Author’s Note: This is a brief post-“Meridian” vignette.

The room is empty now, silent and dark. She stands for a moment in the doorway, not sure whether she should enter.

There’s clutter everywhere, scattered on desks and shelves, spilling over onto the floor.

Pages upon pages of translations.

Worn journals filled with neat, even handwriting.

Artifacts of all shapes and sizes - some alien, some broken, all priceless to their owner.

Glasses, seeming still to reflect the blue eyes they will never cover again.

Photographs: a little shaggy-haired boy with his archaeologist parents; a stunning dark-haired woman; a four-person team who became a family.

Strewn across this achingly silent room are bits and pieces of thirty years filled with pain and love and strength and compassion. Always compassion. Dr. Daniel Jackson’s capacity to care astounded even her on some occasions. Displaying quiet tenacity that earned him the respect of everyone with whom he worked, Daniel had carried on his own personal battle for truth and justice.

His team members are gone from here now, leaving the room in darkness.

Teal’c, whose silent anguish says more than words ever could.

Sam, who fights tears and struggles to keep her emotions in check like the good soldier she tries too hard to be.

Jack, whose stony face conceals every emotion, whose haunted dark eyes betray the fact that he’s dying inside - he just can’t admit it.

She hurts for him. She wants to tell him how wrong it is. She wants to tell him that normal humans need to express grief and pain as a part of the healing process. But she knows it won’t help, because he’s dealing with it the only way he knows how. Maybe in the end he never heals at all; maybe he just lives.

She hurts for Jack, knowing the lifetime of agony he keeps bottled up inside, this loss of his best friend only added to the list. She hurts for Teal’c, who never quite forgave himself for the fate of Sha’re and who must now be blaming himself for Daniel’s as well. She hurts for Sam, who found a brother and a friend and an anchor in the blue-eyed archaeologist.

But mostly, she hurts for herself.

For years she treated his injuries, re-started his heart, gave him injections, tried to provide some measure of comfort every time life knocked him down and kicked him.

But she never told him.

She never told him.

She lays her head down on the desk, drinking in the already-fading scent of a man who gave himself in one final act of caring.

“Daniel,” she whispers. “Daniel, if you’re here - if you can hear me, there’s something I need to say ... ”