[Moments of Adoration]

This is a VERY belated birthday gift for Claira. So belated it might be considered an early birthday gift. But she still owes me $10. Many, many thanks to Tammy and Karen, betas of much fabulousness.

Every morning for the last four months (since cool metal pressed against her skin and long, impossibly long, fingers caressed her face, forcing in in in), Sam has sat on the edge of the bed or lain in her sleeping bag and run her fingers through her hair, over and over. Sometimes she pinches the inside of her arm until it welts bright red, and she has to blink back tears.

On the mornings she wakes up next to Pete, she breaks the skin.

|| Tuesday's child is full of grace ||

Three days after the general sat in her lab and told her what happened with the Replicator wasn't her fault, Sam is standing in his office and he is playing with his pen.

There should be more, she knows. Official reprimands and black marks in her file, but all he says is, "I want you to take some time, Carter. And I want you to talk to someone." His voice is soft with disappointment, and it cuts deep; she won't feel it until she walks out the door.

|| Wednesday's child is full of woe ||

She's tired, empty. She scrapes at a smudge on the arm of the chair with her thumbnail and pretends that MacKenzie can't see right through her.

MacKenzie leafs through her report about the incident with the Replicator, and Sam counts how long it takes him to read each page. He is fifteen seconds into page nine when he dog ears the corner of the page and holds the folder out to her.

"Please read this aloud, Colonel."

"I'm sorry, what?" I understand more than you know, Sam.

"I want you to read this to me."

"But..." On paper she had recounted the sequence of events in crisp, stark, tactical details, removing herself from the equation - correspondent, not performer. But after all these years MacKenzie knows her codes, is adept at reading between the lines she draws around herself. And he is still holding the folder out to her.

You know me as well as I know you.

"I..." Sam runs her fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck. MacKenzie's gaze follows the motion and she jerks her hand away and snatches the folder from him. "'In an effort to salvage any pertinent intelligence, I intervened before Teal'c used the disruptor, and I allowed the Replicator to interface with my mind to better understand what it feared. The Replicator showed me a scene wherein it was tortured, was encouraged to terminate certain SGC personnel in an effort to distance itself from my personal and professional ties to those individuals. Upon completion of the interface, I tried to convince the Replicator that its destruction was not immediately necessary, and that with its assistance we would have the resources to protect it and to stop Fifth's invasion plan.'"

She snaps the folder shut and presses it into her lap, staring down at her hands. There's still bruising around her wrist from the Replicator's fingers digging into her skin.

"Colonel. Sam."

There's something there, some edge of acceptance in his voice that compels her to look up. When she does, he says, "Who were you really trying to protect?"

After she leaves the session, Sam sits in her car in the base parking lot, shaking, and calls MacKenzie's office to cancel her next appointment.

|| Thursday's child has far to go ||

Sam leaves Pete a message at five-thirty the next morning, using the not-quite lie of "Work, again" for canceling their weekend plans, and she's on her bike, on the road before the sun rises.

She stays on I25 South until her shoulders ache and her fingers cramp on the throttle. Arrey, New Mexico (twenty miles south of Truth or Consequences, and that pulls a bitter smile to her lips), is small, but there are three restaurants and she sits in one and downs three glasses of water. A placard on the wall informs her that Urbano Arrey was the town's first postmaster, and that the post office opened in 1901 and never closed.

The shrilling of her phone interrupts the waitress taking her order, and Sam points to some random sandwich on the menu before flipping the phone open. "Carter."

She's a little surprised to hear Teal'c's deep voice respond. "Colonel Carter, it is I."

"Teal'c. Is everything okay?"

"Indeed. I only wished to inform you that Daniel Jackson has returned from his trip." If it weren't so unusual for him to call her like this, she might have missed the forced quality of nonchalance in his announcement. "While they were not successful with the primary objective, O'Neill assures me that you will find some measure of entertainment in Daniel Jackson's report."

"Well, thanks, Teal'c. Tell Daniel I'll give him a call in a few days."

"I will pass along the message." And then, "You are well?"

Sam wishes suddenly, fiercely, that he were there beside her even as she lies to him. "Sure. Just fine."

When she hangs up, she turns off the phone and stares out the window, wondering how far she can get before dark.

|| Friday's child is loving and giving ||

Sam calls the general from El Paso, Texas, at three in the morning, after waking tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, her throat sore and her eyes burning.

"I'm resigning," she says as soon as she hears the sleepy rough-voiced snarl of "O'Neill. "

"What? Carter? What in the hell are you talking about? Where are you? "

"I can't do this anymore."

"Carter-"

She cuts him off. "I don't have perspective. I'm not doing this right anymore. I can't do this right anymore. I can't make appropriate decision, I act without any regard to appropriate protocol and-"

"For Christ's sake, Carter, stop it."

"General." She knows her words are spilling out too fast, mimicking the hysterical pace of her thoughts. She breathes deep and tries again. "You can't tell me you don't agree with that assessment of my behavior."

"Fine. Do you want me to tell you that you fucked up? That I can't believe how incredibly stupid you were? That after the decisions you made about the damn Replicator I have serious doubts about your competency? " Fury has burned the last blur of sleep from his voice and it rings sharp in her ear.

"You let misplaced guilt and some asinine ideal of compassion over-rule your judgment and you made the wrong fucking call. Is that what you wanted to hear, Carter?"

"Yes," she says, and hangs up and turns off her phone again.

|| Saturday's child works hard for a living ||

Drinking black coffee at a little roadside diner the next morning, Sam wonders if she should call him back and apologize. But she's not sorry, not really, because she hates that she had to be five hundred miles away for him to tell her he's angry about what she'd done.

Her stomach twists at the smell of bacon and eggs as a waitress deposits two plates of the breakfast special on the table next to her. She hadn't eaten breakfast for a month after she'd sat at the worn wooden table in a fabricated kitchen on a fabricated Montana farm. Pushing her half-empty cup away, she tosses a handful of cash and change on the table and asks the waitress where the bathroom is.

Inside, she locks herself in a stall and empties her stomach into the toilet. The coffee and bile are still bitter on the back of her tongue even after she rinses her mouth out three times.

Outside, she sits on her bike and fiddles with the straps on her helmet. All she's done since the day her mother died is try to fix things, but she's still falling apart, piece by piece, day by day. There are bits of her strewn across half the planets in the known galaxy, but it's the pieces she knows she's lost here at home, in the place where she's learned she is paradoxically most vulnerable, that terrify her the most. She's more Sam Carter with a gun in her hand and two suns burning her skin than she is sitting in her kitchen with Pete's ring on her finger.

Sam wonders if she's just deluding herself that she can save the world, and live in it, too.

She stops for gas a few blocks down the road. Inside the gas station, she picks up two bottles of water and a keychain with an exaggerated map of the state and Cassie's name in bold bright letters. While she waits in line, she dithers between a plain Hershey bar and one with almonds, and laughs at herself before taking the plain version, because it's a little too much like a metaphor for her life these days.

After packing her purchases in the bag behind her seat, Sam climbs on and pulls on her helmet, tucking her hair under the edges. She taps the gas gauge to make sure the needle isn't sticking (one of these days she needs to fix that) and starts the bike. Tomorrow she will put this incident to rest. She will call and reschedule her appointment with MacKenzie. She will go back to work like she has after every heartbreak, every tragedy, because it's who she is, and because she doesn't know what else to do. There's nothing left in her life that doesn't connect back to her job, somehow.

Today, though, she's far enough away to pretend that's not true, and the American Airpower Heritage Museum is five hours east. Opening the throttle, she pulls out onto the road.