It’s a beautiful day, one of those sunlit, rain washed mornings following a midnight thunderstorm. The air is still crisp enough that their breath makes fog around their faces, but the sun warms their backs, makes the red highlights in Cassie’s hair shine like copper.

Neither of them knew the other was coming. They simply showed up on this bright Colorado dawn, seemingly drawn by some invisible force. Perhaps it was the day that reminded them of him - so vibrant and alive, as he had been. Even when he was silent, his presence had filled a room.

They weren’t surprised to see each other; this has happened before. It seems that sometimes a sunset or sunrise or a spectacular summer thunderstorm makes them think of him and simultaneously long for his presence.

This isn’t him, this cold gray stone, but seeing his name etched deeply into the marble surface makes him seem closer somehow. Maybe sometimes they need to see his name just to be sure he really was real, and not some fantasy dreamed up long ago in different times.

So here they are on a cold morning in early fall, standing side by side. They are mostly quiet; there is nothing to say that hasn’t been said already. There have been years of grief and reminiscence and regrets, and now there is only silence.

Birds chirp in the pine trees around the cemetery and the mountain peaks are stained gold by the rays of the rising sun. In the peace of the morning it’s easy to forget the horrific reality they now live in - the reality of a world more than half conquered by the Goa’uld.

They can’t help but wonder, sometimes, whether it would have happened this way had he survived. He’d been promoted to a General less than a year before his death, and he rarely went on offworld missions any more. P8R-332 was to be his swan song, his last farewell to the crazy, fast-paced life that came with being a member of SG-1.

It was his last chance to protect his team. His ‘kids’.

He did so in his traditional way - with seemingly reckless sarcasm and insolence, drawing the natives’ attention away from his team members. He gave them a chance to escape, and he died five feet from the Stargate, while Daniel was dialing home.

It has been a long time now. A very, very long time. Sam doesn’t want to think about how long, about how much has changed since he left. He’d hate to see his beloved Earth now - cities lying in smoking ruins, dwindling armies outnumbered and outmaneuvered, but still refusing to give up despite impossible odds.

In all likelihood, it is only a matter of time until there’s no one to come to his grave.

“I miss him,” Sam says suddenly, her voice lifting the cloak of silence around them. Cassie keeps her eyes straight ahead, and nods once, slowly. She knows it well, the empty ache, the feeling that something irreplaceable has been removed and can never be restored.

“We didn’t have him for long, did we?” She whispers, her voice choking. She knew him for eight years. She was hardly more than a child, a child who had already lost two mothers, when he died. She had trusted him, had depended on his calm presence to get her through anything, and in the end he had left. Just like everyone.

Sam shakes her head and smiles sadly. “It never would have been long enough, Cass,” she says, using an old nickname that Cassie hasn’t heard in too many years. “A hundred years wouldn’t have been long enough.”

Cassie nods because it is true, and then the curtain of silence descends around them again and they are alone in their own little peaceful bubble. They are alone in a world where they can forget, at least for a few moments, that they are occupants of a doomed planet. They can forget the carnage, the pain, the inevitability of defeat.

And in that well-earned respite from reality, they float back briefly through the corridors of memory and reach out to greet a man whose smile has remained undimmed by the passage of time, his face forever young in their minds.