StargateFic100: 100 ficlets featuring Sam & Daniel, by Amaranth Traces

Too Much

Genre: Hurt/Comfort
Pairing: Sam/Daniel
Spoilers: None
Season: Whenever. Before Heroes.
Rating: G
Word count: 483

As usual, huge thanks go to Thraesja, who somehow manages to juggle the needs of her precious baby and my betaing requests and still come out of it sane. Well, no less sane than usual, anyway.

-oOo-

Daniel slows his pace as he enters the infirmary. Sam’s bed is fully reclined; she must be sleeping. That’s good; he’d been worried her injuries would rob her of her rest.

He eyes the chair next to her bed, tiptoeing closer, a book in his hands. He stops at her side and looks more closely at her. She’s not sleeping after all. She’s staring up at the ceiling, her eyes moving from left to right and back again as her lips murmur silently.

“Sam?”

She doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes flick across the ceiling again and he notices her breathing is uneven and shallow. “Daniel. Hi.”

The self-administering morphine button is clipped to the blanket next to Sam’s hand. The gauze on her other shoulder only shows the faintest hint of the bloody wound it covers. Definitely an improvement over when they first brought her home through the stargate. Janet does good work.

He puts his book down and stands there, staring at her. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to mentally work my way through a proof of Fermat’s little theorem.”

“Why?” he asks. He already knows the answer but it’ll do her good to admit it.

The way she flashes him a glare, it’s clear that she knows he knows. “Distraction.”

Daniel picks up the morphine button and waves it at her. “This works even better for that, you know.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t like it. Fogs my brain.”

“Sam—”

“You don’t use it either.”

“Not until someone who cares enough forces me out of my self-prescribed misery.”

Daniel’s thumb circles in on the button and he watches her for a moment. The rhythmic flick of her eyes across the ceiling starts to falter. She frowns slightly, her tongue moistening her lips in a nervous habit he thinks she picked up from him.

Her eyes slide away from the ceiling toward his hand, which is clipping her morphine control back onto her blanket. “What’d you do?”

“Helped a friend who wouldn’t help herself.”

“You made me stupid.”

Daniel chuckles. “That’s not even possible.”

Her hand lifts off the bed, gesturing vaguely at her head. “All foggy in here.”

“Is the pain better?”

She looks at him under half-lidded eyes. “Hmm?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Daniel steps away, pulls a chair closer to the bed.

“Daniel.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, settling into his seat and pulling his book onto his lap. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Dan’l,” she says again. “Iloveyou.”

He smiles softly as her eyes slide shut and her breathing evens out. It’s a little sad that the only time she’s able to say things like that is when she’s had too much alcohol, too much pain, too much morphine. He’s never sure if she means it as a friend or as a lover. But it doesn’t matter, because he loves her too.

Whatever way she means.

THE END

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