stargateficrec | Protective Resemblance, by Otter (PG)

Rec Category: Sam and Daniel friendship
Pairing: none
Categories: Sam and Daniel friendship, Samantha Carter, Daniel Jackson, gen, angst, character study
Warnings: none
Author on LJ:

agentotter
Author's Website: Faded Press
Link: Protective Resemblance

Why This Must Be Read: Otter gives us Sam and Daniel on one of their earliest missions, when Daniel is still half-dazed - and crazed - with grief and loss. Sam gets him talking a little, and laughing a little, as they bond over huge frogs and the gleeful wonder of standing on an alien planet. I love the peek into Daniel's memories of Abydos, with the opening of that world... which leads, in turn, to the opening of possibilities to friendship and understanding.

I love early Sam and Daniel fics, where the two of them are just getting to know one another. This is early, early Sam and Daniel, when Sam still thinks of Daniel as "Jackson" and Daniel still calls her "Captain Carter." By the end of this charming story, though, Sam is thinking of him as Daniel - and, to use a cliche that suits this very non-cliched story perfectly, it's the beginnings of a wonderful friendship.

"There were other cities on Abydos?" Sam asked. She leaned first one way, then the other, trying to inspect the frog from all angles. It clung to its moss-covered tree branch and watched her, and when she tried to see it from behind it opened its mouth and made a bizarre, trilling chirp noise, almost like a bird.

Jackson said, "Oh, yes. It's a pretty large planet; the settlement nearest to the Stargate was the first, of course, but people did spread out, eventually. There were at least four other cities that I knew of. Sha're and I even traveled to Menouthis once, to negotiate new trade agreements for fish, oils, some of the other coastal exports. She'd never been to the ocean. I taught her to swim."

"Huh," Sam said -- not a brushing-off noise, but an interested noise -- and poked him in the shoulder, friendly. "I still can't quite believe that you lived on another planet. Sometimes when we're dealing with alien people it doesn't really hit me that they're aliens, because they're still people. And all of the places we've been so far don't look much different from Earth. But sometimes you see an animal or a plant that's like nothing on Earth, and it reminds you that you're millions of light-years from home."

"Mm," Jackson said. "Well, I'm no biologist. For all I know there are frogs this big back on Earth." He smiled, the same far-away smile he'd been wearing a lot, since Abydos and Sha're and Skaara and all the other things he'd lost, like his sense of direction and his equilibrium. "I never realized how much I didn't know about my own planet until I married Sha're. She always had questions, about everything." He laughed, a half-startled huff of breath like he hadn't realized that he still had memories that didn't hurt. "You should've seen me trying to explain the rules of cricket. I mean, I never understood cricket in the first place."

Sam grinned, a grin that felt wide and wild, gilded with discovery like when she'd been a kid looking for garter snakes in the grass and chasing after fireflies behind the base housing at Wright-Patterson. She could taste the coming rain; it was still on the horizon, but getting closer, and it smelled like summer and grass and swinging in a hammock with her feet bare to the wind.