak louder than words. He stood over the bomb, hands seared and useless for writing, body irradiated and useless for anything, and realized with a bitter irony that all he had left now were the words. Everything else had been burned out.

And oh, he loved the way they came through. He loved Sam for crying, he loved Jack for not being able to say anything, he loved Teal'c for saluting. He loved them so much he thought his heart would break and it hurt more than he ever thought it could possibly hurt to leave them behind, but he knew in his soul of souls that he had never been a part of them. They would go on without him like they had gone on before him and he loved them for that too and he thought, as he walked up the ramp away from Jack's stunned face, Sam's tears, and Teal'c's desperate stoicism, that just maybe they kind of loved him back a little too.

And that was enough, really. In the end, that was enough.

FINIS

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